When Baz Luhrmann was making his 2022 Elvis movie, he went hunting for footage nobody had seen in years. The trail led somewhere strange. A film vault buried inside the salt mines of Kansas, where old studio negatives sit in the cool and the dark for decades on end.
What he found down there was a haul. Reels and reels of Elvis concert footage, silent negatives that had been sitting untouched for roughly fifty years. His team spent about two years restoring the picture and matching it back up to sound, and it became a new concert film, EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert, that played in IMAX in early 2026.
But the restored shows aren’t really the treasure here. Tucked in with everything else was a separate recording, around forty minutes of Elvis just talking. Not performing. Not reading off a script. Elvis telling his own life story, in his own voice.
Trailer for the restored EPiC concert film
For all the miles of film we have of Elvis singing, there’s almost nothing of him simply speaking for himself, at length and off guard. This tape is exactly that. He called it his side of the story.
Baz Luhrmann on finding the lost footage
Luhrmann has compared digging through those vaults to Raiders of the Lost Ark, and he insists he isn’t exaggerating. Crates of history, slowly fading, waiting in the dark under Kansas for somebody to come looking.
More on the Kansas salt-mine discovery
The world has watched Elvis sing for seventy years now. What almost nobody has done is sit and listen to him talk. That tape, pulled out of a salt mine half a century on, finally gives them the chance.