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May 17, 2007
Author: Paul Heath
 To
co-incide with the region two release of the Oscar
winning DREAMGIRLS on DVD, we have a series of interviews
with the cast and crew of the movie, writer/director
Bill Condon, actress and Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson,
actor Danny Glover and actress actress Anika Noni
Rose.
Bill Condon won an Oscar for his Gods & Monsters
screenplay in 1999 and went on to adapt the musical
Chicago for the screen with Rob Marshall directing.
Condon’s other directorial credits include Gods
& Monsters and Kinsey.
A former contestant on American Idol, America’s
version of the Pop Idol talent show, Jennifer Hudson
makes her movie debut in Dreamgirls playing Effie,
the singer who becomes a victim to the cutthroat
world of showbusiness. She recently won an Academy
Award in the Best Supporting Actress category for
her efforts.
Best known for his performances alongside Mel Gibson
in four smash hit Lethal Weapon movies, Danny Glover
has had a varied screen career with his movies including
Places in The Heart, Silverado and To Sleep With
Anger. He plays Marty Robinson, old school agent
to James ‘Thunder’ Early (Eddie Murphy) who feels
threatened by the arrival on the scene of rival
Curtis Taylor Jr (Jamie Foxx).
An award winning stage actress and singer, Anika
Noni Rose’s film credits prior to Dreamgirls include
Temptation and Surviving Christmas. Future roles
are assured after her stand out performance as Lorrell,
one of the original Dreamers (the others being played
by Beyoncé Knowles and Jennifer Hudson).
Here, they all talk about the movie.
Q: Did you feel much trepidation adapting
Dreamgirls for the screen Bill, given its success
as a stage show?
Condon: “I was nervous, because where in Chicago
all the numbers take place on the stage, the most
famous numbers in this musical are book numbers,
they arise out of the drama. And that’s a convention
that a couple of generations have grown up without.
So the big challenge for me was, how do you get
Jennifer singing ‘And I’m Telling You’, how do you
get Lorrell singing ‘Lorrell loves Jimmy’? Those
things where you break reality and break out into
song.”
Q: You obviously had to make some changes,
were these largely structural or thematic?
Condon: “You know it was more thematic. I think
often the mistake that gets made in movies is ‘because
you can, you do’. To take as an example the movie
version of A Chorus Line, that’s a show that takes
place in two hours in real time in a theatre. In
a movie you can have a helicopter and can have someone
arriving across the 59th Street Bridge, but the
question is not ‘can I do it?’ so much as ‘should
I?’. This show was almost entirely done on a stage
or close to a stage and I tried as much as possible
to stay true to that in the movie.”
Q: But there must have been details you
wanted to add to it, to freshen it up and help it
speak to contemporary audiences, weren’t there?
Condon: “There were. I thought because it was 25
years after the stage show was first presented that
there was the opportunity to put this in a larger
historical context and really try to describe all
of the things that were happening in society that
mirrored what was happening with this group. So
the peaceful civil rights movement, the marches
of the early 1960s followed by the riots later in
the decade, followed by the destruction of the inner
cities. Detroit became a character in its own right.
That’s something you can only do in movies.”
Q: As for you Anika, you have a long experience
of performing on stage – was it very different to
be doing a movie musical?
Rose: “I actually didn’t approach it any differently
than I approach stage.
I think that as an actor you find your way to that
character and you create that character from the
inside out. The script was written so well and Bill
made such a comfortable environment that the oddest
thing for me was dealing with the fact that things
are not happening chronologically as they do on
stage. You get there at 5 o’clock in the morning
and you’re 17 years old, you have lunch when you’re
25, you have a snack at 19. So I made sure that
on my script above each scene I wrote the year and
the age that I was so that I wasn’t becoming schizophrenic
about it.”
Q: Danny, you don’t get to sing, was that a source
of regret?
Glover: “I’ve always been a closet introvert. There’s
a part of me that still thinks he’s Smokey Robinson
and that he has the moves of The Temptations, but
that’s alright.”
Q: Jennifer you’ve broken through to a new
level with this film, is this some sort of dream
come true for you?
Hudson: “Yes, it is. I never would have guessed
two years ago this time that I would be here in
this way. This is all very new to me. I’ve been
singing my whole life, so this is a great thing
for me to be a part of.”
Q: You’ve come so far so fast, was acting
even an ambition when you started out?
Hudson: “Acting never occurred to me until I got
the call to come out and audition for this role.
Back then I was just singing. I did participate
in school plays but I would always just do the solo
number. But once the acting came about I fell in
love with it and it’s something that I want to continue
to do.”
Q: You’ve said many times that your grandmother
is your inspiration Jennifer, can you tell us about
her?
Hudson: “She was my biggest musical influence, though
she chose not to turn professional as a singer.
She said she just wanted to sing in the church for
the Lord and I feel that’s why they say I have her
voice. So I attribute all of this to her, to her
memory. I hope she’s proud.”
Q: Eddie Murphy’s performance in the film
will surprise many, was it hard to persuade him
to take on a dramatic role like this?
