Director Baz Luhrmann’s film “EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert”, which had its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival on Saturday, is a love letter to the King of Rock and Roll, created over the course of seven years.

The film is a combination of concert film and quasi-documentary, using long-lost footage discovered by the director during his research for the 2022 Oscar-nominated drama “Elvis” starring Austin Butler.

Luhrmann and his team were granted extensive access to Presley’s family archive at Graceland, as well as to salt mines in Kansas, where Warner Bros. had stored nearly 60 hours of film negatives for decades in their cool, dark underground vaults.

“We heard there might be mythical footage,” Luhrmann told the Toronto premiere audience.

“The guys went in and said: ‘Actually, we found the negatives.’”

Some of the footage had never even been printed onto film stock before. Additional hours had only been available to the public as scratched, poor-quality bootleg copies.

Luhrmann restored the negatives at great expense in collaboration with Peter Jackson, who directed the highly acclaimed documentary “The Beatles: Get Back.”

Much of the footage they uncovered had no accompanying sound. Creating the film required lip-reading experts to match the visuals with disparate audio sources as accurately as possible.

In fact, the director does not describe his latest project as a documentary, but rather as a “cinematic poem” — acknowledging the use of artistic license.

For example, although most of the audio uses Presley’s original stage voice, some vocals and instruments had to be re-recorded.

Luhrmann uses the film to demonstrate that the singer was still at the height of his performing powers in the later stages of his career, rather than the bloated, vague caricature often associated with his final years.

In particular, “EPiC” features clips from Presley’s Las Vegas residency in 1970 and his summer tour in 1972, when the singer returned to live performances after years in Hollywood.

“He became, if not irrelevant, then lost” during his movie star period in the 1960s, Luhrmann explained.

“When he went to Las Vegas, everyone thought he was going to put on a nostalgic show, just songs from the ’50s and so on. No. He wanted nothing to do with that.”

In the last eight years of his life, Presley gave over 1,000 concerts.

The film takes viewers backstage, where Presley jokes and flirts with the rehearsal singers and playfully performs songs by bands thought to have supplanted him, including “Yesterday” and “Something” by The Beatles.

The film is told entirely in Presley’s own words, drawing from numerous interviews, press conferences, and a 50-minute audio interview he recorded while on tour, which had never before been released.

“We decided we had to let Elvis sing and tell his own story. That was the true choice,” Luhrmann said.

“EPiC” does not yet have a distributor or release date — something Luhrmann and the producers hope will change after the rapturous ovations in Toronto.

Luhrmann joked that even after seven years he may still not be finished with Presley, explaining that there is enough footage to make a sequel.

“The deeper you go into Elvis, the more you realize just how unique he is,” Luhrmann said. | AFP, BGNES