For decades, almost everyone else told Elvis Presley’s story. His family told it. His friends told it. His bodyguards told it. Hollywood told it. Now an extraordinary recording allows Elvis himself to speak.
While making the 1972 documentary Elvis on Tour, filmmakers wanted to record a formal interview with Elvis on camera. According to longtime friend Jerry Schilling, Elvis was tired and the filmed interview never happened. But the recorder kept going.
With no camera pointed at him, Elvis sat and talked for roughly 40 minutes about his life, career and feelings. Schilling says he was unusually relaxed and candid. Colonel Tom Parker reportedly ensured that very little of the conversation became public during Elvis’s lifetime. More than 50 years later, director Baz Luhrmann found the tape while working through enormous amounts of archival Elvis material.
It changed his entire new film.
Instead of filling EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert with historians explaining Elvis, Luhrmann decided to let Elvis narrate his own story. And one confession is especially revealing.
Despite years of screaming crowds and sold-out concerts, Elvis admitted:
“I’ve never gotten over what they call stage fright.”
He said he experienced it before every show and never allowed himself or his musicians to become completely comfortable because every audience deserved to feel like it was their first performance. Think about that. This was 1972 Elvis. He had already changed popular music, starred in dozens of movies and performed before enormous audiences. And he was still scared.
EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert Official Trailer
The trailer introduces the restored footage and the idea at the heart of the film: Elvis telling his story in his own voice.
The rediscovered material also helps expose frustrations hidden beneath the glamorous image. The film explores Elvis’s disappointment with the direction of his Hollywood career and his desire for new challenges, while people close to him have spoken about how badly he wanted to perform internationally. That connects with another famous thing Elvis said in 1972. When a reporter asked about the image he had created, Elvis replied that the image and the human being were two different things, adding that living up to that image was extremely difficult. That may be the real revelation in this lost recording. Not that Elvis had some explosive secret waiting to destroy his legend. It is that the man beneath the legend was nervous, ambitious, frustrated and far more vulnerable than the image allowed him to appear.
For more than half a century, people have talked about who Elvis Presley really was.
Now we can hear the King trying to explain it himself.