Sofia Coppola on baring Elvis’ ugly side in ‘Priscilla’: “I never wanted him to be a villain”

When Sofia Coppola was a child, raised among one of the most famous Hollywood filmmaking dynasties there’s ever been, music played a huge role in her life. Just not the music of Elvis Presley. “I didn’t really grow up with Elvis,” she says. “I loved Elvis Costello!” Wrong Elvis, you might say. But that doesn’t matter to Coppola, director of such acclaimed films as The Virgin Suicides and Lost In Translation. She wasn’t here to tell Elvis’ story; it was his sweetheart Priscilla Presley that entranced her.

Arriving just over a year after Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, the Aussie director’s all singin’, all dancin’ take on the King of Rock ’n’ Roll, Coppola’s Priscilla is the quieter, pastel-washed B-side. Unlike Luhrmann’s film, which plays out from the point of view of sinister manager Colonel Tom Parker, it tells his story through the eyes of the young teenager, who met Elvis on a US army base in Germany in 1959 when he was undertaking his military service. The script comes adapted from Priscilla’s own 1985 memoir Elvis And Me, a book that lays bare her relationship with the most famous man in music history.

“This is a totally different side of the story”

It’s why Coppola, 52, wasn’t concerned about the Luhrmann film that was in production as she began preparing Priscilla. “Her book is really about her perspective of growing up and their private life. It’s not about him as a performer. It’s him in private. So I feel like it’s a totally different side of the same story, which I think makes it even more interesting that people have just been thinking about the story. Elvis is fresh in people’s minds, especially for a younger generation. I think it could be a counterpoint.”

Priscilla starts with Elvis wooing the 14-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu, even visiting her stepfather – a United States Air Force officer – to ask permission to see her. “It definitely is looking at this mythic couple and showing his human side and I tried to approach it with sensitivity and not be judgmental,” Coppola continues. “I never wanted him to be a villain.” Nevertheless, the director doesn’t shy away from showing his volatile temper, seen behind closed doors once Priscilla moves into Elvis’ home, Graceland. “It definitely doesn’t keep him on a pedestal.”

Coppola’s film is awash with behind-the-curtain details about Priscilla’s bewildering life with Elvis. Like the fact she was schooled by Catholic nuns when she arrived at Graceland – something that even surprised the director. Despite Priscilla’s tender age, Coppola understood her infatuation with the King. “What girl wouldn’t want to run off with the rock idol of their era? I can relate to that.” Gradually, the film gets darker as she and Elvis become estranged, the singer increasingly dependent on prescription medications. “I think she struggled and suffered,” adds Coppola, “but ultimately still thinks of him as this love of her life.”

Dressed in navy slacks and a pink and white striped blouse, Coppola is seated in the sunlit garden of a white-walled building on Venice Lido, close to where Priscilla has just received its world premiere at the floating city’s glamorous film festival. It’s a place she knows only too well. Her 2010 film Somewhere, starring Stephen Dorff as an actor kicking his heels in West Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont, won the festival’s top prize, the Golden Lion. Her 2003 film Lost In Translation, just her second movie, also played here, announcing Scarlett Johansson as a major talent.

The same goes for Priscilla, which stars Cailee Spaeny. The 25-year-old Missouri native, who is about to dominate 2024 (thanks to roles in Alien: Romulus and Civil War, the new film from Ex Machina’s Alex Garland), won Best Actress during Venice for her performance. Coppola, who wanted one actor to play the role from 14 to 28, when the film concludes in 1973, was drawn to Spaeny, who has so far featured in small roles in films like Vice, Pacific Rim: Uprising and Bad Times At The El Royale.

“I met her and she has such a baby face, you can believe her as really young,” notes Coppola, who points out that Kirsten Dunst – the lead in her 1999 debut The Virgin Suicides, much-maligned 2006 biopic Marie Antoinette and 2017 remake The Beguiled – had just worked with her in the aforementioned thriller Civil War. “[She] told me how much she liked working with Cailee and how talented she was. So that gave me the confidence to have her carry my whole movie. Really, it was all riding on her.”

Spaeny has been a fan of Coppola since she was a young girl. “She was the first director that I actually went, ‘Oh, who’s behind the camera?’ I was 14 and I watched her whole filmography from start to finish. Just meeting her… it was obviously intimidating. But I was curious because no-one told me what [her new film] was going to be about. And then we sat there and we chatted and had coffee and then she just pulled out her iPad and was like, ‘Do you know about Priscilla Presley?’ She just started showing me photos and said, ‘I want to do a movie about her. I think you could do it.’”

