Music, spirituality and Tom Hanks the villain: Baz Luhrmann drops first Elvis trailer

After filming at the beginning of the pandemic on the Gold Coast, Baz Luhrmann has dropped the first look at his Elvis blockbuster.

Expect meticulously reimagined music, spirituality, and Tom Hanks as an unlikely villain in Baz Luhrmann’s epic Queensland-made Elvis movie.

After filming at the beginning of the pandemic on the Gold Coast in 2020 – when Hanks became one of the first famous faces to test positive for coronavirus and shut down the production for seven months – Luhrmann finally releases the debut Elvis trailer and first images of actor Austin Butler as the music icon today.

“We’ve been working on this for three years. There’s so many stories to tell because I won’t even begin to say how many times we went to start this movie and the world changed,” said Luhrmann, who based himself on the Gold Coast since late 2019 to make the film.

“As the world knows, he (Hanks) went on a very extraordinary journey.”

Austin Butler as Elvis in Warner Bros Pictures’ drama Elvis. Picture: Hugh Stewart

The trailer begins with Hanks’s voice as Elvis’ long-time manager Colonel Tom Parker, the storyteller, which is a rare villainous role for the Hollywood favourite.

“Tom, he ran towards that (being a villain),” Luhrmann said.

“The trailer opens with, ‘There are some who say I am the villain of this story’, now he doesn’t go on to tell the story that says ‘and they’re right’ … it’s a device because in truth when it comes to a historical character there’s only ever somebody’s telling of that story.”

Luhrmann says growing up in rural Australia made him the perfect outsider to tell the stories of his hit films Moulin Rouge!, The Great Gatsby and now Elvis.

What drew him to the biopic, his first film since The Great Gatsby in 2013, wasn’t his fandom of Presley, but how his life represented the social and cultural issues in America over three decades.

“The great storytellers like Shakespeare they didn’t really do biographies … what they did was they took a life and used the life as a canvas to explore a larger different idea,” Luhrmann said.

“The truth is that in this modern era the life of Elvis Presley could not be a better canvas on which to explore America in the ’50s, the ’60s and the ’70s.”

Austin Butler as Elvis and Tom Hanks as Colonel Tom Parker in Warner Bros Pictures’ drama Elvis. Picture: Hugh Stewart

The Warner Bros blockbuster was secured for Queensland through the Federal Government’s location incentive program and Screen Queensland’s production attraction strategy.

It was filmed on the Gold Coast in interrupted bursts from 2020 to 2021 due to the delays caused by the pandemic, creating 900 jobs and bringing in $100 million to the local economy.

Before filming, Luhrmann and Butler had spent time in Graceland and Elvis’ hometown of Tupelo, Mississippi, immersing themselves in Presley’s world and recording in his studio.

The result was a film that explores topics of sexuality, race and black culture, spirituality and country music.

“I am the ultimate outsider. I come from a very small country town not dissimilar to Tupelo,” said Luhrmann, who was raised in Herons Creek, a tiny rural settlement in NSW.

“So when I go and do Moulin Rouge! and it’s in Paris I come as an outsider and I live it … if I do the Gatsby I come and I live like (author F. Scott) Fitzgerald... That’s why I make films so infrequently.”

Austin Butler as Elvis in Warner Bros Pictures’ drama Elvis. Picture: Hugh Stewart

“The thing that became so apparent to me is that actually the number one thing about Elvis Presley’s journey is that black culture isn’t a side note or a foot note, or a bit, it’s absolutely the canvas on which the story is writ.”

“Something has to be done about this Elvis kid and something is done … and eventually the journey of Elvis is to get back to who he really is, and that is in the trailer, and who he really is, is gospel music and gospel music is spiritual.”

“If there’s something I learned that I never knew … that man was spiritual.”

With nostalgic recordings from before the 1960s unable to be used in the film, Luhrmann relied on Butler’s voice in the decade prior before blending it with Elvis’ voice thereafter.

A year before they started filming, Butler, 30, received voice coaching for six days a week in an attempt to perfect Elvis’ voice and sought movement coaching from Polly Bennett, who previously helped Rami Malek in his Oscar-winning portrayal of Freddie Mercury for Bohemian Rhapsody.

Baz Luhrmann at Village Roadshow Studios as work on his Elvis biopic in 2020. Picture: Instagram

“In the beginning I felt like this is impossible, how can I possibly do anything other than feel less than this superhuman individual,” Butler said.

“Then as time passed, at least for me, I started to feel like I grew into it and suddenly I felt his humanity more, and so we got incredibly meticulous with things.”

“Ultimately the life is what is important, is what we sort of realised. You can impersonate somebody but to find the humanity and the life within and the passion and the heart, ultimately I had to release myself from the constraints of that and try to live the life as truthfully as possibly.”

He recalls recording in a chapel with 30 gospel singers on nostalgic microphones as a moment that helped him embody the king of rock ‘n’ roll.

“They are stamping their feet and I’ve stood in the centre and tears just poured down my face and I got chills down my spine,” he said. “It’s a glorious experience. It’s hard not to have it in your marrow at that point.”

“It was experiences like that along the way that really showed me how much gospel and spiritual influenced Elvis … the way he moved and the freedom of his body. It was really beautiful.”

Elvis is due for release on June 24.