Elvis

Priscilla Presley, 77, joined Luhrmann and the cast and crew of the film on the Cannes carpet, giving her blessing to the biopic about her late ex-husband – the ...

“I’ve seen Elvis the film, I watched the trailer over a dozen times. He thought, quite emphatically, that the film was “so adoring of its style and so disinterested in its subject” that the film should have been called Baz instead. Deadline described it as a “creepily memorable portrait and even a risky one as Hanks goes all in on the accent of this man”. The talent manager claimed he was born in the US but was born in the Netherlands under a different name. Priscilla Presley, 77, joined Luhrmann and the cast and crew of the film on the Cannes carpet, giving her blessing to the biopic about her late ex-husband – the King of Rock and Roll. Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, besting the challenges of being filmed at the height of the pandemic, premiered to a 12-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday.

Baz Luhrmann has detailed the emotional response to Elvis from his most valued critics: the singer's wife Priscilla Presley, daughter Lisa-Marie Presley and ...

Butler detailed his intense process for taking on the iconic role, saying he watched the same one second clip repeatedly to try and capture the singer’s spirit. Luhrmann revealed he was on a plane when Priscilla was watching the film. Fortunately for the director, Priscilla’s response was positive.

The film is a lavish spectacle that captures the 1950s and '60s with real aplomb.

A whirlwind of a movie, filled with light, colour and sound, it captures the 1950s and 1960s with real aplomb, a lavish spectacle on steroids. But Luhrmann is a director who knows how to put on a show, much like Parker, and in that regard Elvis is the greatest show on Earth. The so-called ’68 Comeback Special, with Elvis dressed in black leather and rocking out raw versions of songs such as Heartbreak Hotel and Guitar Man, is brilliantly staged — more so, as Luhrmann reminds us that it was supposed to be a sanitised Christmas TV show. An Unchained Melody rendition will likely elicit tears, as will real footage of the King cut into the finale. “Crimes of lust and perversions” scream the headlines, with the singer facing jail time. Narrating the film is Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks), the mysterious impresario who became Elvis’s manager, craftily sending this boy from Memphis to stratospheric heights.

Elvis - The Baz Luhrmann film stars Austin Butler as Elvis Presley, alongside a cast including Tom Hanks.

You’re left with a picture of a talented man who spent his final years caught in a trap – and yes, it is heartbreaking in that hotel. The King himself is played by Austin Butler, and boy does he deliver: from the swagger to the voice, he embodies Elvis and swiftly makes you forget you’re watching the kid from The Carrie Diaries. Baz Luhrmann certainly hasn’t toned his signature style down for this busy biopic that’s both long and fast, zooming in and out of key moments in the singer’s life at speed, with a focus on his relationship with his manager Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks).

The much-anticipated biopic had the most passionate premiere so far — with 'Elvis' star Austin Butler kissing Kaia Gerber on the red carpet.

Tom Hanks is set to return to Australia following his COVID-19 diagnosis back in March 2020 — Hanks also walked the Cannes Film Festival red carpet — as well as the rest of the cast, including Butler. Summoning the iconic ’90s style of her supermodel mother Cindy Crawford, Gerber made a statement in a red halter column gown by Heidi Slimane — which she paired with an effortless up-do and understated earrings. While the 30-year-old star smiled alongside director Baz Luhrmann, who accessorised his all-black ensemble with a flashy gold belt emblazoned with “Elvis,” Butler wasn’t shy in showing affection for the new leading lady in his life. Shakira made her Cannes Film Festival debut, meanwhile new Melbourne resident Kylie Minogue flew over for the special event — donning a sheer corset-style gown. One particular star being Austin Butler, whom she called “outstanding” in the role of her ex-husband, Elvis Presley. On May 25, the stars of Elvis descended upon the coastal French town for the premiere of 2022’s most anticipated film.

There has been a lot of excitement around Baz Luhrmann's film as the director hoped to recreate the buzz he generated when he brought the can-can to Cannes ...

