Elliott Wheeler on scoring Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis and Austin Butler's Transformation

Baz Luhrmann movies and soundtracks go together like, well, Romeo and Juliet, so when taking on a biopic of the King of Rock and Roll himself, the music had to knock it out of the hayride. The director’s longtime collaborator Elliott Wheeler tells us how his understated score allowed the film’s musical numbers to shine, and how he helped Austin Butler step into Elvis’ blue suede shoes.

Elvis has been five years in the making; how does it feel now that it’s out and has received such positive reviews?

It feels wonderful. We started back in 2017 when we first sat down with Baz and started having conversations about it. We started to listen through the entire Elvis catalogue; I think that he recorded over 800 songs! 

So just getting your head around that and understanding the scope of work and the responsibility… we were like, “Okay, this is the mountain that we have to climb; how do we go about it?” It's great to finally be talking about something that feels very private to [us] in some ways for a long, long time – a very close team were working on it. To finally have it out in the public feels like letting your children leave the house!

Before you ever worked with Luhrmann, as a composer you must have been aware of the integral role that music and soundtracks play in his films; was it daunting when you were asked to work on The Great Gatsby?

There was pressure, but mainly excitement, to be honest. William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet is one of the films that I saw in my late teens, and it was such a groundbreaking experience. 

To see Shakespeare reimagined that way and with such an interesting take on the music, I thought was brilliant – not just the contemporary cuts that were in there, but also the Craig Armstrong score was just beautiful; the Kissing You song that he did with Des'ree is still one of my favourite pieces of score and contemporary music combined. So there was great excitement stepping in there.

We imagine you’ve developed something of a shorthand with Baz after working on The Great Gatsby and The Get Down together; where did you start with Elvis?

Myself and my music editor, Jamieson Shaw – who's also a wonderful music producer – we do everything hand in glove. Baz gets all of the core creative teams together, and all of the departments sit down and start looking through the material.

It's a very organic process where Baz is working out whether he wants to do the project and whether it's something that he is going to dedicate himself to, because it's such a massive commitment for him. He looks at it and asks how he is going to find his way into the story.

There was a huge amount of research, you read all the books, you talk to as many of the experts; Baz went and talked to some of Elvis' childhood friends to go back to the source with the people who were the closest to him to find out those parts of the story. We started throwing together ideas, like looking at which concert footage was going to be the best; were there rehearsal takes that were going to be better to use in the actual live performances? 

We had to think about how we were going to portray this in a way that would be exciting for young audiences and that would make Elvis' music as vital, dangerous and as punk as it was in the 1950s, because I think that sometimes with Elvis and his music there's a little bit of a short circuit that happens with the brain because it's so in the communal ear and so well known.

How did you set about capturing the hysteria that Elvis inspired while being mindful of not falling into cliché?

When people saw Elvis for the first time…there's a great quote by Buddy Holly that we actually use in the film, which is, “I can't express how strange he looked”, and Roy Orbison said, “Once I saw Elvis, nothing was ever the same” – music was never the same for him.

It really was this cataclysmic event when people saw him and tried to work out how to take that music, and to give it that impact and cinematic quality was something that we had to think really hard about. Also, because Elvis has been imitated so many times, how do you approach a subject matter like that without feeling like it's another imitation?

At that point, we didn't have Austin Butler as our actor – we didn't know who was going to be playing the lead – so we looked at a lot of things like whether we were just going to use the existing audio. 

We were very lucky that RCA and Legacy opened up the vault for us – we had access to every single stem that we could ask for – which as a music fan was absolutely amazing; we just geeked out over that!

When Butler came on as Elvis, how did his talents wind their way into the music?

When we found Austin, we were like, “Okay, well, he's going to be amazing”, so it's Austin singing on all the material up to 1968. After 1968 it's usually Elvis' voice, but with Austin woven into the performances as well. 

Once we got to filming, that was a whole other thing. Then we had to think about how the score was going to work through all that as well. The wonderful thing about being brought in as executive music producer and composer was that we didn't really have to delineate where the performance would start and the score would stop; whatever was going to work for the storytelling was going to be what we'd go to.

