From the patisserie pastels of Marie Antoinette to the carefully decorated Lisbon girls’ bedrooms in The Virgin Suicides, Sofia Coppola has spent her two decades as a filmmaker proving herself as a master of detail—and of capturing a spirit of femininity that is both frilly and a little frightening. (The choke hold her films had over the Tumblr era cannot be overstated.) When it comes to Coppola’s favored visual themes, however, she may have hit her zenith with Priscilla: An adaptation of Priscilla Presley’s best-selling 1985 memoir, Elvis and Me, it chronicles her relationship with the King, beginning when she was just 14.
Shot on an impressively tiny budget in 30 days in Canada and starring Cailee Spaeny and Jacob Elordi as the Presleys, Priscilla presents a bygone world meticulously brought back to life—from re-creations of the interiors of Elvis Presley’s Memphis mansion, Graceland, to a Vegas casino lit with gold lamé palm trees to interpretations of 1960s newspaper clippings, plane tickets, magazines, and wallpaper. This immaculate production design was headed up by Tamara Deverell, best known for her work with director Guillermo del Toro. (It seemed clear that viewers were in for something special when, in an interview prior to the release of the film, Coppola said that she and Deverell had talked about their version of Graceland “looking like a wedding cake.”)
Deverell had never been to Graceland, so in order to build her re-creation on a Toronto soundstage, she embarked on a “fast and intensive” research process, looking specifically to capture how the house looked when Priscilla arrived in 1963—and how it transformed over the course of her time living there, until she moved out a decade later. “We clung to a couple of these images that we had of Priscilla arriving in Graceland,” Deverell tells Vogue. “I really didn’t want to focus on Elvis.”
Instead, Deverell created a version of Graceland that honors historical accuracy (such as in her reproduction of its gate covered in musical notes) as well as the more abstract mood of the film, imagining how the house would look from a young Priscilla’s perspective. “Graceland was the family home, and we really wanted it to reflect what Priscilla was feeling inside,” she says. “And this [translated to] creams and whites and blues and golds, very pretty and very luxurious.” The house changes subtly over time, reflecting how real people redecorate, but the feel of the main rooms stays the same throughout the film: buttery curtains, pearly walls, deep rugs Priscilla sinks into to do her homework and play with her puppy. She is discouraged from going outside and, as a cruel Presley cousin barks at her, making “a spectacle of herself.”
The light in the house, as rendered by cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd, is hazy, a perpetual magic hour with dust particles drifting in the air. It marks the space out as somewhere both enchanting and suffocating—much like the film’s central relationship. “Just the quality of lighting and the composition helped to make it dreamlike, like a memory,” Deverell says.
“[Graceland] is already a memory because it is in our collective memory,” she continues. “Everybody knows who Elvis is. Now a lot of people might know who Priscilla was. And that’s one of the things I wanted to focus on. It’s not Elvis’s movie, it’s Priscilla’s movie, it’s Priscilla’s memory. Through Sofia, I had a couple of questions for her, like, what did she remember of Elvis’s bedroom? And she really didn’t remember it in any specific way. So I always felt like, Okay, well, let me honor her memory of what it may have been.”
Few contemporary images of Graceland’s second floor exist, so when it came to Elvis’s bedroom, Deverell had room to experiment with what she called “the man-cave factor.” The surfaces are harder; the colors darker—the King, already in the throes of a pill addiction by the time Priscilla came along, slept through most of the day. “We knew he kept it dark in there and that he actually had automatic blinds,” she says. “So we did that, and we decided to make it dark and focus on blues and blacks and golds in there. That was sort of like the color of royalty.” The room has Easter eggs featuring reproductions of Elvis’s zany animal statues, like a tiger Priscilla pets while tripping on LSD.
“It was kind of weird replicating the space, or doing my version of the space where Elvis eventually died,” says Deverell. “You can’t help but think of it.”
Even after Coppola’s Elvis and Priscilla get married (Chanel provided a reproduction of Priscilla’s famous wedding dress), the bedroom, which is closed off to visitors at the actual Graceland, remains entirely Elvis—including during the long stretches of the film where Elvis and Priscilla never get out of bed, role-playing and reading philosophy and having playful pillow fights that quickly turn sinister. “It never was Priscilla’s space,” said Deverell. “I think none of Graceland, really, she owned. In my mind, that was part of the issue. She never really landed. I imagine that in all the decor choices, just like in the way he told her how to choose her wardrobe.”
Elordi’s Elvis has an outsize, magnetic presence (after you see the film, it is impossible to stop doing the voice), while Spaeny’s Priscilla is quieter. The actors’ actual physicality further expresses these differences—Elordi stands at six feet five, Spaeny at five feet one. “[His height] actually really affected us,” says Deverell. “I made Graceland taller than it is. I lifted the ceilings because we didn’t want him to be squat in this space. We wanted to fit him.” Deverell’s team rebuilt a reproduction of Elvis’s actual couch, making it taller so that Elordi’s “knees wouldn’t be at his chest.”
“Especially when Priscilla’s first in Graceland, it was okay that her feet didn’t touch the floor when she sat on that couch,” she says. “We kind of wanted her to be this kid, which she was when she met Elvis, and emphasize that. So rather than struggling with the differences in height between them, we kind of embraced it and used it as part of the story.” As a result, Spaeny looks even tinier when walking through Graceland’s enormous empty rooms, left alone while Elvis goes on tour.
Priscilla revels in its ambiguities, showing a young woman’s growth through and despite an imperfect yet loving relationship—and the design mirrors her complicated evolution. At the tail end of the film, you see Deverell’s interpretation of Priscilla’s own home in Los Angeles. It feels sunny and like her—with barely a trace of Elvis’s influence. “We always wanted to punch out Priscilla in her environment,” said Deverell. “I didn’t want her to fade away into it but to punch out.”
