When Cailee Spaeny took home the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival, many imagined that Priscilla, the eighth film from Francis Ford Coppola’s daughter, would be a contender in the race for the oscar And despite the fact that the talented 25-year-old protagonist also received a nomination for the Golden Globe, the film was completely left out of the Hollywood Academy’s shortlist. This does not detract from the merits of this portrait of a teenager who manages to make the dream of many come true to meet her idol up close and who shows throughout the story that not everything in this apparent fairy tale was rosy.
Why did you want to tell the story of Priscilla Presley?
I just read his memoir, but I never imagined that it would move me so much. I realized I didn’t know much about her. I felt so connected to the way she described everything that happened, from being a simple high school student to becoming an independent woman after experiencing very special circumstances. Little did I know that he was still going to high school while living at Graceland. That’s how I got into the world of 1960s America.
Why do you think it took so long since the book was published for her to have her movie?
I think things happen when people are ready. It seems to me that now is a time in our culture where there is more interest in women’s stories. I was surprised how little we knew about her. He is one half of one of the most famous couples of his time. Knowing everything we know about him, it’s very interesting to see what things were like for her being around him.
What was the biggest challenge in creating a believable character from what was in the book?
I think the biggest challenge was to take such an important part of a person’s life and boil it down to its essence so that it fit into the length of a film. It was not easy to get the audience to understand everything she experienced in just two hours.
How did conversations with Cailee help you play Priscilla?
It was very important, because we had to shoot this movie jumping all the time to different moments in history. What Cailee did was truly impressive. When she came to the set, I knew what point in the story we were at by the way she looked. And at the time of editing, I realized that she was always very clear about where she was and had managed to create a very gradual transformation. When shooting, we just concentrated on the scene we were doing, and we had all the sets in the same soundstage, the teenage bedroom was next to the dining room set, and sometimes you had to go from one place to the other even if they were scenes that would appear at different times in the film. It was like a puzzle.
His film doesn’t show Elvis as evil, but as someone who certainly had his problems…
Yes, it was very important for me to keep Priscilla’s perspective of him. It shows him as a human being, beyond the fact that in popular culture he is perceived as a god. In the book she explains what he was like, his vulnerabilities and his way of being in intimacy. It seemed very interesting to me to show the good and bad times she lived, without neglecting the incredible charm that Elvis had, as well as his darker sides. For me it was key that it was seen that they had a complex relationship. I didn’t want him to be evil, but a human being with his conflicts and problems.
Did you learn anything from your previous films that you could use in shooting Priscilla?
I’ve learned to trust my intuition and not forget what interests me about a project, because you can’t assume who will respond or feel connected to your work. You just have to listen to yourself and trust that if he connected with you, he will connect with other people too. When I started I wasn’t so sure about this, and now that I’ve been doing it for a while, I feel that intuition is telling me what the right decisions are in what I do.
Do you feel that there are points in common between Priscilla and Lost in translation?
It’s not something I’ve thought of, but it makes sense. I am always interested in the relationship between fantasy and the reality of what seems to be ideal but is not. I understand very well how fame works. Having grown up in the industry, it’s something I know very well. I have a much more realistic look than it can be. As for this story, from the outside it looks like a fairy tale. And then, when you listen to them all, you realize that it’s not what you imagined. She had an apparently ideal life, but in reality it was full of ups and downs and she had to struggle with many situations. There is an idea in our culture that fame and fortune make you happy, and the reality is that all of that comes with a lot of other things that aren’t so nice.
What do you hope the audience will take away from this film?
For me the most important thing is that Priscilla did not deceive herself. At first glance, she had a perfect life, but it wasn’t the right one for her. On the surface, she was in an ideal relationship, but she gave it all up in the early 1970s when it was very difficult to leave a very powerful man without an income of his own. He had the strength to find his own identity by moving away from Elvis. I think what the movie is saying is that it’s never too late to find out who you are.
