‘Elvis’ Producer on ‘Joan of Arc,’ Karaoke With Hugh Jackman

Schuyler Weiss opened his masterclass at an MPA event during the Tokyo International Film Festival‘s TIFFCOM market by tackling the most ceaselessly requested query in his profession: What does a producer really do?

Comparing himself to “a sort of cartoon sheepdog, endlessly moving the flock forward together, unrelentingly driven, but always relentlessly positive,” Weiss emphasised the protecting nature of producing. “Above all, protective of the group, and most importantly, protective of the entire creative endeavor,” he said during the session.

The producer, who has labored with Baz Luhrmann for about 20 years, described filmmaking as an exercise in stability and rigidity. “The most quintessential tension of all in show business is probably between art and commerce,” Weiss said. “You can’t have one without the other. You can’t tell stories for no one, and yet to try and convene people together to watch a movie that has no art and has no soul, has no story at the center of it is a hollow exercise.”

Weiss started his movie profession as a manufacturing assistant at the Australian Film Television and Radio School, touchdown his first job by signing up on a clipboard. His task: defending 20 parking areas during peak hour on a Sydney avenue nook at 4 a.m., armed with parking cones, an orange vest and a clipboard. “From that moment on, I was hooked,” he said, watching the movie crew assemble round him piece by piece.

Working on “Australia” with Luhrmann offered his complete training in filmmaking, from script development by way of global advertising and marketing. The experience included memorable moments like karaoke with Hugh Jackman and the local Fox distribution team at 2 a.m. after the Tokyo premiere. “Unfortunately, I don’t have a photo of that,” Weiss said.

The journey satisfied him he “never wanted to just go back to one part, one slice” of the filmmaking course of. To obtain this aim as a producer, Weiss moved to New York City and began making low-budget impartial movies. “When you have no money, you have to just work it out,” he said of making ultra-low-budget motion pictures in the U.S. impartial system.

He produced roughly half a dozen indie movies, a number of premiering at Sundance, including “Piercing,” based on a Japanese novel by Murakami Ryu. Weiss described his profession philosophy of alternating between different sorts of challenges: “Pushing yourself to keep up with a fast moving herd with great experience and great power” versus having “no one with whom to keep up, no one even noticing whether you’re going to succeed or fail, except yourself.”

About capturing musical performances on movie, Weiss detailed the in depth preparation required for “Elvis.” The team started recording with Austin Butler in Nashville’s RCA studio — the place Elvis himself recorded — roughly a 12 months before capturing started in Australia. “We’re not big believers in capturing music performances live on set,” Weiss explained. “Preparation is everything. You really have to take some big leaps, because you’re committing to creative decisions about the music well before you film anything.”

The manufacturing created a hybrid musical language mixing Elvis’s unique vocals with Butler’s voice. For Nineteen Fifties materials, recorded in mono and unsuitable for contemporary Atmos theater sound, the manufacturing used solely Butler’s vocals. For later live performance footage with multi-track Elvis recordings, they often blended each voices. “Focus 100% of your energy on set to capturing the visual side of that performance, and then you can continue to build on it in the post production process, musically,” Weiss suggested.

The method proved so profitable that Weiss utilized related methods to his subsequent movie “How to Make Gravy,” a sub-$10 million impartial Australian manufacturing starring Daniel Henshall. For a jail choir sequence, the team pre-recorded advanced preparations that would have been unimaginable to seize live on set.

“Elvis” confronted distinctive challenges filming during the pandemic, notably recreating a performer whose “signature move is to get down from the stage in the audience and kiss just about every member of the audience you can find.” The manufacturing invented options including an “extras antibacterial mouthwash station.” Weiss credited closed borders with creating surprising advantages: “There was something about making a film in this kind of perfect isolation and perfect focus that I think produced an extraordinary result.”

The advertising and marketing challenges prolonged past manufacturing. As the then-head of Warner Brothers advertising and marketing told Weiss, “he was going to be damned if he was going to make Austin a star with this movie and then have the next guy reap the benefits when Austin became a star.” The strategy succeeded, putting Butler on the cowl of every major journal worldwide before release. “He was a household name by the time we rolled out the movie,” Weiss said. The movie earned a standing ovation at Cannes and grossed over $300 million globally.

