Last Sunday, Austin Butler was the surprise winner of BAFTA’s Best Actor award after his sensational performance as Elvis Presley in Baz Luhrmann’s lavish biopic. The 2 hours and 39 minute Elvis movie crams in America through the 50s, 60s and 70s, with a lot of footage having to be left on the cutting room floor. Now the director has posted one deleted scene from the movie of the recording of In The Ghetto.
Baz wrote on his Instagram page: “Celebrating Austin‘s BAFTA BEST ACTOR win with a small ungraded clip of AB performing In the Ghetto.”
The Elvis movie scene takes place around 1969 with The King recording the track in Graceland’s Jungle Room, which he called The Den. Meanwhile, Priscilla comes downstairs to watch her husband performing with backing singers.
In real life, the star cut the record in a Memphis studio in his first creative session after his 1968 Comeback Special. However, the singer did make Elvis Presley Boulevard, Memphis Tennessee and six songs from his last album Moody Blue in The Jungle Room. The carpeting on the ceiling of the famous space made it great for recording.
This scene is just one of many “wackadoo” ones from Baz’s planned 4 hour version of the film, which fans were begging for in the comments.
Baz previously told the Radio Times: “I would have liked to lean into some of the other things more. There’s so much more. I mean, there’s lots of stuff that I shot like the relationship with the band, I had to pare [that] down, and it’s so interesting how the Colonel [Tom Parker, played by Tom Hanks] gets rid of them.
“[The four hour cut depicted Elvis’] addiction to barbiturates and all of that…What happens is he starts doing wackadoo things, like going down to see [President] Nixon. I had it in there for a while but there just comes a point where you can’t have everything in, so I just tried to track the spirit of the character.”
Scenes with The King’s first girlfriend Dixie were also cut. The director has also teased how his four-hour version of Elvis won’t quite be what fans may have thought.
READ MORE: Elvis’ incredible generosity – King’s cousin shares five more facts
Speaking with IndieWire at the 2022 Gotham Awards, Baz said: “It’s a directors’ assembly. It’s not a cut. There’s a whole lot of material that adds up to four hours, but I have gone on record now to say not today, not tomorrow, but at some point I would do [it] because Austin did his concerts full out. He did all the numbers.
“Austin just did it and it was an out of body experience to watch him do those full concerts, so one day I will cut those full concerts together. We just had all the cameras. [Cinematographer] Mandy Walker even got the lenses reproduced from the ’60s and ’70s and ’80s to match exactly everything.”
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