Baz Luhrmann has promised fans of his hit 2022 movie Elvis that he wants to release a full concert version of the film, with extended footage of Austin Butler’s recreations of some of Elvis’ most famous live performances. This will take the run-time of the film to a whopping four hours.
Elvis was a surprise box office hit, raking in over $285 million, and it’s currently in the Top 15 highest grossing movies of the year. This is quite an achievement when it’s up against Marvel movies, other franchise fare, and animated kids’ movies. Speaking to IndieWire, Luhrmann said that he currently has; “a directors’ assembly. It’s not a cut. There’s a whole lot of material that adds up to four hours.”
He continued; “But, I have gone on record now to say not today, not tomorrow, but at some point I would do it [cut it together properly]. Because Austin did his concerts full out. He did all the numbers. Austin just did it and it was an out of body experience to watch him do those full concerts, so one day I will cut those full concerts together.”
Luhrmann continued, “We just had all the cameras. [Cinematographer] Mandy Walker even got the lenses reproduced from the ’60s and ’70s and ’80s to match exactly everything.” Luhrmann’s typically frenetic editing could certainly do with being curtailed, giving each scene the chance to breathe a bit more, so an extended cut will probably help this.
“The way that we approached every [concert performance] was Baz and I early on decided that when I was on stage, we weren’t going to have a moment where suddenly we cut and we’re talking about acting,” Butler said during the film’s extensive press tour.
“So I would come on stage, like in Vegas, do the entire concert, curtain comes down, I walk off. So every time the audience is getting the experience of the show. And if we would cut for any reason, I would entertain the crowd as Elvis. It was the same thing as him having to make jokes to keep everyone entertained.”
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