Did Butler perform the ‘live’ vocals live in the film, or was he miming to a pre-record?

It was both. We did do pre-recordings mainly because often on any one day, he'd be in the chair doing makeup and prosthetics – depending on what period we're up to – for four to six hours, and then he'd have to record for six to eight hours as well. 

So partly it was making sure that his voice could be preserved. Having said that, once he got on stage, he sang every single line live as well. 

We had a wonderful props department that made sure that all of the props were working model props of the microphones that Elvis would have been using so that when we did get to the point where we were blending Elvis and Austin together, if Austin did something on camera, like if he breathed a certain way, or he said something to someone in the audience, we could seamlessly blend those two things together. So it was pre-recorded, but we also recorded everything live.

You worked with Butler to help him with his vocals to make sure his performance was as authentic and genuine as possible. What did this entail?

I'd love to claim all the credit for Austin's wonderful performance – the guy’s work ethic is second to none – there wasn't a performance or rehearsal take that he didn't already know verbatim by the time he'd come in to actually work on the track – he was incredible. 

The way I like to think about Austin's performance is like a classical pianist or a classical musician in that there's so much technique that he had to get down to get the performance across.

Elvis wasn't just one ‘voice,’ – there's about four different Elvis voices, from the head voice from some of the early performances like That's All Right Mama, to the ‘68 special where there's quite a lot of gravel in it. The song Trouble at Russwood has a lot of gravel in it, and at the end when he's singing Unchained Melody, it's almost operatic, so Austin had to learn all those different styles of singing.

A lot of what I did with Austin was working with a wonderful vocal coach called Irene Bartlett to give him a lot of vocal and breathing exercises, ways of looking after his voice, as well as learning how to access those different types of voices within his body in a way that was sustainable and wouldn't injure him if he was having to sing for six to eight hours.

We'd also sit down with the stems and isolate, bar by bar, what Elvis was doing. We could hear where he was breathing, we could hear where he was changing what was happening in his body. 

We’d go through, particularly when we were recording, and we would sometimes do something line by line and even go in and change word by word. But the wonderful thing about Austin's performance was that he got that technique down to the point where he could eventually forget about what he was doing – the amount of practice he'd done, man! It was just in his body.

He also worked very closely with movement coach Polly Bennett. There's a line in the film when Elvis is recording Heartbreak Hotel and he says, “If I can't move, I can't sing”. That was so true because he moved so much as he was dancing and singing, and that became a real part of his performance. 

So if he's swinging his arm, like he is in, say, If I Can Dream, and he's really bearing down into his solar plexus, that obviously affects what happens to his voice. So we worked really closely with Polly to make sure that he had this incredible dance routine that he had to do down as he was singing as well. 

You can't really separate the voice from the movement, in lots of ways; it is a masterful performance. I'm still in awe of what Austin did.

Luhrmann strikes me as being incredibly involved with the scores in his films; is this the case?

Yeah, very! The music goes back and forth all the time. Sometimes with Baz we talk about what the idea is and I go away and do something, and he'll be like, “Yeah, that's great, but we're missing this point, or storytelling-wise, it needs to be doing this”. 

We spend a lot of time talking about what story we're trying to tell before I actually start writing. I've got hours of videos of Baz conducting and going, “And the strings are going [imitates intense string sounds] – so he’s actually singing string lines. 

He's incredibly involved. Often with the artists doing contemporary cuts, he briefs them directly. He's very much a music producer in his own right.

Was there anything that you or Luhrmann wanted to avoid doing with the score?

With all of Baz's films, storytelling is the core of everything and the way that relates to music is with the score – it always has to support what was going on. I was trying to get out of the way as much as I could with the score, even though there's over an hour and a half of score in there. 

I was trying to not put myself into the film as much as I could, because we had all these Elvis tracks. Normally as a composer, you sit down at the beginning of the process with a blank page and you're like, “Damn, I gotta write all these different themes and melodies”. 

