14 minute read
Elliott Wheeler
DANNY TURNER discovers the smoke and mirror techniques that brought ‘The King’ back to life on Baz Luhrmann’s Presley biopic
Film composer Elliott Wheeler’s association with filmmaker Baz Luhrmann began over a decade ago on The Great Gatsby, and continued three years later with the Netflix musical drama The Get Down, where Wheeler expertly intertwined jazz, pop and hip-hop with musical storytelling, alongside music icons such as Nas, Grandmaster Flash and Nile Rogers.
So successful was their partnership that Wheeler was appointed executive music producer for Luhrmann’s recently released Elvis Presley biopic. Diving into the ‘The King’s’ 800-strong discography, the composer began reworking classic tracks, creating orchestral themes and helping actor Austin Butler create authentic vocal renditions using high-fidelity stems, taken from original Elvis recordings.
With the assistance of Nashville producer Dave Cobb, Wheeler also had access to the legendary RCA Studios where Elvis recorded dozens of hits, adopting his original microphones, preamps and recording devices. Orchestral recordings took place at AIR studios and were relayed to Wheeler’s production house Turning Studios, with facilities in Sydney, Los Angeles and New York.
You’ve developed an ongoing partnership with filmmaker Baz Luhrmann. What lies at the heart of this creative affiliation? With any creative relationship between director and composer you start to develop a form of musical shorthand when it comes to looking at a story, and trying to understand where you need to get to. From that perspective, I can understand why composers lock in with particular directors, because so much time and effort is devoted to getting these projects up and running that it requires a leap of faith to develop that relationship. One of the understandings that I have with Baz is that he tends to use many external artists. Coming in as composer and executive music producer on The Get Down, and now Elvis, gave us license to use whatever flavours we needed to, whether that’s recording the score with Jeff Foster in London or bringing in other artists like Doja Cat, Yola and Gary Clarke Jr. to play a role in the film.
Are you happy to work with Baz irrespective of the topic, or did the Elvis biopic hold a particular fascination for you? The Get Down and Elvis are very American stories looking at different eras of the country, but when Baz is telling a story you want to jump on board no matter what it is. There are very few directors who make the music such a focal point of the storytelling, so it’s a real gift to work with him.
At the same time, your role moved beyond composer into executive music producer. What did that entail in relation to this project? The great thing was that Baz got my music editor Jamieson Shaw and I involved very early on so we could sit down and start going through this huge body of material that comprised over 800 songs. We sat with Baz, did a lot of listening sessions, made a lot of lists and started to understand which tracks and performances we’d begin using for the
storytelling and how we would try and portray Elvis.
For example, do we do it all using masters or recreations and who was our actor going to be? It was such a gift to find Austin Butler. Without him I’m not sure how we would have moved forward, and that led to a lot of other answers. Then we went over and worked with Dave Cobb in Nashville to recreate a lot of the early recordings of Elvis. We had access to all of Dave’s incredible equipment including every microphone and preamp and the tape that Elvis recorded to. We even had the original tape delay machine that he used and we recorded at the same studios at RCA that Elvis recorded at. But knowing we had Austin to vocalise the early Elvis really did unlock a lot of avenues for us.
How important was it to work at RCA and use so many of the same tools that Elvis had in order to get your head inside the project? With regard to the recording process, we wanted to keep a sense of fidelity but also manipulate recordings in a way that felt cinematically exciting. We felt it was really important for that sonic landscape to be absolutely authentic. Basically, Austin sings everything up to 1968, and after that it’s pretty much Elvis’s vocals being blended in. Austin’s voice was so close to Elvis’s anyway, but because we had the Turner microphone that Elvis used at Russwood, or the RE15 mics that he used in Vegas, we had the flexibility to blend the two voices together in a way that was authentic. Another thing that Baz was really insistent on was that we wanted a contemporary audience to have a cinematic experience and understand what a punk Elvis was —by sensing the danger of his performances.
