Bless my soul, what’s wrong with a two-hour movie these days?

Director Baz Luhrmann, whose upcoming Elvis biopic is weighing in at a hefty 2 hours and 39 minutes, revealed to the Radio Times that his initial cut came in at four hours in length, and he was loath to chop it down to the (slightly) more manageable run time.

Luhrmann, who also directed epics like Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge and The Great Gatsby, told the publication that a four-hour version of the film exists, which includes several scenes that had to be cut from the version that will be released in cinemas.

“I mean, I have a four-hour version, actually,” he told the Times. “I do. But you have to bring it down to 2 hours 30.”

So what didn’t make the cut? Luhrmann dropped scenes with The King’s first girlfriend and the unlikely but all too true time that Elvis met President Richard Nixon.

“I would have liked to lean into some of the other things more – there’s so much more,” Luhrmann said. “I mean, there’s lots of stuff that I shot like the relationship with the band, I had to pare [that] down – and it’s so interesting how the Colonel [Tom Parker, played by Tom Hanks] gets rid of them.

“The relationship with his first girlfriend, Dixie, you know… someone who’s got such a hole in his heart like Elvis constantly looking and searching for love and finding it on stage but nowhere else.”

Meeting Nixon was a stranger than fiction moment in American history, and Luhrmann wanted to capture that too. “You know, the addiction to barbiturates and all of that, like what happens is he starts doing wackadoo things – like going down to see Nixon. I had it in there for a while but there just comes a point where you can’t have everything in, so I just tried to track the spirit of the character.”

The film stars Austin Butler as Presley, and covers his rise from obscurity to superstardom to near-infamy under the guidance of his long-time manager Colonel Tom Parker, played by Tom Hanks. The film opens nationwide on June 24th.