How Lisa Marie Presley Reacted to Priscilla
Months before her death, Lisa Marie Presley penned a letter to the film’s director Sofia Coppola slamming the script as “shockingly vengeful and contemptuous” for its depiction of Elvis and Priscilla‘s early courtship that began in Germany in 1959 when she was 14 and he was 14.
“My father only comes across as a predator and manipulative. As his daughter, I don’t read this and see any of my father in this character. I don’t read this and see my mother’s perspective of my father. I read this and see your shockingly vengeful and contemptuous perspective and I don’t understand why?” Presley wrote in one of her messages obtained by Variety, published on November 2, 2023, a few days before the film’s cinematic release.
The letter was sent to Coppola before filming started. “I will be forced to be in a position where I will have to openly say how I feel about the film and go against you, my mother and this film publicly.” She also said that she had spoken to one of her children about the film, who had asked after seeing an announcement about it. “I had to explain that we are going to have to endure another hit in our lives. That there is going to be a movie about her grandfather that is going to try to make him look really, really bad but it’s not true,” she wrote.
“I had to explain that her beloved grandmother is supporting it. These two little girls have been through so much in the past 7 years, enduring my divorce and horrific custody battle and then losing their brother. We’ve all been drowning.”
When asked to comment on the correspondence, Coppola told Variety, via her rep, what she said in her reply to Lisa Marie. “I hope that when you see the final film you will feel differently, and understand I’m taking great care in honoring your mother, while also presenting your father with sensitivity and complexity,” wrote Coppola.
A source with knowledge of the film’s production said the exchange took place on September 2, 2022, “The source said the film is exclusively based on Elvis and Me, and efforts were made to ‘tone down’ some elements of the book regarding the couple’s courtship that would have been shocking to contemporary audiences. Coppola’s goal was to tell a love story, the insider said, with the primary tension of the film being Priscilla’s struggles to adapt to life with a global superstar,” the industry publication reported.
