Sofia Coppola reveals why there are hardly any Elvis songs in her biopic “Priscilla”.

Priscilla Director Sofia Coppola says despite her critical acclaim and box office success, she continues to fight for “a small share” of the money her male colleagues have to work with.

Coppola, who won an Oscar for best screenplay for her 2002 film Lost in translationtold BBC News that budget constraints meant her upcoming biopic was shot digitally rather than film and was put together in just 30 days:

“I just see all these people getting hundreds of millions of dollars, and then I’m fighting for a small piece of it.

“I think it’s just a remnant of the culture of this company. It’s frustrating, but I always fight for it and I’m happy that I can make my films independently and find people who believe in them.”

However, she adds that this limitation gives her the opportunity to be creative:

“It’s a challenge and a freedom to make things small because when you have a big budget you get a lot of input from studio executives and I could never make a film like that.”

“So I have this freedom. And then you have to be very skilled and it was very difficult, but I had the best team… we could reuse sets and I don’t know how we made so many costumes! It was all hands on deck and there were only very creative heads of department.”

“I would have liked to shoot on film, but we shot digitally because we had to be so fast.”

Priscilla is based on the 1985 memoir by Priscilla Presley Me and Elviswith Presley credited as an executive producer on the film.

When it comes out on January 1, Elvis fans may notice that his songs are missing from the soundtrack. This touched on rights issues, another challenge Coppola faced, telling BBC News:

“At first I wanted three Elvis songs, but I always knew we might not get them. I wanted the focus to really be on her [Priscilla’s] story … and for me it’s very important to have Dolly Parton at the end, to have a female voice at the end.”

The film ends with Parton’s song: i will always love youthe song the country star refused to give to Elvis after his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, tried to wrest the publishing rights away from her.