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Toronto International Film Festival

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TORONTO - Australian film-maker Baz Luhrmann's Epic: Elvis Presley In Concert, which had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept 6, is a love letter to the King of Rock 'n' Roll seven years in the making.

A fusion of concert movie and quasi-documentary, it uses long-lost footage unearthed by the director while researching his Oscar-nominated drama Elvis (2022), starring American actor Austin Butler.

Luhrmann and his team gained extensive access to Presley's Graceland family archive, as well as salt mines in Kansas where Warner Bros stored almost 60 hours of film negative in its cool, pitch-dark underground vaults for decades.

"We'd heard... there may be mythical footage," Luhrmann told the Toronto premiere audience. "The guys went in and said, 'Actually, we have found the negatives.'

Some of the footage has never been printed onto film reel previously. Hours more have been in the public domain only in the form of scratchy, poor-quality bootlegs.

Luhrmann, 62, restored the negatives in collaboration with New Zealand director Peter Jackson, who made the acclaimed documentary series The Beatles: Get Back (2021).

And much of the footage they tracked down had no accompanying sound. Making the film required the use of lip-readers to match film with disparate audio from various sources as accurately as possible.

Luhrmann does not describe his latest effort as a documentary, but a "cinematic poem" - recognising its use of artistic licence.

For instance, though most of the sound uses Presley's original vocal from stage, some voices and instruments had to be re-recorded.