As a pilgrimage site for Elvis fans, Graceland attracts over half a million visitors yearly. But how is the property remembered by its past inhabitants? For the Priscilla sets, director Sofia Coppola and production designer Tamara Deverell endeavored to build a version of Graceland that stood as a poetic reflection of Priscilla Presley’s memories in the home.
“We were walking that fine line between making it a beautiful place, a period place, and a place that exists in reality,” Deverell says to AD over Zoom, explaining the balance needed for the Priscilla sets given the film’s artistic approach to the real life events it captures. Graceland stands frozen in time today, but in the period between Priscilla’s departure from the home and Elvis’s death, it underwent many redesigns. There’s relatively little documentation of the home’s design during the period of time that the film captures. “We didn’t have a lot to go on for early Graceland, so we were really free to create our own world,” the production designer says. Deverell opted to keep the floor plan of Graceland mostly in line with reality—partially because of its familiarity. But making sure that each decorative detail was pulled from reality didn’t hold the same importance.
Priscilla Presley’s memoir Elvis and Me, which the film was adapted from, was useful for approaching the emotions that the interiors needed to conjure in the film. “I wanted to evoke her memories and also Sofia’s feeling of what it should be—the Graceland that Priscilla perceived. Whereas the bedroom was more Elvis’s space, [the downstairs of] Graceland was really, in my mind, Priscilla’s dream—her vision,” Deverell explains.
Picking the proper colors for the interiors was essential in creating this dream-like quality in the Graceland of Priscilla, which transitions from a space of discovery and excitement for the central character into a gilded cage—as Deverell describes it—as the movie wears on. Rather than going with the pure white color that can be seen in the real Graceland’s downstairs living space, a warm white tone was chosen, which Deverell describes as an “icing on the wedding cake tone.” The pastel colors, abundance of soft textures, and diffuse lighting come together for an almost surreal atmosphere—apropos for the not-quite-reality quality of memory.
By comparison, the upstairs of Graceland (where Elvis’s bedroom is located) is much more adult and dark. In contrast to the downstairs, which was intended as a reflection of Priscilla’s interior world, the bedroom was conceptualized as Elvis’s space. “We decided on a color palette of very dark blues. He was wearing blue pajamas, and costume designer Stacy Battat and I talked about the fact that Elvis kind of matches his world. It’s all very Elvis-centric and glitzy,” Deverell shares. Several details were based on the reality of Elvis’s bedroom—a striped tiger statue, a statue of Jesus, and remote control curtains, to name a few—showcasing the opulence and oddity of the house Priscilla would have encountered.
The exterior is as true a representation of Graceland’s defining qualities as possible, with its façade and the grand music-note-adorned gates that stand at the property’s entrance. To recreate the exterior of Graceland, Deverell and her team clad an existing home with stone and added shutters so that the home’s iconic exterior would be instantly recognizable in exterior shots. The gates too, imposing and rock and roll themed as they are, stand as the ultimate signal of Priscilla’s inherently secondary role on the property.
