'Elvis was at the center of it all, for the good, the bad, the ugly, and the beautiful.' KING SHIT 🎸 bazluhrmann spoke to the musician OmerFedi about his outrageous new drama Elvis for our Summer issue ⭐
LUHRMANN: Oh man, I’ve actually got something to tell you. So we were there trying to make music, and you wouldn’t expect it to be a place to find great recording studios. But a guy says to us, “Hey, there’s this dude down in Burleigh Heads and he’s got this place where he keeps all of these motorbikes, but I think it might have been a recording studio.” So we go down there, and believe it or not, it has two Neve mixing desks in it.
FEDI: Right, the research is definitely the fun part. That’s literally what I do every night before I go to sleep, just research something or some producer and try to learn something new about someone like Quincy Jones and what other albums he was working on when he madeLUHRMANN: In a very profound way, I really did. When you’re young, you think, “I’ve got it now. I’ve found who I am.” But actually, self-revelation is a lifelong journey and you don’t control that process, you curate it.
FEDI: I was talking to my friend, who’s also an artist, about what the future of music is. Where should we go next? To figure that out you basically need to go back to the past and listen to what was done in the ’60s or ’70s or ’80s or ’90s. Like you said, humans have patterns—history always repeats itself, musically, artistically, in everything.. I didn’t do it because I’m lionizing or a megafan. This movie is really about America in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s.