Priscilla covers nearly 15 years in the life of its eponymous heroine, but with only a little more than a month to shoot, there were days on set in which the character was a wide-eyed teenager and a pregnant newlywed merely hours apart. For star Cailee Spaeny, this meant orienting her portrayal from one era to the next and back again, over and over. In charting Priscilla Presley’s singular coming of age through her whirlwind, tabloid-captured romance with Elvis (played by Jacob Elordi), the actor found her way in by understanding that the iconic costumes, hair, and makeup signified a lot more than just her age. “She used fashion to tell her side of the story, her journey through her years with him,” Spaeny says. “Elvis had rules in terms of what he didn’t like Priscilla wearing and what he approved of. She decided when to follow the rules—and when to break them.”

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It’s why the character fits so naturally into the oeuvre of writer-director Sofia Coppola, the Oscar winner enjoying some of the best critical and box office responses of her career. The disturbing reality of Priscilla falling into a 24-year-old Elvis’s orbit at just 14 years old is acknowledged and presented plainly, but she and Spaeny invest wholly in her personal experience—the dizzying, sometimes dreamy, sometimes crushingly lonely journey through Graceland, culminating in her decision to seek an independent life. Spaeny came to understand that trajectory intimately, through everything from Coppola’s perspective to Presley’s memoir (from which the script is adapted) to the legendary photographs of the couple. Spaeny also spent some time with her subject, gaining insights into the quirks of her personality.

Naturally, then, Spaeny was most nervous about getting the pre-Elvis—that is, pre-fame—Priscilla right: a teenager about to have her world turned upside down. “It was so important for her to feel that age,” Spaeny says. The collaboration with Coppola’s longtime costume designer Stacey Battat proved crucial; they’d have lunch to discuss particular fittings and cutoffs on dresses, to talk through the ideas behind every look. There’s an innocent glow in Spaeny’s careful, affecting performance here. In the scene where we meet Priscilla, she wears a ’50s poodle skirt and penny loafers, the ensemble saturated in soft pinks. Her hair is in a cute ponytail. “I took creative license there [because] I wanted Cailee to look as young as possible,” lead hair stylist Cliona Furey (Nightmare Alley) says. “That moment is not [one] that’s been photographed, so I felt I could use my own judgment.”

Contrast that to one of the more iconic moments in Priscilla’s life, recreated for the film: When she applied full makeup—including those massive fake eyelashes, with her beehive hair at its tallest—just before giving birth. The look, finished with a pink minidress look, is perhaps her most famous, and Coppola invests considerable time into Priscilla’s process in perfecting it against the clock. You can hear the chaos in the background, of people waiting to take her to the hospital; in her head, though, all is silent. “It’s not even a question that she was going to do a full face of makeup right before going into labor,” says Spaeny. The scene’s time squeeze was matched by the production. The crew was losing light. The eye-liner needed to be exact. “The producers had to walk into the hair and makeup trailer and say, ‘Everyone put your brushes down, we have to stop where we're at and start filming,’” Spaeny says. “We only had one take to pull that off.”

The first time Spaeny wore a wig of Priscilla’s famous hairdo, it felt heavy. Really heavy. It also unlocked a key part of her interiority, “of imagining what it would’ve been like to get up however many hours before to present yourself like this every day—she was never not seen in makeup, even inside the house.” Still, the actual mechanics demanded some practice. “I had to practice getting into cars; I hit my head in the car so many times,” Spaeny says. “It required a princess-like movement.”

Cliona Furey pulled five wigs to use across the film’s decade-plus time span. Did she ever worry about going too big with the hair? “When I did the early ’60s graduation look with the big black updo, Sofia even said, ‘Do you think it’s too high?’” Furey remembers. “And I said, ‘It’s not as high as Priscilla’s was!’” They found a way to use the hair’s sizing and coloring to shape the narrative. That black wig, for instance, resulted out of Elvis telling Priscilla to dye her hair black, a central instance of his controlling her. “Or the last wig: It’s a similar color and texture to her first wig, where she’s really herself and she’s natural,” Furey continues. “The hair gets longer and richer in color, and poofier and bigger, as time goes on. Then at the end, she finds herself—and she’s back to a natural look.”

Battat, who’s used to working both with Coppola’s bold imagination and with a limited budget, was able to source a great deal for the costumes. Spaeny jokes that there were more pieces in the wardrobe department than there were script pages (which is to say, hundreds). “Those were the longest fittings I’ve ever done in my life,” Spaeny says. “I went out to the set a week early just to try to give everyone a head start.” It’s a remarkable level of detail for a set run on such a tight budget. On the days that forced more rushing than usual, the intricate eyeliner application needed a “tag-team” between Spaeny and the makeup artists. “We had a stamp for the eyeliner and then I would jump in and do the final touches myself, like the wings,” Spaeny says. “All these different details that you had to think through when you’re going through three different ages in one morning.”

When Spaney got to spend time with the real Priscilla, they didn’t always talk about life with Elvis. “Sometimes we’d talk about her daily routine of taking her dogs out to play fetch,” Spaeny says. The actor got to know a woman who “wears her heart on her sleeve.” She’d watch home videos of Priscilla and Elvis on tour, or on a beach vacation, goofy and playful. She saw the loving, warm dynamic between them, critical as the film simultaneously takes a clear-eyed view of Elvis’s abusive, tormented qualities. Priscilla was forced to learn how to navigate such dueling realities. Battat emphasized her use of denim in the 1970s chiefly because it represented a rebellion from how Elvis had tried to mold her. The look showed how she broke the rules.

Priscilla’s psychological experience, subtly conveyed by Coppola throughout, is emotionally driven in large part through music. (Notably—perhaps, to her benefit—the filmmaker was not given access to Elvis’s music, as the estate disapproved of the movie.) Key tracks used in the movie like “Crimson and Clover” and “I Will Always Love You” were written into the script, then played on set for the actors to experience their feelings against the content of the material.

That latter Dolly Parton song plays over Priscilla’s moving conclusion. She drives away from Graceland forever and toward a new life. Like most times on the set, the crunch to get the scene just right was on. “We only had two takes to shoot that because we were also losing light there,” Spaeny says. “But there’s a giant speaker in the backseat with some guy playing the song on repeat. To have that track playing the whole time really did a lot of the heavy lifting for me.”

Spaeny’s face communicates a quiet, measured triumph. In her performance, there’s always a ton being said without words, a thorough and empathetic interpretation of an utterly distinctive experience. But from beginning to end—again, a trajectory sometimes captured on set on the same day—a kind of personal dignity is maintained. You can trace that attribute back to one of the first questions the actor ever asked Priscilla: Does she look back on this time with Elvis, in all its messiness and loneliness and strangeness, fondly? “She said, ‘Yeah, these are some of my best memories.’”