As mentioned, you worked very closely with Austin to ensure that his performance was as authentic as possible. How deep did you personally go into that process? I was very deeply involved in that side of things, but at the end of the day the person who was most responsible for Austin’s voice was Austin. His work ethic was insane and there’s not a recording or a performance that he couldn’t do verbatim, but we did do a lot of work with him. We had a wonderful coach, Irene Bartlett, who helped him to understand how to access different parts of his vocal range to match all the different types of voices that Elvis had over his career. We also had access to those stems, so we’d often sit down with Austin and listen line by line to work out what Elvis was doing in each of those performances.
What about the physical component of Elvis’s performances? The incredible rhythmic ability that Elvis had in every line he sang was something we worked on developing, working hand in hand with movement coach Polly Bennett. There’s a line that Elvis says in the movie: “If I can’t move, I can’t sing” —his physicality affected his voice, so as Austin was learning the songs he’d also learn how to do the movements in conjunction with the vocals.
What tools were used to combine Austin and Elvis’s vocals? It’s worth mentioning that the reason we combined their vocals was to make sure that the audience never slipped from the illusion that we were trying to create on screen. If Austin breathed or came in fractionally early or late on a line during a live performance, by using the old microphones we could switch between Austin and Elvis’s vocal for that particular scene. For sync purposes, we’d often use Austin’s live take as the master then phase the Elvis recording into his performance. By moving Elvis’s stems rather than Austin’s, not only was the lip sync always locked in, but it gave us a greater sense of fidelity. We basically fed the source material into VocAlign (review, Resolution V17.7) followed by the material that we wanted to affect so that any variation in delivery locked one line up with the other.
/ Composer, producer and Turning Studios founder
Elliott Wheeler
Did hearing Elvis’s vocal stems add a sense of mystery to his enigma or subtract from it? For me, it was spine tingling because you suddenly feel like you’re in the room with the person. Being able to hear what he’s doing with his breathe and how much his rhythm was guiding what was happening with the music were some of our best geek-out moments.
You must have been intensely aware that there would be a level of scrutiny from Elvis fanatics and audiences at large. How did you deal with that pressure? I dealt with it with endless nights of sleepless terror! We were very much aware of the responsibility that the Presley estate gave us in being entrusted with the music, and didn’t ever
/ Austin Butler as Elvis
underestimate how much it means to his millions of fans, his family and the legacy that he represents. You just have to honour it through the work. When you’re trying to represent a lifetime in 2 hours and 40 minutes you have to take poetic conjunctions but you also have to be absolutely certain that you know when you’re breaking the rules —because you think it makes sense, for example, having Elvis performing Trouble at Ruswood Stadium when that wasn’t where he originally performed the song.
But having Priscilla and Lisa Marie’s blessing on this film meant everything, because they knew the man in a way that none of us did. Of course, we also hope that The King would have liked the way he was portrayed and the family has already told us that they think he would have approved, so we have to trust them on that.
Was it difficult to create a score that would enable the big Elvis numbers to stand apart from everything else? In some ways, but the joy of wearing the composer and producer hat is that we didn’t really have to think about the score differently because it was all
/ Wheeler conducting
about the musical storytelling. I was very certain from the beginning of this process that a film about Elvis Presley’s music should be entirely about his music, so all of the thematic choices and main character themes are Elvis songs too. It was a joy trying to work out how to take ‘Suspicious Minds’ and give it a more operatic feel or take ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’ from the beautiful version that Kacey Musgraves sings as they’re kissing to the final goodbye. For that, we created a large orchestral version of the song using an original Elvis stem that was re-harmonised and placed on top of it. Hopefully, it didn’t feel like there was any separation between the score and the performance, because the idea was that it should all feel very much like one tapestry of Elvis’s music taken through different lenses.
I also read that you combined Elvis songs such as ‘Edge of Reality’ and ‘I Got a Feelin’ in My Body’ to make a completely new musical piece… That was something we wanted to play with because not only did we have access to all of the Elvis material but we were very lucky to have the ultimate Elvis scholars Ernst Jorgensen and Rob Santos to help us. They gave us access to the vault, so we took a bassline from ‘I Got a Feelin’ in My Body’ and put the melody of ‘Summer Kisses, Winter Tears’ on top of it with the idea of creating what we called “DNA tracks”. Jamieson Shaw was fantastic at pulling out different elements from different songs to create an entirely new track made up of only Elvis vocals and instruments.
