Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla is the opposite of a travel story – it’s a film that hinges on its titular character’s inability to go anywhere at all. Priscilla Presley, during her marriage to Elvis, did not see much of the world. She visited him in Los Angeles once, yes, and accompanied him to Las Vegas for a show as well. But almost all of her time was spent in Memphis, within the confines of her husband’s Graceland. After a promised trip to Europe disappeared behind a very early pregnancy, travel was simply not on the menu.
Yet a particular strength of Coppola’s films is the strong sense of place that defines each of them: the Park Hyatt Tokyo of Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette’s Versailles in the film of the same name. It would be easy to assume that Coppola, who had unprecedented access to the palace, had shot her latest project at Graceland itself. But Priscilla was actually made entirely in Toronto – a truth you’d never know were you not told. To get to the bottom of the dupe, we sat down with production designer Tamara Deverell to find out what it took to create Priscilla’s world.
Did you visit Graceland in preparation for this film?
I definitely started with Graceland, because we knew we were going to build the interior sets. I was shocked at how few images there were available. I never visited it, though, no. It was a fast film. And I actually feel like it wouldn’t have been the right thing to do. Now, Graceland is dressed the way it was in the 1970s, which was after Priscilla’s time – he did it all in red. So we only had a few photos, and we really clung to those. I did find the plans of Graceland, and copied the footprint – including Elvis’s bedroom, which there’s really nothing on. I stretched it a little bit because long and narrow sets frame really well, and raised the ceilings because Jacob Elordi is so damn tall, I didn’t want him to bonk his head. Elvis had this 11-foot-long custom couch that we built. But I wasn’t totally religious to what I saw – it was about getting the vibe of the place right rather than perfect accuracy.
We did lots of colour testing – do we want blue-white, or do we want buttery white? – with [cinematographer] Philippe [Le Sourd] when he arrived from Paris. That was tense. And we found a couple of locations – the house itself and the gate were on opposite sides of Toronto. I had shot the house before for an Anne Rice series called The Feast of All Saints: it’s this old plantation house that could be New Orleans as well. There’s a pool there that we could shoot at certain times of the day.
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