When it came to casting the King, Coppola went for Australian actor Jacob Elordi, the Euphoria star who has just torn up the screen as the entitled Oxford student in Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn. “Nobody looks like Elvis. How do you cast Elvis?” asks Coppola. “A friend of mine told me how much they liked Jacob Elordi. And when I met him, I just thought he had the charm and the charisma that Elvis had. And he’s sensitive. I felt like we were trying to show a more vulnerable, personal side of Elvis and I thought he could give that.”

The one slight issue is that Spaeny is 5ft 1in, while Elordi is 6ft 5in. “I had these massive chunky platform heels – they were also hot pink, which just made everything more embarrassing – that I would wear whenever my feet weren’t shown in the shot,” laughs the actress, who’d also walk across wooden runaways built around the Graceland set to appear taller than she was. “We had so many apple boxes [on set],” adds Coppola. “We were always trying to make her taller.” But it’s a good metaphor. “It works for the story that he’s this bigger-than-life character and Cailee and Priscilla are tiny.”

“Priscilla definitely doesn’t keep Elvis on a pedestal”

Crucially, Spaeny was able to meet with the real Priscilla over lunch. “I think Priscilla was definitely an old soul,” she says. “Her father was in the Air Force. And she was always getting moved around, and never really held on to friends too long. And I think she had a real understanding of loneliness. And I think Elvis was also incredibly lonely after his mother’s passing. So I think they just met each other at a certain time in his life. And she just wanted to be caring and be there for him. One of the first things she said to me was: ‘The love was there – and I want to make sure I see that when you play the role.’”

Quite rightly, Spaeny notes that Priscilla has “been through so much” in her life; most recently, she suffered the heartache of losing Lisa Marie – her and Elvis’ daughter whom she gave birth to in 1968 – who died last January of a heart attack. Coppola “never got to” show Lisa Marie the film, as it wasn’t finished before she died. And yet she’s retained the full support of Priscilla, now 78, throughout the process, something of a novelty after previously taking on the long-dead historical figure Marie Antoinette. “To have a subject I could speak to was new for me,” says Coppola. “I could actually ask her questions and talk to her.”

On the flip side, the Presley estate barred Coppola from using any music. “We didn’t get permission to use any Elvis songs which, at the end, I think is okay, because it’s just really her story,” she says. “It sounds like they are protective of this image and so they were involved in Baz Luhrmann’s film… I don’t think they like to give permission to something they don’t create the story for.” Fortunately, Coppola was able to call on her husband, Thomas Mars, the French-born lead singer of the band Phoenix, who became the film’s co-music supervisor alongside Randall Poster, one of the best in the business at curating soundtracks.

Among the songs chosen was the Ramones’ cover of The Ronettes’ ‘Baby, I Love You’ and Tommy James & The Shondells’ ‘Crimson And Clover’, while Elordi is seen playing the piano strains of what appears to be ‘Love Me Tender’ – in fact, he’s technically playing ‘Aura Lea’, a song in the public domain that inspired the classic Presley track. But is there one song Coppola was desperate to include? “There’s a song called ‘Pocketful Of Rainbows’ that I really liked that we had in the movie, so we had to take it out,” she says. “But I like how the music works and I think it’s interesting that we don’t have Elvis songs.”

For Coppola, it all fits in with her need to tell Priscilla’s story first and foremost as well as explore feminist dynamics. “It was interesting to look at the roles of women of that generation – my mother’s generation – and how much things have changed and how much they haven’t,” she says. “I still see women in relationships where they let the men make all the decisions, even now… my daughters [she has two teens, Romy and Cosima, with Mars] look at the story and say, ‘I would never let a man tell me what to do.’ So it’s interesting. I have this perspective in between the two generations.”

Did Coppola relate to the story, growing up in the media spotlight – given her famous family includes filmmaker father Francis, director of The Godfather, and actor-cousin Nicolas Cage? It’s something she’s not thought about, she says, “now I have a long career… [but] I always felt fortunate that I got to grow up on my dad’s sets.” Whatever the case, Priscilla fits perfectly in Coppola’s own body of work. “I’m just touched by stories where people are in transition, trying to figure out who they are.” And has she managed that for herself? “Way more than in my twenties,” she smiles, demurely. “But I think you’re always asking questions throughout your life. You’re always changing who you are at different stages.”

‘Priscilla’ is in UK and Irish cinemas now

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