The legacy of Elvis Presley is explored in Director Eugene Jarecki’s new documentary feature, The King.
Forty years after the death of the titular character, Jarecki’s film takes Presley's 1963 Rolls Royce on a musical road trip across America during the 2016 presidential election. Interviewing a diverse cast of citizens — both famous and not — along the way, Jarecki uses Elvis’s rise and fall of as a metaphor for the country he left behind and takes a penetrating look at how the hell we got here.
The King earned Jarecki a Golden Eye nomination at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival.
Following the DGA Eastern Region Special Projects Committee’s Documentary Series screening in New York on July 26, Jarecki discussed the making of the film in a conversation moderated by Director Marilyn Agrelo (An Invisible Sign).
In addition to The King, Jarecki's filmography includes the feature The Opponent; the documentary feature The Trials of Henry Kissinger; the television documentary Quest of the Carib Canoe; and episodes of the documentary series The Addiction Project and mercredis de l'histoire. He is a two-time winner of the Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize for Documentary for his 2005 film Why We Fight and his 2012 film The House I Live In and took home the Emmy Award for Outstanding Historical Programming - Long Form for his 2011 film Reagan.
Jarecki has been a DGA member since 2009.
You can listen to Jarecki's Q&A by clicking the podcast episode embedded below. You can find more DGA podcast episodes here.