Rose: “I can say that one thing about Eddie is that
he really is a beautiful person with a wonderful
spirit. I think that what people don’t know is that
he is very still and very subdued and shy. So you’re
not working with somebody who is constantly on.
You’re working with somebody who, when they say
‘action’ is giving the most amazing performance
and is so totally open that you have a wonderful
electricity working between you, and that is constant
with him. He’s not the type of person that you’re
like: ‘oh please, just shut up so we can do the
scene, please don’t make me laugh again’. He’s just
not like that.”
Q: Eddie was a fan of this show, wasn’t
he?
Condon: “Right from the beginning he’d seen Dreamgirls
four times, so this was something that he was interested
in doing and I think he felt it was something he
wanted to live up to. The first people he was interested
in as musicians were James Brown and Otis Redding,
so he felt like this was his music too. He was very
excited about doing this movie.”
Q: What research did you do for the role, Jennifer?
Hudson: “I looked at [Supremes singer] Florence
Ballard, but I feel that Effie’s story and I guess
the Dreamgirls story in itself is a bit of everybody’s
story in the industry. As far as the music, I would
say I looked at Aretha Franklin, at Whitney Houston
and [original Dreamgirls star] Jennifer Holliday.
I tried to pay tribute to all the great female vocalists
in almost every song that I did.”
Q: Diana Ross was reportedly unhappy when
this film was announced, how does she feel about
it now?
Condon: “I worked with Rob Marshall on Chicago,
and last year right before we started shooting Dreamgirls
I went to the premiere of his film Memoirs Of A
Geisha. I was sitting there and Diana Ross sits
down in front of me, I watched the entire movie
through her hair………I was so tempted to reach forward
and ask her myself. But you know, the fact is this
is not her story. I think she went on the David
Letterman show and said that she hadn’t seen Dreamgirls,
but she was going to see it with her lawyers. But
that was her joke. Dreamgirls was always a highly
fictionalised version of real events.”
Q: Jennifer, has your old friend Simon Cowell
offered you any guidance since this success has
come your way?
Hudson: “If you want to consider what Simon gives
as guidance, I don’t know….. I think I’ve been blessed.
I think to be able to sit back and watch my castmates
has been a source of guidance for me. I take them
as a lesson and just try to learn from them all.”
Q: The showstopper in the story is Jennifer
singing And I’m Telling You I’m Not Going – how
was that to do?
Hudson: “It was something that I felt I really needed
to focus in on. At the time I felt it was my biggest
responsibility, I just tried my best to live in
that moment and to tell that story that so desperately
needed to be told.”
Condon: “We pre-recorded all the songs. Jennifer
went in a few times and the last time was three
weeks before we actually did the scene. But Jennifer
sang every time. We must have done it 65 times or
so, but she sang every take full out so her voice
was gone after three of four hours. We’d planned
to do it over two days but when the voice was gone
she couldn’t pretend, it had to be coming from deep
inside. So we actually had to scramble and ask for
a lot more money so that we could continue through
the week, because it became clear that was the way
it was going to happen.”
Q: Did Beyoncé need much persuading to take
on her role in the film?
Condon: “Beyoncé came to us, we met, I loved her
but I still had a couple of question marks. One
was that this was a level of acting she’d never
attempted before. But more than that, she’s someone
who’s got such a well developed stage persona, could
she adapt to something that was so really different?
Just take the way she is sexually on a stage, she’s
so powerful and so contemporary. This was all about
something very different, it was about withholding
and it was about a certain kind of 60s sexuality.
So she volunteered to audition and we worked together
on the hardest scene in the movie.”
Q: She auditioned?
Condon: “She did a screen test. I called up [co-producer]
David Geffen on the way back to the airport and
said ‘she’s it’, it was very clear. We didn’t see
anybody else. She really wanted the part. She went
to Bergdorfs the night before and found this incredible
form fitting kind of Marilyn Monroe dress. That
was the thing that was clever, you’d think she’d
do Diana Ross. She had a little bit of that, but
she had a lot of Marilyn, she understood that [her
character] Deena at that point was going to try
to imitate the white sex goddess of the period.
It was really very inventive, her audition.”
Q: Jennifer, was it more nerve wracking
making this film or appearing on American Idol?
Hudson: “I think because Idol was first I would
have to say Idol because it helped prepare me for
this. I walked away with the feeling that if I could
get through American Idol I could get through anything.
The way they get you on that stage and judge you
and devour you, if I can stand that and still survive
then I know I can get through this. It can’t be
worse.”
Q: What research did you undertake for your
character Danny, is he based on anyone in particular?
Glover: “Not really. I think that Marty is an amalgamation
of many guys. Bill, in the narrative gave me some
clear outlines, some places to go. If you place
Marty in some sort of historical context in terms
he would have managed people like Little Richard
or Chuck Berry or the other people who preceded
them. Remember the wonderful scene that I had with
Ken Page, where we talked about Billie Holiday?
You got all those little clues as to what kind of
culture he comes out of, what he’s had to endure
and who he’s had to be to make sure that his main
person, his client, his Jimmy, didn’t have to endure
it in the same way.”
DREAMGIRLS is released on DVD, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray
in the region two territories from May 28.
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