Tommy speaks to RadioTimes.com about adapting the Queen of Soul’s life story. <\/p>
Aretha Franklin is the latest music icon to be given the biopic treatment, with Jennifer Hudson starring as the Queen of Soul in new movie Respect<\/a>.<\/p>\n The film charts Aretha\u2019s rise from her early days as a little girl singing in the Baptist Church to becoming one of the finest performers the world has ever seen, and includes lots of details about her family life and civil rights activism in addition to her phenomenal musical success.<\/p>\n By and large, the film is pretty accurate in its depiction of her and those around her \u2013 though of course a few artistic liberties are taken.<\/p>\n Naturally, it would have been impossible to explore every single aspect of Aretha\u2019s life in detail during the film, and so the biggest problem for director Leisl Tommy \u2013 who shaped the narrative alongside screenwriter Tracy Scott Wilson \u2013 was condensing this extraordinary life story down to a two-and-a-half-hour runtime.<\/p>\n \u201cYou know, it wasn\u2019t easy to narrow down the songs. And it wasn\u2019t easy to narrow down the events,\u201d she told RadioTimes.com<\/a>. \u201cBut because I knew that we were going to finish with Amazing Grace, when I pitched it I said it should begin in the church and end in the church.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd I knew that I wanted the Amazing Grace album, one of her most successful albums to be kind of like the penultimate, triumphant moment in the film. And so the tagline I gave the studio was that I thought the movie should be about a woman with the greatest voice in the world struggling to find her own voice.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd once you have that as your spine, then all the sequences and events in the film really must feed that idea. And that\u2019s how you\u2019re able to be rigorous about what goes in the film and what doesn\u2019t get to be in the film.\u201d<\/p>\n\n Tommy explained that it was especially vital to her to ensure that Aretha\u2019s civil rights activism was at the forefront of the picture, and said that her own experiences growing up in apartheid South Africa informed her choices when making the film.<\/p>\n \u201cI grew up in South Africa, I grew up during apartheid, I grew up in an activist family,\u201d she said. \u201cSo, you know, conversations around civil rights, around freedom, around advocacy for our community was formative for me, and it was the same for her.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd I really connected to that part of her story, I really related to it, so it felt really important to track it from the beginning. Because when she was a teenage girl she was on tour with Martin Luther King, singing gospel music, getting people ready to go out on the streets and demonstrate and protest with him. So she was using her voice as an inciting force when she was a girl. And so that seemed really important to highlight.\u201d<\/p>\n Most of Aretha\u2019s biggest hits are included during the film\u2019s runtime \u2013 including Respect, Think, and I Say A Little Prayer For You \u2013 but another difficult part of writing the film was working which tracks made the cut and which didn\u2019t, and Tommy explained that one or two of the songs that were initially recorded for the film didn\u2019t quite make the final movie.<\/p>\n \u201cI got the main ones for sure,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd I got some of my favourites like Ain\u2019t No Way. But we did shoot a pretty extraordinary scene where she sings Dr. Feelgood in the studio. And in the end, it just didn\u2019t make the cut for all the millions of reasons you make [decisions] while you edit things.\u201d<\/p> What was absolutely crucial for Tommy during these musical scenes was ensuring that the raw energy of Aretha\u2019s performances was recreated on camera \u2013 and one of the ways that she went about ensuring this was insisting that all the performances were sung live, rather than over-dubbed with studio recordings.<\/p>\n \u201cMy understanding of music from working on musicals definitely influenced my choices in this film,\u201d she explained. \u201cSo for example, I said that everybody was going to have to sing live in this film. So that influenced casting \u2013 that\u2019s why I cast Audra McDonald and Heather Headley and Titus Burgess because they all have terrific voices.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd the actresses who played her sisters are all Tony nominees, Tony-winning actresses, who really can sing. And so understanding the power of the live singing event, knowing that lip-synching was never going to cut it in this film, and that the movie\u2019s sound was going to be made on set live and not in a studio was a big part of it.\u201d<\/p>\n Speaking of casting, one of the easier decisions was deciding who would play the lead role. Franklin herself had singled out Jennifer Hudson as the person she wanted to play her before she passed away, and Tommy said that being able to lean on Hudson took some of the pressure off when it came to making the film.<\/p>\n \u201cAretha Franklin wanted two things,\u201d she said. \u201cShe wanted something that had size and scope, and then she wanted Jennifer Hudson to play her in that movie.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd, you know, once I met Jennifer, I 100 per cent saw what Aretha Franklin saw in her, I knew exactly what it was. In addition to the voice, there is just so much humanity that Jennifer brings, and I think Aretha Franklin saw that and knew that that\u2019s what was going to be required to play her because her life was so complicated and complex.\u201d<\/p>\n Tommy speaks to RadioTimes.com about adapting the Queen of Soul’s life story. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":4054,"template":"","categories":[1],"acf":[],"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/56\/2021\/09\/respect-director-leisl-tommy-on-adapting-aretha-franklin-true-story-for-the-big-screen.jpg",620,413,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/56\/2021\/09\/respect-director-leisl-tommy-on-adapting-aretha-franklin-true-story-for-the-big-screen-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/56\/2021\/09\/respect-director-leisl-tommy-on-adapting-aretha-franklin-true-story-for-the-big-screen-300x200.jpg",300,200,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/56\/2021\/09\/respect-director-leisl-tommy-on-adapting-aretha-franklin-true-story-for-the-big-screen.jpg",620,413,false],"large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/56\/2021\/09\/respect-director-leisl-tommy-on-adapting-aretha-franklin-true-story-for-the-big-screen.jpg",620,413,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/56\/2021\/09\/respect-director-leisl-tommy-on-adapting-aretha-franklin-true-story-for-the-big-screen.jpg",620,413,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/56\/2021\/09\/respect-director-leisl-tommy-on-adapting-aretha-franklin-true-story-for-the-big-screen.jpg",620,413,false]},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"importmanagerhub@sprylab.com","author_link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/radiotimes\/author\/importmanagerhubsprylab-com\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"Tommy speaks to RadioTimes.com about adapting the Queen of Soul's life story.","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/radiotimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed\/4053"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/radiotimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/radiotimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/rss_feed"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/radiotimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/radiotimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4054"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/radiotimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/radiotimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"