Sofia Coppola admits to working with limited budgets since, as a female filmmaker, she does not always receive the big money that her male counterparts do.

The director of Priscilla Presley claimed to BBC News that the film’s $20 million budget forced her to be creative in order to make a Priscilla Presley biopic based on the biography Elvis and Me.

“I just see all these men getting hundreds of millions of dollars, and then I’m fighting for a tiny fraction of that,” she told me. “I think it’s just left over from the way the culture of that business is. It’s frustrating, but I’m always fighting to get it, and I’m just happy to get to make my movies independently and find people that believe in them.”

Despite how frustrating the scenario can be, the director recognized that there is an advantage to it: higher-ups aren’t as involved in her work, so she doesn’t have to deal with as much criticism.

“There’s a challenge and a freedom in making things small because if you have a big budget, you have a lot of input from studio executives, and I would never be able to make a movie like that,” she said. “So, I have that freedom, and then you have to be really crafty, and it was really hard, but I had the best team.”

Coppola praises her creative department heads with taking what they had and running with it, allowing her and her crew to make several outfits and reuse many sets.

Another issue they ran into was their inability to incorporate Elvis Presley’s music into the project. The director of Marie Antoinette had her heart set on three of Elvis Presley’s classics, but she was well aware that her prospects of securing the rights were limited. Instead, she chose to listen to a song by another well-known singer.

“To me, it is really important to have Dolly Parton at the end, to have a woman’s voice at the end,” Coppola said of the film’s ending sequence, which is set to Parton’s “I Will Always Love You.”

Priscilla, starring Jacob Elordi and Cailee Spaeny, is presently available on Amazon Prime Video.