Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla is the latest movie to be awarded a SAG-AFTRA Interim Agreement just in time for its premiere. The upcoming biopic explores the Presleys’ marriage and Elvis Presley‘s career from the perspective of his young wife, played by Cailee Spaeny. While Coppola is a SAG-AFTRA member and the guild is now on its 40th strike day, Priscilla has been given an Interim Agreement based on its filming locations. The agreement comes just before the film is set to make its debut at the 80th Venice Film Festival.
‘Priscilla’ Gets Interim Agreement In Time for Venice Film Festival
Based on Elvis and Me, Priscilla Presley’s 1986 autobiography, Priscilla tells “the intimate story of Elvis Presley and Priscilla Presley, told by the woman who lived it.” In September 2022, Cailee Spaeny (Pacific Rim: Uprising) was cast as Priscilla Presley alongside Jacob Elordi’s Elvis. Raine Monroe Boland and Emily Mitchell will star as an infant and child version of Lisa Marie Presley, respectively, with Jorja Cadence as Elvis’s cousin Patsy.
According to Sofia Coppola, the idea of a Priscilla biopic has existed for some time. In an interview with Vogue, Coppola revealed that she’s owned Priscilla’s biography for years and has been intrigued by how Priscilla spent her teenage years in Graceland since she was only 14 when she met a 24-year-old Elvis Presley. Filming for Priscilla began in October 2022, and importantly for the SAG-AFTRA Interim Agreement, took place in Canada under TCB Productions Canada.
In a convenient loophole, Priscilla’s filming location being Canadian is what gives it the go-ahead to continue production despite the SAG-AFTRA strike. Earlier this month, SAG-AFTRA updated its Interim Agreement conditions to exclude any projects covered by the Writer’s Guild of America in the U.S. Since Priscilla was filmed in Canada, it gets an Interim Agreement despite Sofia Coppola being a SAG-AFTRA member. Another film using this loophole is Apple TV+’s Tehran, made by an Israeli company and filmed in France.
Under Priscilla’s SAG-AFTRA Interim Agreement, the film’s cast, including Spaeny and Elordi, has been given the green light to appear at the upcoming Venice Film Festival along with the film’s debut. Whether or not they’re actually going to appear is still in the air, apparently, but we’ll see when the Venice Film Festival begins on August 30th.
