[Source: BBC]
Cast your mind back not so long ago to the summer of 2022. Baz Luhrmann was making a dazzling return to the big screen with his eye-popping Elvis biopic, a riot of colour and glitz with a budget of around $85m (£67m).
Eighteen months later, Sofia Coppola is telling a similar story from a different perspective in her film Priscilla. It’s a quieter but no less stylish interpretation of life under the lens from the viewpoint of the wife of the king of rock’n’roll.
Coppola’s starting point was Priscilla Presley’s 1985 bestselling memoir Elvis and Me, which gave an intimate insight into the pair’s turbulent relationship and the pressures of stardom.
The filmmaker first read the book 10 years ago before returning to it more recently, having previously felt the tale might be too similar to her 2006 film Marie Antoinette, about the controversial wife of Louis XVI. The young Austrian princess was 14 – the same age Priscilla met Elvis – when she married the French king.
But on a more recent re-reading of Priscilla’s book, Coppola had a change of heart. “I was really surprised with how much I related to it and how vivid her story was,” she explains.
“So then I called Priscilla up and she was open to it. I loved that it [the book] was so focused on her and their relationship and how intimate the story was.”
Coppola is known for putting women front and centre in her movies, which also include The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation. In 2022, a study found that 33% of films featured sole female protagonists and another concluded that women accounted for just 18% of directors working on the top 250 films during the same year.
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