Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” is, true to the Australian director’s style, a dazzling sensory experience, alive with color, sound and vibrantly realized evocations of Elvis Presley’s rise from humble beginnings to international stardom. But, according to Karen Murphy, it was no easy task to bring viewers into the world of one of the most famous entertainers in recent memory.
Murphy says she and the rest of the creative team understood that Luhrmann’s goal “was to help the audience understand how it felt to be Elvis,” and “how it felt to be there when he first came on the scene.”
The 52-year-old Murphy is nominated for an Oscar for “Elvis” in the category of production design, along with Catherine Martin, and set decorator Beverley Dunn. All told, the film will enter the March 12 Oscar ceremony with a total of eight nominations.
“Everyone knows so much about Elvis,” says Murphy, who lives in Portland with her daughter, and with Murphy’s partner, Carrie Brownstein, who is known both as a musician in Sleater-Kinney, and for her work as an actor, writer and director in projects including “Portlandia” and “The Nowhere Inn.”
Murphy has worked on such films as “A Star is Born” (2018), “Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith” (2005), and “The Matrix Reloaded” (2003), and has previously collaborated with Luhrmann and his wife and creative partner Martin on “Moulin Rouge” (2001), “Australia” (2008), “The Great Gatsby” (2013) and the Netflix series, “The Get Down” (2016-2017).
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The job of a production designer, Murphy says, involves responsibility for the overall look of a film. “I look at the script, I work through it with the director. In the case of ‘Elvis,’ Catherine Martin and I did this job together.” Murphy says. “It was a very big undertaking.”
To create the world of “Elvis,” who is played in the film by best lead actor Oscar nominee Austin Butler, Murphy and Martin, who also designed the costumes, met with Luhrmann to understand what he needed, and how he wanted the environments to feel.
“Elvis,” as conceived by Luhrmann, traces the legend’s early days, his exploding fame, the artistic disappointments of his Hollywood movie star days, and the last years of his life, which ended with his death in 1977, at age 42.
Many of the high spots of Presley’s career were documented in film, video and photographs. “For example, “A lot of people have been to Graceland,” as Murphy says of Presley’s famous Memphis home. “We were set with the task of building Graceland from the inside out. We had the sets evolve three times over the 30-year period Elvis was in that place, off and on.”
The challenge was to both recreate what an audience already had some familiarity with, while also conveying the drama and the story through the design of the sets, Murphy says.
“There was a film called ‘Elvis: That’s the Way It Is,’ made of an Elvis concert at the International Hotel,” Murphy says. “We studied that footage.” Luhrmann wanted anyone who had seen the 1970 documentary to be unable to tell the difference between what “Elvis: That’s the Way It Is” depicted, and how “Elvis” looks.
There were many problems to solve when it came to duplicating spaces that no longer exist. “It was a forensic job to piece together all of the details,” Murphy says. It was also tricky to design the suite that Presley lived in while he performed in Las Vegas. “There were no drawings. Catherine Martin is very good with texture, and color and palette. We worked very hard to create an environment for Elvis where he was in this gilded cage. It was lush, and lavish, and very much a part of his design world.”
Using heavy and dark colors and textures, Murphy, Martin and Luhrmann tried to emulate Presley’s style, and to “tell the story of a man on top of the world, but he’s trapped, and alone.”
Murphy has lived in the U.S. for eight years, and was based in New York before coming to Portland. “I moved here in 2020 and have been here since,” she says. “I come from Sydney, Australia, which is a very big city. I love Portland. Obviously, it’s a little smaller. But I think the things that I like about it are that we get around very easily, and the city itself does feel very cosmopolitan.”
Murphy says she would love to be considered for a film that would shoot in Portland, instead of Europe, Los Angeles, or in Canada, which is where she’s heading for her next project. “But I’m not sure when or if that will happen. The scale of the films I’m working on these days are a little bit larger, and I’m not sure that the projects that are coming here can hold enough work for all of us in the area.”
For now, Murphy is busy with activities, awards shows, and events associated with “Elvis.” Murphy has worked on other Oscar-nominated films, and attended the ceremony before, but being personally nominated this year has, she says, “been quite the process.”
In addition to “Elvis,” the other films nominated for production design Oscars in 2023 are “All Quiet on the Western Front,” “Avatar: The Way of Water,” “Babylon,” and “The Fabelmans.”
One of the best things about being nominated, Murphy says, “Is you get an opportunity to meet your contemporaries, and sometimes you meet people more experienced than you. It’s like a community-type thing. It’s great to be able to meet these people from all round the world.”
— Kristi Turnquist
503-221-8227; kturnquist@oregonian.com; @Kristiturnquist
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