On Location: How ‘Priscilla’ Bought Graceland Back to Life

Sabrina Lantos/A24

Sofia Coppola's Priscilla is the opposite of a travel story—it's a film that hinges on its titular character’s inability to go anywhere at all. Priscilla Presley, during her marriage to Elvis, did not see much of the world. She visited him in Los Angeles once, yes, and accompanied him to Las Vegas for a show as well. But almost all of her time was spent in Memphis, within the confines of her husband’s Graceland. And after a promised trip to Europe disappeared behind a very early pregnancy, travel was simply not on the menu.

Yet a particular strength of Coppola's films is the strong sense of place that defines each of them: the Park Hyatt Tokyo of Lost in Translation, Marie Antoinette's Versailles in the film of the same name. It would be easy to assume that Coppola, who had unprecedented access to the palace, had shot her latest project at Graceland itself. But Priscilla was actually made entirely in Toronto—a truth you’d never know were you not told. To get to the bottom of the dupe, we sat down with production designer Tamara Deverell to find out what it took to create Priscilla's world.

Did you visit Graceland in preparation for this film?

I definitely started with Graceland, because we knew we were going to build the interior sets. I was shocked at how few images there were available. I never visited it, though, no. It was a fast film. And I actually feel like it wouldn’t have been the right thing to do. Now, Graceland is dressed the way it was in the 1970s, which was after Priscilla’s time—he did it all in red. So we only had a few photos, and we really clung to those. I did find the plans of Graceland, and copied the footprint—including Elvis’s bedroom, which there’s really nothing on. I stretched it a little bit because long and narrow sets frame really well, and raised the ceilings because Jacob Elordi is so damn tall, I didn’t want him to bonk his head. Elvis had this 11-foot-long custom couch that we built. But I wasn’t totally religious to what I saw—it was about getting the vibe of the place right rather than perfect accuracy.

We did lots of color testing—do we want blue white, or do we want buttery white?—with [cinematographer] Philippe [Le Sourd] when he arrived from Paris. That was tense. And we found a couple of locations—the house itself and the gate were on opposite sides of Toronto. I had shot the house before for an Anne Rice series called The Feast of All Saints: it’s this old plantation house that could be New Orleans as well. There’s a pool there that we could shoot at certain times of the day.

Had you spent any time in Memphis, just in general? How would you compare Memphis to Toronto, where you shot?

I have not spent any time in Memphis, and I’ve never been to Graceland, but I studied it. I did go through Tennessee years ago. It’s completely different from Toronto, there’s no similarities! But the movie is so internal, we are dealing with lots of internal spaces. And it wasn’t just Memphis, we also did Germany and Las Vegas and Los Angeles in Toronto, which was a difficult task. There are scenes of Priscilla driving in Los Angeles with palm trees, and that’s obviously Los Angeles, we do not have that in Toronto anywhere. But the mid-century modern house that is reminiscent of their Palm Springs honeymoon, and correct for the period they spent in Los Angeles, is owned by mid-century modern antique furniture dealers [in Toronto.] It really feels like California, it’s a great house and they’d never had filming there before. We added a ton of greens, palm trees of all sizes and cactuses in Toronto** in? **October. We put blankets over them the night before we shot, once we had planted them in.

Let’s go to Vegas. What spirit did you want to capture?

Elvis actually went to the Stardust among other places, and all of the references for the places he was going had these pastels that we didn’t want to use at all. We went with deep reds and golds for Vegas. We had this great shooting location called the Elgin [and Winter Garden] Theatre in Toronto. We filmed in the lobby, which is full of beautiful gilded gold details, and there’s two theaters—we shot the casino and its entrance with VFX for Vegas because it’s just Young Street in Toronto. The theaters are stacked the way old movie houses are—in the Winter Garden Theatre, we also shot the cinema where Elvis and Priscilla go on a date in Germany. And then we shot Elvis on stage upstairs.

We just made Vegas there, we made slot machines and blackjack tables quite painstakingly with bright graphics. But when I showed the location to Sofia and Philippe, it was just like, “That’s such a shift for her.” It’s not the pastels of Graceland or the gray, yucky greens and browns of Germany. It’s something new to embrace, and that stayed true for the hotel set that we built for them at the end. It was a conscious color choice informed by the location, which we fell in love with.

Were there any other locations around Toronto that grabbed you in that way?

Parkwood in Ottowa is something we use a lot, [Guillermo del Toro and I] shot Nightmare Alley there, for these houses on the German military base. And there was a dreadful, dreary closed childrens’ psychiatric hospital that was kind of haunted and horrible. We used it for the German high school.

Since you live in Toronto, what is your relationship with the city when you work with it?

You know, I’m always thinking about what can be used and what cannot. But, to be honest, I get bored with Toronto and I’m super excited because I’m going to the United Kingdom to shoot Frankenstein with Guillermo next.

Originally Appeared on Condé Nast Traveler