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Jennifer Hudson has had plenty of time to think about how to portray Aretha Franklin on screen. In 2007, shortly after Hudson won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress – for playing a girl group singer in “Dreamgirls” – Franklin told Hudson she should play her in a biopic, starting a ten-year friendship filled with weekly conversations.
Like Franklin, Hudson grew up singing in church and she put the virtuosity of gospel into pop songs. And like Franklin, whose mother died at age 34 of a heart attack, Hudson experienced sudden and devastating loss: his mother, brother, and nephew were murdered in Chicago in 2008. During his career, Hudson has paid homage to Franklin several times, using a Franklin song for his “American Idol” audition in 2004 to sing “Amazing Grace” at Franklin’s funeral in 2018. Now, Hudson plays Franklin in the biopic “Respect” which comes out in rooms this week.
“Every artist, every musician, you have to cross paths with Aretha, especially if you want to be awesome,” Hudson said in a video interview in Chicago, where she lives; her gray cat, Macavity, lurked in the background. “She has always been present in my life in one form or another, even when I didn’t know it.”
As Hudson explained the choices that governed her performance, she said that through the film, she understood how much of a “blueprint” Franklin was. “Our church music was based solely on her. The ‘Amazing Grace’ that I grew up singing in church comes from her album ‘Amazing Grace’. I didn’t realize it until we researched the film.
Hudson, 39, is both the star and executive producer of “Respect”. The film chronicles Franklin’s life from childhood – as a vocal prodigy singing in church alongside his father, the eminent Reverend Clarence L. Franklin – through her pregnancy at age 12, her frustrating years of singing songs. jazz standards at Columbia Records, her triumphant emergence as Queen of Soul at Atlantic Records, and the pressures and drinking that threatened all she had accomplished. Its story ends in 1972 with Franklin reclaiming his religious heritage to record his live gospel album, “Amazing Grace”.
“Respect” is the first film directed by Liesl Tommy, who was born in apartheid South Africa and worked extensively in the theater, making reconceptualized classics and new politically charged plays like “Eclipsed”, about women during civil war in Liberia. (She was nominated for Best Director Tony for that production.) To write the screenplay for “Respect,” Tommy brought in playwright Tracey Scott Wilson, whose grandfather was a preacher.
“When I pitched my idea for the film,” Tommy said over the phone from Los Angeles, “it was to start in church and end in church. The theme of the film was the woman with the greatest voice on earth, struggling to find her voice I wanted to know how a person sings with such emotional intensity.
“A lot of people have brilliant voices,” she continued, “but she’s the only one who delivers songs like she does. I don’t think you become the queen of soul if you have an easy drive. There was a lived experience that allowed him to sing like that.
Franklin was celebrated again after her death in 2018. The long-running concert film made when she recorded the album “Amazing Grace” was finally released that year. And National Geographic devoted a full season of its “Genius” television series to Franklin, with Cynthia Erivo in the title role. “Aretha Franklin lived a life where there is room for many versions of many stories about her,” Tommy said. “She deserves this.”
“Respect” juxtaposes the personal and political streams of Franklin’s career: forging a feminist anthem with “Respect” while grappling with an abusive husband, appearing regularly with Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. while supporting controversial figures like Black Power activist Angela Davis. One of the crudest scenes involves Franklin singing at King’s funeral. “Imagine being Aretha Franklin around this time and Dr. King, to whom she was so close, being murdered,” Hudson said. “Imagine the suffering and pain she was going through. But in her position, she still had to be that person to be the light in such a dark time. It’s hard.”
Yet Hudson and Tommy were determined to put Franklin’s music at the center of the film. “Everyone’s like, ‘We’ve never seen a biopic with so much music, where you can hear the songs,” Hudson said. “It’s not a musical. It’s a biopic about them. artists, musicians … But I can’t think of a biopic or a musical that’s been made that way.
As executive producer, Hudson said, “I wanted to make sure the right songs were in the movie. I wanted ‘Ain’t No Way.’ If I’m just an actor I don’t really have a say, but with that it’s like, ‘I’m sorry, but we can’t do this unless,’ Ain’t No Way “be part of it.”
In a lengthy studio recording sequence, Aretha’s sisters Carolyn and Erma Franklin sing all the backing vocals – not Cissy Houston, whose mute soprano counterpoint transfigures the song. “It’s part of the artistic license,” Tommy said. “You can only have a certain number of characters. You have to stay focused.”
To create immediacy, Hudson delivered Franklin’s stage performances by singing live in front of the camera – no lip syncing, no voice dubbing afterwards. “I wanted to experience it as it has in her life,” said Hudson. “No matter what we replicate and recreate what she’s done in her life, if it was live, it’s like, ‘Well, let’s do it live.’ ‘Amazing Grace’ was live. ‘Ain’t No Way’ was live. ‘Natural Woman’, we’re going to sing it live, so it could be authentic to what was really in her life.
Franklin was an accomplished gospel pianist as well as a singer, skills forged in her childhood in church. Her first commercially unsuccessful albums for Columbia backed her up with famous jazz musicians and elaborate orchestral arrangements. It was elegant but in the 60s it was already old fashioned.
Her return to the piano was one of the catalysts for her indelible Atlantic successes, defining the groove with religious foundations and creating a call and visceral response between her fingers and her voice. Hudson, after a singing career only, began to learn the piano. “It was an actor’s choice to say ‘I can’t play Aretha Franklin without learning some elements of the piano,'” said Hudson. “And now when I learn music, I don’t just look at the top line, the melody line, the song line anymore. I consider him to be an arranger. Which key is it in? What is the evolution? “
Hudson also thought about how to reinterpret Franklin’s songs. Their voices are different: Hudson’s is louder and clearer, Franklin’s is bluesier and grittier, and Hudson wanted to emulate Franklin without copying it. “I was using her approach, just allowing all of the influence she had on me to come through, while still using her inflections and different nuances,” Hudson said. “It was more a question of feeling than of correspondence with the notes. “
Despite their years of conversation, Hudson still had to search for Franklin. “Aretha was not a person who verbalized too much unless it was through music,” she said. “I know from my experiences being around her, I was like, I can’t really tell where I am. She didn’t give you much. So Hudson set out to understand the time she was growing up and other circumstances to get a feel for what it was like to be a woman back then. “It was only for me that literally in the middle of the scenes that I realized, the things she had said to me, she was speaking from experience. His greatest expression was through his music – and it was real. “
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