Craft
DANNY TURNER discovers the smoke and mirror techniques that brought ‘The King’ back to life on Baz Luhrmann’s Presley biopic
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ilm composer Elliott Wheeler’s association with filmmaker Baz Luhrmann began over a decade ago on The Great Gatsby, and continued three years later with the Netflix musical drama The Get Down, where Wheeler expertly intertwined jazz, pop and hip-hop with musical storytelling, alongside music icons such as Nas, Grandmaster Flash and Nile Rogers. So successful was their partnership that Wheeler was appointed executive music producer for Luhrmann’s recently released Elvis Presley biopic. Diving into the ‘The King’s’ 800-strong discography, the composer began reworking classic tracks, creating orchestral themes and helping actor Austin Butler create authentic vocal renditions using high-fidelity stems, taken from original Elvis recordings. With the assistance of Nashville producer Dave Cobb, Wheeler also had access to the legendary RCA Studios where Elvis recorded dozens of hits, adopting his original microphones, preamps and 40 / Autumn 2022
recording devices. Orchestral recordings took place at AIR studios and were relayed to Wheeler’s production house Turning Studios, with facilities in Sydney, Los Angeles and New York. You’ve developed an ongoing partnership with filmmaker Baz Luhrmann. What lies at the heart of this creative affiliation? With any creative relationship between director and composer you start to develop a form of musical shorthand when it comes to looking at a story, and trying to understand where you need to get to. From that perspective, I can understand why composers lock in with particular directors, because so much time and effort is devoted to getting these projects up and running that it requires a leap of faith to develop that relationship. One of the understandings that I have with Baz is that he tends to use many external artists. Coming
Are you happy to work with Baz irrespective of the topic, or did the Elvis biopic hold a particular fascination for you? The Get Down and Elvis are very American stories looking at different eras of the country, but when Baz is telling a story you want to jump on board no matter what it is. There are very few directors who make the music such a focal point of the storytelling, so it’s a real gift to work with him. At the same time, your role moved beyond composer into executive music producer. What did that entail in relation to this project? The great thing was that Baz got my music editor Jamieson Shaw and I involved very early on so we could sit down and start going through this huge body of material that comprised over 800 songs. We sat with Baz, did a lot of listening sessions, made a lot of lists and started to understand which tracks and performances we’d begin using for the
Elliott Wheeler images, Prudence Upton Elvis images courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
Elliott Wheeler
in as composer and executive music producer on The Get Down, and now Elvis, gave us license to use whatever flavours we needed to, whether that’s recording the score with Jeff Foster in London or bringing in other artists like Doja Cat, Yola and Gary Clarke Jr. to play a role in the film.
