Movies The advice Leonardo DiCaprio gave Austin Butler on working with Baz Luhrmann What does one Baz Luhrmann leading man say to another? By Maureen Lee Lenker Maureen Lee Lenker Maureen Lee Lenker is a senior writer at Entertainment Weekly with over seven years of experience in the entertainment industry. An award-winning journalist, she's written for Turner Classic Movies, Ms. Magazine, The Hollywood Reporter, and more. She's worked at EW for six years covering film, TV, theater, music, and books. The author of EW's quarterly romance review column, "Hot Stuff," Maureen holds Master's degrees from both the University of Southern California and the University of Oxford. Her debut novel, It Happened One Fight, is now available. Follow her for all things related to classic Hollywood, musicals, the romance genre, and Bruce Springsteen. EW's editorial guidelines Published on June 24, 2022 02:00PM EDT Here's some handy advice — from Titanic's "King of the World" to the King. When preparing to play Elvis Presley in Elvis (out today), Austin Butler was lucky to get some insight from another of director Baz Luhrmann's leading men, Leonardo DiCaprio. DiCaprio rose to prominence playing Romeo in Luhrmann's 1996 Romeo + Juliet, and he collaborated with the Australian director again on the title role of 2013's The Great Gatsby. So when Butler was working with DiCaprio on Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, he knew there was no one better to ask about what to expect before embarking on Luhrmann's first feature since Gatsby. Mike Marsland/WireImage; Theo Wargo/WireImage "Leo told me, 'Baz is going to constantly keep you off balance, and it's going to pull things out of you [that] you never knew you had inside you,'" Butler tells EW. "That's exactly the experience that I had." "There were days where I just thought, 'Baz, why don't we just do what we prepared?'" Butler recalls. "I realized that he would push me right to the edge of what I was capable of. You capture lightning in a bottle in a way — if you had just done the thing that you had prepared, it may have been more stale." Butler likens Luhrmann's directorial approach to that of a jazz musician. "In order to play jazz, you have to know music theory," he tells EW. "You have to know the scales on that guitar inside and out, but at the end of the day, you're improvising. You have all this knowledge and practice that is then going into this present moment and playing off whatever's in front of you. That's how Baz is because he works so hard at preparation. When it comes time to actually film, I'll have been preparing a scene for a year, and suddenly, the day of, the entire scene changes." Luhrmann's already proved he knows how to turn a blonde heartthrob into a movie star with DiCaprio, so maybe he'll get twice lucky with Butler. Related content: The man who would be King: Inside Austin Butler's Elvis transformation Why artists like Doja Cat and Kanye West were essential to the Elvis soundtrack How actor Austin Butler mastered the distinct sound of Elvis Presley's voice Baz Luhrmann says he has a 4-hour cut of Elvis that includes Nixon meeting