'Luhrmann has made a woefully imperfect but at times arresting drama that builds to something moving and true. 'I made Elvis Presley.' It was clever of Luhrmann to tell the story of Elvis through the self-serving eyes of Colonel Tom and cleverer still to cast Hanks. The film chronicles the life and career of Elvis from his early days as a child growing up in Mississippi to his ascent as a rock and roll icon and movie star, along with his complex relationship with his manager. He wrote: 'It's not a movie so much as 159-minute trailer for a film called Elvis – a relentless, frantically flashy montage, epic and yet negligible at the same time, with no variation of pace.' Speaking of the unique framing of the movie, Brian praised: 'It was clever of Luhrmann to tell the story of Elvis through the self-serving eyes of Colonel Tom and cleverer still to cast Hanks.' Story: The biopic is framed with Tom as the narrator, with the film opening on his words 'I made Elvis Presley', before adding 'there are some who make me out to be the villain of this story' He wrote: 'It's not a movie so much as 159-minute trailer for a film called Elvis – a relentless, frantically flashy montage, epic and yet negligible at the same time, with no variation of pace.' The film critic lauded Austin for not turning his impersonation of Elvis into a 'parody' and instead managing to perfect the 'essence' of the American singer's personality. Speaking of the unique framing of the movie, Brian praised: 'It was clever of Luhrmann to tell the story of Elvis through the self-serving eyes of Colonel Tom and cleverer still to cast Hanks.' The biopic is framed with Tom as the narrator, with the film opening on his words, 'I made Elvis Presley', before adding 'there are some who make me out to be the villain of this story'. Opinions: The much-anticipated Elvis Presley biopic premiered at Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday night and was hailed by critics as a 'spectacle' in the first reviews

“That was the innovation for the film, and for cinema,” continued the filmmaker whose career shot to fame at Cannes with Strictly Ballroom in 1992. “Cannes has ...

“He was running away from an aspect of his past,” added Hanks on Parker, who moved from a small town in Holland to American, taking on a whole new alias. After showing the film to Priscilla Presley, he received a note from her in which she said, “‘I just wasn’t ready for that. “He was a father, he was a husband, and a grandfather and a person, and they have children,” the filmmaker added, “The greatest review I got from them in my life; now there’s something they can look to that is the truth of the humanity of the man.”

Luhrmann came close to tearing up as he described his feeling when Priscilla Presley first watched the film and gave him her review. “No critique, no review was ...

“His work is super powerful and so spiritual, so ascending,” said Mason, who gives a showstopping performance in the film as Little Richard, of Luhrmann’s style. “He was the original punk rocker.” “You have to give him credit and see the reality that the amount of ways Colonel Parker cheated people out of nickles and dimes was extraordinary.” As he has done with Moulin Rouge!, Romeo + Juliet and The Great Gatsby, Luhrmann packs the soundtrack of Elvis with modern-day music, including tracks by Eminem, Swae Lee and Diplo, Tame Impala and Jack White. “Because we see Elvis as this icon or as the wallpaper of society, and trying to find a way to strip all this away and find the nature of that, was deeper, [was] really the joy of my life.” “She said: ‘If my husband was here today, he’d say ‘Hot damn, you are me’…it was the best review I’ve ever had.”

Reviews for the new biopic of the King of Rock and Roll praise Luhrmann's style and Butler's performance but criticize an underwhelming script.

Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis is a wild ride clearly made with a big hunk o' love for its subject, and that zeal for capturing Presley’s humanity, both by its director and its star, outweighs the film’s excesses and shortcomings in the end. It’s not a movie so much as 159-minute trailer for a film called Elvis – a relentless, frantically flashy montage, epic and yet negligible at the same time, with no variation of pace. It finds so little reason for Presley’s life to be the stuff of a Baz Luhrmann movie that the equation ultimately inverts itself, leaving us with an Elvis Presley movie about Baz Luhrmann. They both deserve better. Luhrmann’s sensory overload has resulted in some of the most swooningly electric moments in modern cinema, from the fish tank sequence in “Romeo + Juliet” to the elephant medley in “Moulin Rouge!” and that fantastic party sequence in “The Great Gatsby,” but the hyper-romantic energy of those films helped braid the present into the past in a way that made them both feel more alive. Directed, co-produced, and co-written by Luhrmann, the biopic marks the Australian filmmaker's first movie in nine years following his 2013 adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's romantic drama The Great Gatsby. However, the director had been in talks to direct an Elvis Presley movie as far back as 2014, although there was no more development on the biopic until 2019, with production beginning in early 2020. The reviews are in for Baz Luhrmann's Elvis, with critics voicing their thoughts on the first cinematic biopic of the legendary rock icon.

