Baz Luhrmann still remembers the day Elvis Presley died, on Aug. 16, 1977.

“I was a little kid sitting in the back of a bus, and this friend of mine got on and said, ‘Elvis died today,'” the director recalls to Entertainment Weekly. “And my distinct memory was going, That’s not right. I was meant to meet him. We were gonna be friends. And that’s sort of tucked away in the back of my mind.”

A friendship may not have been in the cards, but the King of Rock & Roll was destined to play a huge part in the filmmaker’s life, both as the focus of Luhrmann’s Elvis, featuring an Oscar-nominated performance by Austin Butler, and now with EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert, a new movie comprised of six shows filmed in 1970 at Elvis’ Las Vegas residency, and from four concerts filmed in 1972 from his U.S. tour.

So why has it taken so long for audiences to see this footage? The original film stock — “these mythical missing reels from the [International Hotel] showroom,” as Elvis historian Ernst Jorgensen described them to Luhrmann while he was making Elvis — was owned by MGM and stored in salt mines in Kansas, to preserve the integrity of the media and prevent moisture damage.

“It was a bit like Raiders of the Lost Ark,” Luhrmann says of the journey to find the footage, which ended up being 65 reels of film; still, some of it was missing, damaged, or unusable. But Luhrmann and his editor and producer on EPiC, Jonathan Redmond, convinced Elvis studio Warner Bros., “to at least scan it, with the intention of doing something with it.”

‘EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert’.

NEON

But EPiC isn’t just a concert film; the story is told through Presley’s own words, portions of a 1972 interview with the directors of the 1972 movie Elvis on Tour, recorded after a rehearsal, and a 45-minute audio interview recorded around the same time.

“That was a light bulb moment. It was like, why don’t we just get outta the way — most pieces on Elvis are people talking about Elvis, or talking heads — and just let Elvis come to you kind of in a dreamscape, tell you his story, and sing it too,” Luhrmann recalls.

“When we came across Elvis talking about his life in his own voice, it became something else,” says Redmond, speaking with EW in early January, surrounded by dozens of Presley’s iconic jumpsuits on display at Elvis Presley’s Memphis, across the street from Graceland. “He wasn’t telling us something I didn’t know already, but hearing him say it was just so much more powerful. And then looking at the footage, you see how funny he was, him kind of goofing around in rehearsals, or backstage chatting with his backup singers in a really kind of sweet way. That added a depth to the man that I felt was lacking just in terms of what I’d read about him.”

Still, even with all of this never-before-seen footage, Luhrmann says it took a while to secure financial backers for the film. But that gave them time — some two years — to also track down the audio from those performances, which was recorded separately from the 35mm film stock. Oh, and they wanted to present the movie “at the highest possible quality for IMAX,” so they turned to Peter Jackson and his team at Park Road Post (a division of Jackson’s WingNut Films), which specializes in film restoration.

Even after all of that, Luhrmann says it “looked like it wasn’t gonna happen for a lot, a lot, a lot of times,” but he and Redmond couldn’t wait any longer. About a year ago, “I just said, ‘We are making this. Let’s go.'”

The result isn’t a formulaic trip back in time but rather a vibrant, electric, mesmerizing film that will make you forget Presley is even dead, as he performs more than 20 of his hits and covers (availble now on the official soundtrack), including “That’s All Right,” “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling,” “Burning Love,” “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” “Always on My Mind,” “How Great Thou Art,” “Suspicious Minds,” and “Can’t Help Falling in Love.”

“Baz didn’t want this to feel nostalgic in really any way,” Redmond says, citing the work of Jackson’s team in helping the footage feel clean and maintain its natural qualities. “It doesn’t look old….And we didn’t want anything to get in the way of Elvis.”

“It’s like he’s alive. It’s like you’re at a concert and he’s there,” says Angie Marchese, VP of Archives & Exhibits for Graceland. As a 36-year employee there, she’s heard and seen a lot — but this, she says, is “just different.”

“I really got to see more of the Elvis who I really think I got to know through the family and through the entourage members, who he was as a person,” she tells EW during a chat in the Presley Motors Automobile Museum, in front of Presley’s famous pink Cadillac. “It’s easy to tell the Elvis icon story. It’s easy to tell the gold records and the movies. But being able to get to know who Elvis was authentically as a person… If it’s the glances or the slow camera pans or the little grins or the way he talked to the directors in the Hollywood camera… He walks into a room, and he’s Elvis, but he’s so humble.”

He also opens up in ways that we haven’t necessarily heard him speak about himself, like how he wasn’t very popular in school and was very shy. But once he started singing, people liked him more.

“It’s so simple, but he could see that,” Luhrmann says of the more defining and surprising things Presley spoke about. “Then suddenly this song was a way of this incredibly shy, very, very self-conscious kid connecting with people.”

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It’s one thing to watch Presley in any of his 31 feature films; it’s another to see him in concert. The singer and musician performs like a conductor, leading his band with his entire body — those famous dance moves included — sometimes changing the tempo of rehearsed songs on the spot, or playfully interacting with his backup singers, the R&B girl group the Sweet Inspirations, or going into the crowd to kiss (and not just on the cheek sometimes) a fan. It’s evident where he earned his royal moniker.

‘EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert’.

NEON

“He has this kind of universal quality because he’s his own person. So unique. You feel like you know him, and because you feel like you know him, you’re not watching an artifact,” Luhrmann says. “He just feels alive. And I think that was the quality on stage. So many great artists write great songs, can sit there and sing them, but here’s a full package. It isn’t just the music, which is this quivering life force…. Even [the kissing] was spontaneous; they used to let him come and kiss a bit, but he just jumped down in that audience one night. You’d never do it now; it’d be too dangerous. But that is him actually giving himself to the audience. Like, literally, physically —  almost like a sacrificial lamb.”

And nearly 50 years after his death, it’s possible he’s never been more popular.

“I’ve been here so long that I’ve been able to see the generations,” Marchese says. “And then all of a sudden we come to the next generation of fans, and they weren’t alive when Elvis was alive. So we had to figure out how to introduce Elvis to that generation and explain what he did to change pop culture forever, and the music you know today would not really exist if it wasn’t for that. And now being able to see this new generation as they discover Elvis, if it’s a song in a commercial or if it’s the Baz movie — obviously through Austin’s portrayal of Elvis — they’re finding out all this information, andthey’ree on TikTok and social media, anit’s’s so fascinating to see Elvis through their eyesIt’s’s very heartwarming, the fact that this new generation is gonna get to know how important this guy was, not only as an entertainer, but as a person”.”

EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert is now playing in theaters nationwide and in IMAX.

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