The joy of this project was going through and looking at which Elvis themes should represent each of the characters. Heartbreak Hotel became his theme with Gladys; Unchained Melody became a love affair that Elvis had with his audience; Are You Lonesome Tonight? was the theme for Elvis and the Colonel’s relationship.

It was a blast as a composer to take all of those themes and make that the tapestry for the musical world that we were seeing. Often, you're hearing five or six themes within the one orchestral cue. It was such a musical feast, and then on top of that, we brought in contemporary artists as well.

Which was your personal favourite scene to score?

There are a bunch of them, but one of the ones that we composed quite early on is this scene called the flyaway weave, which happens quite early in the film. We went to Nashville and recorded this fantastic gospel choir with Dave Cobb in this small church. 

We had about 30 wonderful gospel singers and they recorded this fantastic version of I'll Fly Away. I put it into a minor key in context with the scene.

What was key for you to get across using music in this scene?

You can't talk about Elvis without dealing with the issue of appropriation of black music, so this was an examination of his background and what I think his experience of that was. He grew up the one white family in a black neighbourhood. 

They were extremely poor at the time and Elvis was part of this young gang where he was the only white kid running around in the neighbourhood. They’d go down (and this is what we found out from the interview that Baz did with Elvis’ childhood friend), and they would go to these juke joints where they'd hear these fantastic rhythm and blues tracks, and then they would run over to these Pentecostal services. 

Elvis would go down into the service and be up there with the congregation, right in the middle of it, and be shaking around. Then he sees Gary Clark Jr performing Black Snake Moan at the juke joint – an extremely sexual performance. 

There's a couple of people dancing there, a lady of the night who's trying to get a customer, and these young kids are obviously extremely taken by this, but slightly overwhelmed as well. 

They run across to this Pentecostal service, and it's an amazing gospel performance, so it’s the two things combined of what's on his mind. As he's in the service, he has Black Snake Moan in his mind's eye, and the rhythm of the two things combined.

At the same time, you've got Elvis in a different time period about to go on the Louisiana Hayride, and he's trying to calm his nerves. Then he and his family start singing, so he's sort of singing back to himself through time, doing his own version of Fly Away. 

That combines with another version of That's Alright Right Mama that he records at Sun Studios, and then that morphs into an orchestral score as he's walking on stage. So it's all these wonderful combinations of using contemporary artists, gospel, old tracks and orchestral score. It tells a huge amount of story in about a five minute period.

Conceptually, for me, as a composer and music producer, it does all the things that I love doing in music, which is being able to do storytelling in a way that I think you could only do musically. 

We cover about 10 years of Elvis’ life in about five minutes, and show where the source of his music comes from. It is a very unique piece of storytelling.

How did you make sure the recording process was as authentic as possible?

We did a lot of pre-record experiments where we were basically trying to make it sound exactly like the recording, and that didn't quite work. It just sounded a bit of a sort of stale facsimile. 

We eventually went down to Nashville with a wonderful producer called Dave Cobb, who does a lot of country music, and he operates out of RCA Studio A, which Elvis actually used to do a lot of his recording in. 

We had a wonderful time down there with him getting all the original analogue gear that Elvis would have been recording on, down to the actual tape delay machine used at Sun Studios by Sam Phillips. We recorded a bunch of backing tracks down there with Dave with some wonderful musicians, including a lot of the gospel material that you'll see in the film.

The score was recorded all over the place. We did a lot of the band recordings and the gospel work with Dave in Nashville, but we did record stuff at Turning Studios both in Sydney and Brisbane in Australia as well. 

All of Austin's vocals were recorded on the Gold Coast where we were filming on set, or at least in the production facility up there. The actual score itself was recorded in London at AIR Studios (where Baz has recorded most of his scores), with the wonderful Geoff Foster and a fantastic orchestra. 

That was all done remotely with me back in Australia, sadly, because we couldn't travel due to covid restrictions. AIR is very much associated with the sound of Baz’s films.

Elliott Wheeler image credit: Prudence Upton

Elvis images: via Bazmark