Production
Halle Berry, Whitney Houston, Robin Givens, Pam Grier, Vanessa L. Williams and Janet Jackson were all considered for the role of Tina Turner. It was Whitney Houston who was actually offered/received the role, but had to decline due to imminent maternity. Jenifer Lewis, who plays Tina's mother in this film, originally auditioned to play Tina Turner. Lewis is only one year older than Bassett.
Laurence Fishburne was offered the role of Ike Turner five times and turned it down each time. When he found out that Angela Bassett was cast as Tina Turner, he changed his mind.
All the Ike and Tina Turner songs used in the film were newly re-recorded versions featuring Tina Turner covering her own songs. On "Proud Mary", Laurence Fishburne sings Ike Turner's parts. For Tina Turner's solo recordings the original masters were used, including the Phil Spector-produced "River Deep - Mountain High".
In his autobiography Taking Back My Name, Ike Turner claims the movie damaged his reputation immensely and attacks many of the scenes for being either not strictly accurate or completely fabricated.
Bassett was injured while filming the first spousal abuse sequence. She fell off the back of a high-rise sofa, put her hands out to reduce the impact and suffered a hairline fracture of her right hand. She only tried the stunt fall once, and footage leading up to the mishap appears in the film.
Actress Vanessa Bell Calloway, who plays the fictional character of Jackie, was wary of chanting the Buddhist words because of her strong Christian faith. Director Brian Gibson allowed her to form the words with her lips silently during filming and added the words with a voice double in post-production. She also appeared alongside Tina in the music video of "What's Love Got to Do with It".
Read more about this topic: What's Love Got To Do With It (film)
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“[T]he asphaltum contains an exactly requisite amount of sulphides for production of rubber tires. This brown material also contains “ichthyol,” a medicinal preparation used externally, in Webster’s clarifying phrase, “as an alterant and discutient.””
—State of Utah, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.”
—Erich Fromm (1900–1980)
“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
—Charles Darwin (1809–1882)