As a teen, Alis Lesley was billed as the Female Elvis Presley. Now she's on the cover of a new Bob Dylan book with Little Richard and Eddie Cochran.

No wonder she become one of the most recognizable icons of rockabilly." An advertisement for a late November 1957 Lesley concert at the Canyon Lake Club in Rapid City, South Dakota, promised "she's sensational and uninhibited!" "There will be no topping Alis Lesley if she goes in for snake dancing," the Daily News reported. "She just looked kind of mild. "I'm not growing old in show business," she said. "Elvis Presley has a female counterpart whose gyrations, it is said, make the boy from Memphis look like a Salvation Army drummer." "It's the beat that gets you," she said. "However, the shoes don't last long. She told Davis that at the conclusion of her final tour, she returned to Arizona to care for her ailing mother, and went on to work as a teacher and a missionary, continued to do occasional vocal work and coaching before retiring in 1980. The Republic story also mentioned a concert in San Bernardino that resulted in a riot that was quelled only by the combined forces of the police and fire departments." "Teenage boys have been Alis' most vociferous rooters. "It gets all young people these days.

Austin Butler has said he was rushed to hospital after he finished filming Baz Luhrmann's upcoming Elvis Presley biopic.

“My body just started shutting down the day after I finished Elvis.” Butler, who plays Elvis, recalled in an interview with GQ UK how his body “started shutting down” after filming concluded in March 2021. “The next day I woke up at four in the morning with excruciating pain, and I was rushed to hospital,” Butler said.

Tom Hanks skirted discussion of his polarizing accent work in 'Elvis,' instead speaking about researching his character, Colonel Tom Parker.

But then it’s like spinning plates because you want to go back to the specifics, so it was a constant back and forth.” I would watch one clip of ‘Hound Dog,’ and watch one second of where his hand was and what it was doing and do that exactly in the mirror. Added Butler: “The tricky thing was being there on the day and having it feel like it was happening for the first time. It was finding the balance between getting as specific as I possibly could and that meant endless research… He sought that and knew that about Elvis the first time he saw Elvis’ effect on an audience…He realized that guy was forbidden fruit and you could make an awful lot of money off of forbidden fruit. Warner Bros. is opening “Elvis” in U.S. theaters on June 24. There are some extraordinary, tabloidy, melodramatic stories about why and how he left Holland. I’d like to think, yeah, he was running away from an aspect of his past and escaping his small town, and who among us wouldn’t jump at an opportunity to do that very thing?” But on the way, I researched living in the south and being embraced by Graceland, and I learned about Elvis the person. The snowmen and the showmen. “Was he a cheap crook that played fast and loose? She said, ‘My husband was here today.'” What Baz tantalized me with right off the bat was, here’s a guy who saw the opportunity to manifest a once-in-a-lifetime talent into a cultural force.

At the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, Baz Luhrmann debuted his Elvis Presley biopic starring Austin Butler and Tom Hanks.

The ultimate goal, as Luhrmann said in a quote that I suspect will form the tagline of Butler’s Oscar campaign, was to find “the man, not the icon.” Whether the film’s up-to-eleven approach truly serves the late Elvis Aaron Presley depends on who you talk to. He’s got the shimmy and he’s got the shake. “The lyrics to ‘Hound Dog’ were salacious, rude, unacceptable in polite society. What I can tell you is that Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis is undoubtedly a Baz Luhrmann Elvis movie. Imagine Hermann Göring playing the Penguin, and you’ll have a sense of Hanks’s register here. He will put a hat on a hat, then give that hat its own hat with a little spinning pinwheel on it.

