Elvis Presley, Mick Jagger had bouts of stage fright, Baz Luhrmann says
Baz Luhrmann‘s new film on Elvis Presley reveals that the King surprisingly had a royal case of stage fright. But the “EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert” director tells Page Six Hollywood that Elvis wasn’t the only exhibitionist rock icon with the yips.
“I’ve worked with some of the greatest artists of all time, and the truly great ones are always a bit nervous when they go out on stage. I remember working with Mick Jagger once at the Grammys. He was amazing,” Luhrmann says. “People got up, standing ovation — and he came off, he went, ‘How was I?’ And I’m like, ‘My god, you don’t know?’ And they don’t. I think that if they have that vulnerability, that keeps them great.”
Luhrmann can relate. “I have art fright for everything I ever make: ‘A can-can movie? Who could care about that?’” he recalls of his 2001 musical, “Moulin Rouge!” “Even right now, I’m doing everything I can to try and get people in to see the movie!” (Austin Butler developed anxiety just playing Elvis, previously saying of Luhrmann’s 2022 biopic, “I didn’t sleep for two years… I would wake up at three or four in the morning every day in terror.”)
Luhrmann just can’t stay away from Elvis: The famed director is back with his unique project combining long-lost performance footage and interviews that’s somewhere between a doc and a concert film.
“The Great Gatsby” director was keen on the idea of sprinkling in some unseen footage — but plans changed when a whopping 65 boxes of film, falling apart and reeking of vinegar, were unearthed from a Kansas salt mine. After enlisting the help of “Lord of the Rings” visionary Peter Jackson to painstakingly restore it, Luhrmann knew exactly what he wanted to do.
“Realizing what we had, we made a conscious decision to go, ‘Let’s not do a documentary.’ And then we found 30 minutes of him just talking, unguarded, and said, ‘Let him tell his story, but let him also articulate his story through the best way he always knows how to communicate, and that is through music,’” he tells Page Six Hollywood.
“EPiC” has gotten raves from critics on the festival circuit, and earned over $3.25 million from only 325 IMAX locations over the weekend, delivering a staggeringly high per-theater average ahead of its expansion into traditional formats this Friday.
Are there more Presley productions for Luhrmann after he completes his upcoming “Jehanne d’Arc” film?
“I do believe that Elvis will never quite leave my building,” he cleverly says. “I just want to train up younger teams. There’s so much more footage that we couldn’t release, because it costs a lot of money. We have to prove that Elvis can stay up on the big screen, because that tells the powers that be that he’s viable,” he says. “Get him up on the big screen, where he needs to be seen, so we can have another go and do some more!”
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