Weiss previewed “EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert,” a documentary culled from roughly 60 packing containers of never-before-seen footage from Elvis live shows between 1970 and 1972. Luhrmann traveled to Wellington to work with Peter Jackson on restoration, syncing misplaced audio from work prints. The documentary options roughly 40 minutes of beforehand unheard Elvis dialogue. “Baz committed himself to having Elvis narrate the film. So it really is Elvis singing and telling his own stories,” Weiss said. The Imax-finished movie releases worldwide by way of Universal Pictures and Neon in late February.

On artificial intelligence, Weiss revealed the “Elvis” team used machine studying methods roughly a decade in the past, before the time period AI turned widespread. To insert Butler into traditional Elvis movies, they partnered with the University of Adelaide’s technology lab slightly than major VFX firms, who “weren’t really thinking along those lines.” “We weren’t calling it AI, and we had to look outside our own business to do it,” he famous.

Today, Weiss and Luhrmann use AI as a artistic tool for concept imagery and iteration, though never in completed movie merchandise. “Baz knows the difference between creative and generative, and AI is just a derivative tool that can collage a seemingly infinite, but actually finite bunch of stuff. That’s not creativity.”

Looking ahead to Luhrmann’s “Joan of Arc” biopic starring 18-year-old English actress Isla Johnson, Weiss positioned the project as a response to unsure occasions in Hollywood. “The only way to continue to do that is to come back to where we began: to believe in original storytelling and believe that, that will win the day,” he said.

The story of a 17-year-old lady in a “fractured and devastated world, her country on its knees, and the future for young people completely uncertain,” together with her destiny “held tightly in the knobbly fingered grip of a bunch of the entrenched powers,” feels well timed. “Her ability as a 17-year-old girl to break that world wide open and recapture the future for France at a time of change and peril, feels like a story that people might see something in today.”

The manufacturing goals to start pre-production next 12 months, with capturing by mid-2026. Weiss acknowledged price range negotiations with Warner Brothers are ongoing, joking that in the event that they don’t attain settlement, “we’re going to be making the 1928 ‘Trial of Joan of Arc.’” The 1928 silent movie by Carl Theodor Dreyer stays “one of the most poignant and poetic tellings of the story,” Weiss said, including “we carry the spirit of that in our hearts as we try and make our own” version.

On IP dominance in up to date cinema, Weiss drew historic parallels. “There was a time, if you can believe it, when the most sure fire commercial kind of movie that you could make was a Western,” he famous. “Taste is a funny thing that way. The IP boom in the Marvel comic book sense definitely seems to be waning.”

Weiss sees alternative in the current transitional second between industrial tendencies: “If we are truly finding ourselves in that slightly liminal state between big commercial trends, that’s a great opportunity in which I think original storytelling can really flourish.”

After “Elvis,” Weiss recommitted to working in Australia and collaborating throughout the Asia Pacific area. Bazmark is growing initiatives with an animation company in Tokyo and a report label in Seoul. “The more that we can connect the dots between what we do in the Gold Coast, Australia, all throughout this region, we feel like we are so excited to play even a small part in the enormous global cultural potential of the APAC region,” he said.

On distribution challenges for smaller movies like “How to Make Gravy” — based on a preferred Australian tune however tough to promote internationally despite that includes Hugo Weaving — Weiss acknowledged the panorama has modified. “We’ve broken down a lot of the old systems for disseminating and distributing independent cinema around the world,” he said. “We’re in a challenging spot right now.”

However, Weiss inspired rising filmmakers to embrace democratized instruments. “The barrier to entry for so many different things is sort of reduced almost to the floor,” he said, noting that Hollywood studios spend tens of millions attempting to optimize what people can accomplish by way of Instagram and TikTookay. “You have all the same tools that Warner Brothers has in terms of communicating their movie through digital marketing.”

On cultural authenticity versus internationalization, Weiss advocated for leaning into specificity. “The stories that lean into greater authenticity and are less concerned as to whether a broad international audience is going to pick up every single reference” succeed globally, he argued, citing Korean cinema and the Australian animated collection “Bluey.” “People readily consume content that wasn’t necessarily made with an international audience in mind, and people like it all the more for it,” Weiss concluded.