Baz Luhrmann Talks Elvis Presley, 30 Years of Romeo + Juliet, Leonardo DiCaprio and New Film "EPiC"

Zach Sang Show

Sangasong, LLC

Music, Tv & Film

4.6 • 685 Ratings

🗓️ 26 February 2026

⏱️ 74 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We were beyond thrilled to welcome Aussie auteur Baz Luhrmann on the couch! For 30 plus years he’s been wowing audiences with his fantastical, rich, music-heavy world-building — from ‘Romeo + Juliet’ to ‘Moulin Rouge,’ ‘Great Gatsby’ to his Austin Butler-starring Elvis biopic, and now he’s taking Elvis on an international tour via his new concert film ‘EPiC.’

In the process of creating 2023’s ‘Elvis’ Baz and his team unearth 50 plus unseen reels of footage from Elvis’ heyday, performing in Vegas in the early 70s. Alongside Peter Jackson’s team (who restored the Beatles footage for ‘The Beatles: Get Back’) and a coterie of experts, Baz brought the concert footage and backstage scenes back to life, painstakingly piecing together and syncing audio, and in some cases orchestrating the audio where it was lost. We get into all of that (and the accompanying soundtrack). The whole shebang is narrated by Elvis, in his own, hitherto unheard words, thanks to a 45 minute interview that also lay languishing in the Kansas salt mine vaults with the rest of it. After Elvis’ manager Colonel Tom Parker blocked him from going on international tours throughout his career, the King is finally hitting the road outside of America!

And then there’s all the other stuff we talked about: Bowie, Mick Jagger, his love of abiding K-pop (and the genre’s connection with Elvis), his Oscar-winning wife and partner in crime Catherine Martin, 30 years of ‘Romeo + Juliet,’ working with Leonardo DiCaprio as a teenager and then a 30-something, roaming around Graceland when it was closed for business, his upcoming film about Joan of Arc (‘Jeanne d’Arc’), growing old disgracefully and so much more.

See 'EPiC: Elvis Presley In Concert' ►► https://www.epicmovie.film/home/

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, beautiful human. I'm Zach. That is Dan and that is Basil Herman here in the studio.
0:09.0	Yo!
0:10.0	This is crazy.
0:11.0	You, Zach, have some of the best pencils I've ever seen.
0:14.0	Thank you so much for coming in here and admiring my pencils.
0:17.0	It means a lot to me.
0:18.0	I think of a furniture, but you have a very cool space, but you have the pencils I dream of.
0:22.9	As I told you, oh, they took my book, but I'm analog. You know, I still write notes. I'm always looking for my pencils, and with your pencils, I never have to look. Yeah, it'll be there forever. Do you have, like, an ideal pencil? Are you, like, a lead pencil person? Actually, I really like the Mugi little civil ones, just because they're so...
0:37.7	I don't mean Japan a lot.
0:40.1	And the thing about the moji is that they're the little tiny ones they just have them everywhere. You're never without them. Oh my God. If only had a double espresso. Zach, you have a magical environment here. Let's talk K-pop. Yeah.
0:56.6	You were saying you fly into soul in the middle of the night.
1:01.8	I got now, I'm going to be careful what I can say, but I will say I have been involved in K-pop from way back.
1:03.8	What happened was when 2 a.m. happened that long ago.
1:08.7	They had an album called Fscott Fitzgerald.
1:11.2	And I thought, this is amazing because I was writing Gatsby or working on it.
1:15.6	And I opened and I said, what a beautiful packaging.
1:17.9	I used to see it.
1:19.3	Probably I used to see Big Bang and go, wow, they've really got something going on.
1:23.1	And then 2 a.m., actually, that's where, you know, Mr. Bang came from, split off.
1:30.4	And at that time, he was trying to get this little band going.
1:33.3	But then I became good friends with G-Dragon, who actually cut a track for me with Teddy in Black Label in the middle of the night.
1:42.7	I flew in the middle of the night.
	...

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