Austin Butler and Tom Hanks star in Baz Luhrmann's upcoming musical biopic "Elvis," which has been labeled "deliriously awful" by one critic at Cannes.

During the French fest, Hanks avoided a question about his “ ridiculous” accent. It finds so little reason for Presley’s life to be the stuff of a Baz Luhrmann movie that the equation ultimately inverts itself, leaving us with an Elvis Presley movie about Baz Luhrmann. They both deserve better.” However, the musical biopic garnered a 12-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this week.

Luhrmann and his co-writers Sam Bromell and Craig Pearce use the story of Elvis' supremely crooked manager, Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks, lurking beneath ...

For a few confusing moments, the real Elvis is no longer a ghost—he has returned to us, an actor playing himself, and we see that as good as that Butler kid was, there’s no comparison to the real thing. The only consolation is that when a person is no longer a person, he is at last free to become a dream. In the final moments of Elvis, Luhrmann returns his beloved subject to that world, like a fisherman freeing his catch. In Elvis, when Butler sings, it’s Elvis’ voice that streams out, in lustrous ribbons of recklessness, of ardor, of hope for the future. I’m dying to see it!” to “I can’t even look at that thing,” to “What accent, exactly, is Tom Hanks trying to achieve?” (The movie, incidentally, explains the unidentifiable diction of this man without a country, and probably without a soul.) In the movie’s last moments, Luhrmann recreates one of the saddest Elvis remnants, a live performance of “Unchained Melody” from June of 1977, just two months before his death. We see him succumbing to the dangerous manipulations of Colonel Parker, and later kicking against them, most notably as he mounts his 1968 comeback special. Though Elvis more or less follows the facts as we know them, there are moments of invention that are piercing. Luhrmann and his co-writers Sam Bromell and Craig Pearce use the story of Elvis’ supremely crooked manager, Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks, lurking beneath prosthetic jowls), to frame the larger, more glorious and more tragic story of Elvis. Though he was born in Tupelo, Mississippi—his identical twin, Jesse Garon, died at birth— Elvis grew up poor in Memphis, adoring and being adored by his mother, Gladys (Helen Thomson). Luhrmann shows us Elvis as a preadolescent, splitting his time between a juke joint and a revival tent down the road. And in a world where there’s always, supposedly, a constant stream of new things to love, or at least to binge-watch, love of Elvis—our American pauper king with a cloth-of-gold voice—feels like a truly pure thing. The girls, and most of the boys, too, go nuts. Doubtful. But isn’t it exactly what you want to see in a movie? Baz Luhrmann’s movies—even the great ones, like his 1996 Shakespeare-via-Tiger Beat romance Romeo + Juliet, or The Great Gatsby, from 2013, a fringed shimmy of decadence and loneliness—are loathed by many for what they see as the director’s garishness, his adoration of spectacle, his penchant for headache-inducing, mincemeat-and-glitter editing.

Leave it to the ever-overcranked Baz Luhrmann, who just premiered his gaudy Elvis Presley biopic out of competition at Cannes, to inject a little bit of ...

I'd consider myself among the Luhrmann apologists of the world, but Elvis left me wanting more. Murmurs on the Croisette prior to the premiere, disseminating from an especially lucky handful of journalists who saw Elvis at super-secret, super-early screenings, went some way in quadrupling anticipation. Thank god for Elvis, then, which critics saw at 8.30 a.m., if for no other reason than it being the celluloid equivalent of a double espresso.

Baz Luhrmann was first in Cannes exactly 30 years ago with his debut “Strictly Ballroom,” which he recalls barely making a sound at the festival.

