Dreamgirls The Star Interviews

26-04-2007 21:05

Bill Condon (screenwriter, director)

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.

Jennifer Hudson (Effie)

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.

Danny Glover (Marty Robinson)

Best known for his performances alongside Mel Gibson in four smash hit Lethal Weapon movies, 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).

Anika Noni Rose (Lorrell Robinson)

An award winning stage actress and singer, 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).

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."

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."

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."