Was it a challenge mixing vintage tracks for a modern cinematic audience? That’s one of the reasons why we rerecorded all the ’50s and early ’60s material, but even when we got to the ’60s and ’70s multi-tracks it was a real challenge mixing them for cinema. Our mixer, Evan McHugh, did a lot of that work, but we also spent a long time trying to work out how to place the sound in the cinema properly. One of the challenges with the later stuff is that Elvis always recorded himself in the room, so the spill was everywhere —you’d have bass in the string mics and brass in the vocal mix, and trying to isolate that in a way that you normally would for a cinema mix was a real challenge. We had to use a lot of tricks to work out how to translate that
music into an experience the audience would feel on a visceral level while keeping the fidelity of the aesthetic and giving the sound an extra sense of oomph.
What role did sound design and Dolby Atmos play in the soundtrack? In terms of sound design and Atmos, Wayne Pashley of Big Band Sound Design did an incredible job creating an audio universe comprising not just sound effects but the crowd, which was like another band member. It was another education for me to hear the level of detail that’s in a crowd, which typically has seven or eight different layers. Unfortunately, the crowd sounds on the original recordings were so baked into the musical stems that it was hard to isolate them, so most of that work was done by a sound recordist on set. We used hundreds of extras as a starting point and those were then recreated using extra recordings and loop groups.
What role did your own Turning Studios play in the production process? The joy of this film was that we were able to work everywhere. We went to Nashville to access Dave Cobb, the equipment, the incredible players he had over there, and be in the space Elvis recorded at; but we were still able to produce a number of tracks at Turning Studios and record the orchestra in London. I have to say that the amazing technology that we now have seemed to move forward in leaps and bounds throughout the pandemic. For example, it was a shame that we couldn’t attend the orchestral scores at AIR studios, but it was still an amazing experience to sit in our production studios on the Gold Coast and do a full orchestral score in real-time, mixed in 7.1 with Chris Masterson conducting over in London. In terms of physicality, the technology has got a point where it feels more like an enabler than a limitation.
To what extent is the acceleration of those technologies likely to change how you work in the future? We used a combination of Source Connect, which I know a lot of the ADR sessions still rely on, Audiomovers for the orchestral sessions and even Zoom or Clearview in some instances. I do think it will change how composers think about producing because you’re not limited to having to be there, but there’s also the real sadness of not being there when the music’s being made because that’s part of why we do this. Being in the room during some of the Gospel sessions at Nashville was one of the most transformative musical experiences I’ve ever had —people were crying after their takes. It’s really hard to recreate that sense of proximity, so there are gains and losses.
What can you tell us about the facilities at Turning Studios’ various locations? We have it set up so we can go where the work is, and that particularly applies to Baz because we ended up working in a lot of different places. Due to recall, the core of the workflow is digital now, but each studio has bits of beautiful analogue gear or equipment that’s unique to that space, so it’s always great to be able to access something different from a studio. There’s so much wonderful technology out there now, but I think Spitfire Audio have done an amazing job with their orchestral libraries, and I love how they’re making them accessible to young composers. We’re mostly recording and writing in Pro Tools, which is a whole other universe — I really wouldn’t know where to start with the myriad of plugins and other equipment that we use.
Having completed the score, were you able to view the movie with any sense of objectivity? Probably not, yet [laughs]. Once you’ve lived with a film and know every single decision and thought process that’s gone into making it, it’s really hard to unlearn that, and just watch it as a film. It’s also hard to turn of the analytical part of the brain when comparing the original mix to how the movie might sounds in another space. Even in a Dolby high-specification room a wall might have a cavity that resonates, so it varies from theatre to theatre. Fortunately, Dolby does a great job signing off with their Dolby specification. They’re super aware of how a mix changes as it travels around a room and spend a lot of time building in those systems.