LUHRMANN: I had to answer a question the other day, do I think cinema is dead. I think his openness as a person and as a soul was part of his immense effect. Having a film that isn’t a franchise that motivates audiences to go out to the theater. I doubt you could imagine “Elvis” premiering on a streaming service. So was I. Hang on, he was always searching and so am I. Even I recognize at my advanced age that I have remarkable freedom. I just kind of thought he was the greatest canvas up which to explore these great things in America. Yes, show and biz. AP: Part of the way you represent that is in his make-up and a personal style that could approach the feminine. But at its heart, “Elvis” is struggle of an artist to fully express himself without control imposed on him. AP: Presley died at the age of 42, never toured outside the U.S. and, as your film captures, was in some sense imprisoned performing in Las Vegas at the end of his life. He was extremely manly but wore a knitted tank top tight at the top and long hair, which was considered girly. I think these two grand forces — one is the new, represented by Elvis, who is brought up in one the few white houses in a Black community. Luhrmann was first in Cannes exactly 30 years ago with his debut “Strictly Ballroom,” which he recalls as initially struggling to make any noise.

Baz Luhrmann's massive film Elvis, full of the flash of disco and the trash of Vegas, had its gala launch at the Cannes Film Festival.

A carnival show, according to the movie’s Colonel Tom Parker, should leave the punters with smiles on their faces. The tragic course of Elvis’s life – his decline into drug addiction and death at 42 - was not examined with any seriousness. “As I’ve heard in anecdotes, the colonel was an attractive and wonderful guy who lit up a room,” Hanks said. “We meant to make it theatrical.” The amount of ways Colonel Tom Parker cheated people out of nickels and dimes is extraordinary.“ When it came to Elvis, which had its gala launch at the Cannes Film Festival on Thursday, there was only one review he actually feared.

Austin Butler, who's playing the King of Rock 'n' Roll in the upcoming "Elvis" biopic, revealed he was hospitalized the day after filming ended.

So when I learned that, it was one of those things where I got chills and I just thought, 'OK, I can connect to that,'" he said. He said he began imagining the role from the perspective of someone with glamour used to "hearing screaming fans, and then suddenly you’re just dressed like everybody else in those fatigues." "Masters of the Air" director Cary Fukunaga added: "I was aware when he showed up, he was still very much Elvis."

Austin Butler is bringing Elvis Presley to life in the new Baz Luhrmann biopic, Elvis, but is he really singing in the movie? Here's what to know.

He said that his goal was to get his voice to sound so much like Elvis that "if you heard a recording of him and heard a recording of me, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference." He said that what eased his nerves was seeing the crowd's reaction to his performance. Butler revealed what it was like transforming into the King of Rock and Roll in a February interview with the Hollywood Reporter. "When I began the process, I set out to get my voice to be identical. The actor said he watched as many videos of Elvis as he could in order to do the part justice. Since the clips tease there will be plenty of musical performances throughout the film, you might be wondering if Butler actually sings in "Elvis." You'll be happy to hear the answer is yes! Austin Butler is set to have his breakthrough role with " Elvis." The biopic, which is based on the life of Elvis Presley, is set to hit theatres on June 24.

Baz Luhrmann was first in Cannes exactly 30 years ago with his debut “Strictly Ballroom,” which he recalls barely making a sound at the festival.

LUHRMANN: I had to answer a question the other day, do I think cinema is dead. I think his openness as a person and as a soul was part of his immense effect. Having a film that isn’t a franchise that motivates audiences to go out to the theater. I doubt you could imagine “Elvis” premiering on a streaming service. I just kind of thought he was the greatest canvas up which to explore these great things in America. Yes, show and biz. So was I. Hang on, he was always searching and so am I. Even I recognize at my advanced age that I have remarkable freedom. AP: Part of the way you represent that is in his make-up and a personal style that could approach the feminine. But at its heart, “Elvis” is struggle of an artist to fully express himself without control imposed on him. Is “Elvis," like your “Romeo + Juliet,” a tragedy? He was extremely manly but wore a knitted tank top tight at the top and long hair, which was considered girly. I think these two grand forces — one is the new, represented by Elvis, who is brought up in one the few white houses in a Black community. Luhrmann was first in Cannes exactly 30 years ago with his debut “Strictly Ballroom,” which he recalls as initially struggling to make any noise.