Deadline’s Learn the Screenplay collection spotlighting the yr’s most talked-about scripts continues with Sofia Coppola’s biopic Priscilla. Primarily based on the 1985 memoir Elvis and Me co-authored by Priscilla Presley and Sandra Harmon, the script was tailored by Coppola who additionally directed.
The story begins when teenage Priscilla Beaulieu meets Elvis at a celebration and the person who’s already a meteoric rock-and-roll famous person turns into somebody solely surprising in personal moments: an exhilarating crush, an ally in loneliness, a susceptible greatest buddy. From Priscilla’s perspective, the movie appears on the unseen facet of an incredible American fable in Elvis and Priscilla’s lengthy courtship and turbulent marriage.
Cailee Spaeny performs the eponymous function, for which she gained a Greatest Actress Volpi Cup on the Venice Movie Pageant. Jacob Elordi performs Elvis.
On the world premiere in Venice, the actual Priscilla Presley choked up when she took the mic and informed the press corps, “It’s very tough to sit down and watch a movie about you and about your life and about your love. Sofia did a tremendous job, she did her homework.”
Coppola mentioned she was drawn to the challenge as a result of she was “so struck with how the setting is so uncommon however she goes by way of the entire issues that each one women undergo rising up into womanhood — her first kiss and changing into a mom — all of those moments I may relate to, however on this very uncommon setting that we’re so curious to know.”
Adapting the memoir for the display marked Coppola’s first actual foray into residing historical past. Re-reading the e book, she informed Deadline’s Joe Utichi, “it grabbed me in a manner the place I may see this engaging, inspiring visible world of Graceland and Nineteen Sixties Memphis. It was one thing I’d by no means performed, and it was so Americana.”
In her Deadline evaluate, Stephanie Bunbury wrote that Coppola’s “stylistic pizzazz overcomes the boring sense that we all know precisely what’s going to occur.” The small print she exhibits, “are like an extra narrative rippling throughout the details we already know.” The “power” of Coppola’s movies “is that appears to see the whole lot.”
A24 launched Priscilla domestically November 3; it has grossed almost $21 million up to now.
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