Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla transports audiences back to the start of the relationship between Priscilla and Elvis in the late 1950’s and follows their relationship until the early 1970’s. We were lucky enough to chat with production designer Tamara Deverell about her incredible work on Priscilla, her first feature after her Oscar nominated work on Nightmare Alley.

Kenzie Vanunu: Congratulations on the film, what an incredible achievement! Beautiful work. When the project first came to you, did you read the script and begin envisioning your designs as you went or did you read the whole script and begin coming up with your specific vision? 
Tamara Deverell: Thank you! I always read the script thoroughly before I start anything, especially with something like Priscilla, which is so character driven. And I, of course, read the book or at least listened to the audiobook, which was narrated by Priscilla herself. And that was nice because I got to hear her voice.

Kenzie Vanunu: I love the audiobook just because her inflection makes it so much more detailed. And it’s really her perspective, all consuming. I know Graceland is just so iconic and we’re all so familiar with it, but you have such a fresh envisioning to the way you display it in the film, were you able to visit it before filming? Or had you visited it before?
Tamara Deverell: No, it was a very short prep and I have never visited it. And I think it would have just been it would have misdirected me in a way to have gone there because it’s so different now than the period that we were trying to portray, for which there was very little reference for research. You know, when Priscilla first arrives, I think we found maybe like three or four photos that actually showed the way it was then and certainly nothing of the upstairs, as I was mentioning when we were at the premiere. So, I really got to make that up. I did follow the basic geography of it. And the essence of it, but I had carte blanche in terms of the bedroom.

Kenzie Vanunu: As the film transitions from Germany to Graceland, the lighting changes from dark to light, but I also noticed the same with the production design. The tones in Germany are much darker and colder and it really brightens up once at Graceland and with Elvis. Was this something you and Sofia spoke about as you were researching and planning?
Tamara Deverell: Yeah, very much so that we really wished that we have Philippe Le Sourd, our DP, and Sofia, we talked about it a lot, even with costumes with Stacey Battat. When we talked about just making Germany gray monochromatic, it was the type of year, it was the feeling, so that when she comes to Memphis, everything opens up, her world opens up. That was kind of the intention. And, you know, it’s there in the dialogue too, Elvis refers to the grays and browns of Germany. Like even with her dress, ‘It reminds me of the army.’ So we really went with that color palette.

Kenzie Vanunu: Sofia’s films always feature so many shots of trinkets and objects, there are so many shots in the film of magazines with Jacob Elordi as Elvis, the AquaNet and other cosmetic items, and all the decor throughout Graceland. What was the process of researching the time period and all the objects to bring to life for the film?
Tamara Deverell: When we research them, like the Aqua Net, which actually hasn’t really changed much. You know, after all these years was was pretty easy. We had to create all the Elvis graphics, the magazines, the posters, the show cards all with Jacob with his face as Elvis, so that was a lot of work for the art department; the enormous amount of graphics. And we had Jacob for in preproduction. So he hadn’t even got a chance to really get into his Elvis. He was so good though. He really got into like, you know, we had the album and we basically replicated each album, and all these magazines from real research, for a real reference point.

For the trinkets and stuff, you know, it’s funny, because we tried to imagine what Priscilla would have in Germany. What would be period appropriate and what created the right mood. So, you know, I ended up bringing a bunch of stuff from home, as did Patricia Cuccia, our set decorator. I had little porcelain shoe collection that my mother-in-law had from Hungary. I used that in the film. And, you know, Sofia did these big close ups on it. There was a lot of tone of kitsch in the film, in Graceland that we had those ceramic dogs and things those were those were from the real research from Graceland that we got our hands on. Like the Jesus statue in the bedroom was from some later research of Elvis his bedroom that we kind of went with.

Kenzie Vanunu: Graceland in the film appears different in so many scenes; at one point it is like a museum then Elvis’s home and it becomes both a home and a prison for Priscilla. Much of this came from how the sets were designed to feel at different moments within the film. When you set out to design these sets, was there a discussion how they need to have a different feeling as the story progressed?
Tamara Deverell: A lot of the mood was the lighting, but we did have to go fast. So we did do a lot of paint tests to get just the right color for the Graceland main floor, which I had the real color of Graceland and it was really something white, you know, you don’t do we don’t do white in film. We did two very different color palettes that we camera tested, one was in the gray range and one was in the cream range. We ended up going with a cream range and Sofia wanted it to be like a wedding cake, like just like delicious, warm, and pastels. We were looking at a lot of Eggleston photographs of some rich colors, but I didn’t want the the environment to take over from the costumes. We really wanted to showcase some of the fashions that Priscilla shows up in, so you know, it was all white on white with the hints of blue in the curtains and with hints of gold. And that was kind of it for the main floor Graceland like we really toned it to to feel like a wedding. That’s the way I see it.

We had to custom make the white sofa based on something Elvis really had in the actual Graceland. We did enlarge things in height and things because Jacob is so tall. We actually wanted to play up that height difference and that the Priscilla’s so petite in that new environment, especially when she first arrived. So, you know we custom built that, I think it was an eleven foot long couch to what they had in Graceland, which I think is still in Graceland, but was the the one of the period. I actually lifted the ceilings from what Graceland is like. Graceland is not a huge mansion, people think of it as this big mansion, but it’s not really, it’s a large house and it’s not vast because because we did actually enlarge it a bit from the actual Graceland plans like I elongated it, which I think in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis they may have done that as well, because it just films better. I’m not sure what exactly what they did, I looked at their stuff, obviously, as that film was coming out, and I was like, ‘oh, an Elvis movie?’ Just my luck.’ But yeah,

Kenzie Vanunu: The two films do feel so different. Like this feels so much more intimate the way that Graceland is reconstructed. It really does feel like a home. But also, you can feel that Priscilla is uncomfortable at first when she arrives, that she’s not really welcome.
Tamara Deverell: It took me a while to remember and I watched it twice over the weekend. On the second watching, I really noticed we did do these very subtle changes at a certain point when they would have redressed. We mostly kept it the same until towards the end, when I think he’s sitting in a chair and they’re doing the family photo. And then we had changed some of some of the big pieces, the dressing, and the piano. Because Elvis had a series of different pianos in the back music room went from a golden white to black. The dining room changed. We went with a later version, we changed some of the furniture in the living room. So you know, to help tell the story, but I didn’t want it to be about the set. So it was very subtle changes. And we changed some of the photos, we added like their wedding photo. And we took away certain things and added photos of Lisa Marie when she was a baby that we had taken, so we tried to evolve it but yeah, again, I didn’t want it to be about the set. It’s about Priscilla and I think keeping that in mind too that is Priscilla’s story, more than Elvis’s story. I went full on Elvis with my vision for his bedroom and his bathroom. But the rest of it, I really wanted to temper it and color it to Priscilla’s persona.

You can read our review of Priscilla here.
The film is exclusively in theaters now.