Simon Cowell said she was out of her league on American Idol. Now Jennifer Hudson is poised for an Oscar, Dreamgirls director Bill Condon tells Michael Dwyer.
Dreamgirls, which is set against the landmark period in the 1960s when the Motown sound emerged from Detroit and black singers crossed into the pop-music mainstream, is a terrific screen musical directed with passion, empathy and flair by Bill Condon. As the film charts the ups and downs in the careers of a singing trio loosely modelled on The Supremes, it reflects ruefully on the fickle finger of fame.
Jennifer Hudson makes an astonishing film debut as Effie, the lead singer of the fictional Dreamettes. They start out as backing singers for the established performer James "Thunder" Early (Eddie Murphy on prime form) before being promoted to take the stage in their own right. Then, as the trio are on the rise, their manipulative manager, Curtis Taylor jnr - inspired by Motown's founder, Berry Gordy jnr, and played by Jamie Foxx - decides to move the more svelte and attractive Deena (Beyoncé Knowles) into the spotlight, crushing Effie's ambitions.
And so art imitates life. Florence Ballard had the strongest singing voice in The Supremes, but Gordy made Diana Ross the lead singer. Ballard sank into depression and alcoholism, and Gordy sacked her from the group in 1967, after she had sung on a succession of hit singles. She died in poverty nine years later, at the age of 32.
Like Ross, Knowles had been singing in an all-woman trio, Destiny's Child, before she went solo. "That was just a coincidence," says Condon, who also wrote the screenplay. "She really wanted the role, and she agreed to audition for it. I wanted her to make the part her own. She is not playing Diana Ross."
When we met in London, the morning after the film's premiere, Condon was still on a high from the audience reaction the night before. I wondered if Ross had been to see his film. "Well," he says, laughing, "she was on David Letterman's show a few days ago, and she joked about it. She said she had been too busy to see it, but she had heard a lot about it - and she said that she was going to go and see it with her lawyers."
When Condon was preparing to film Dreamgirls, Effie was the last key role to be cast after an extensive search that involved close to 800 auditions in six cities across the US. Hudson is a 25-year-old former gospel singer from Chicago who, like Effie, has tasted rejection. In Hudson's case, her humiliation was live on television, on one of the United States' most watched shows, American Idol, when she was eliminated and Simon Cowell, one of the judges, snidely remarked that she was out of her league.
Hudson proved him wrong when she was cast in Dreamgirls and again, last week, when she was nominated for an Oscar, for best supporting actress, having already collected a Golden Globe a few weeks earlier.
When Condon and I talked last week it was also the eve of Oscar-nominations day, and he was understandably apprehensive, given his history of ups and downs in the awards. In 1999 he won the best-original-screenplay Oscar for Gods and Monsters, which featured Ian McKellen as the film director James Whale, and Condon was nominated again in 2003 for his screenplay for the musical Chicago, which won six Oscars, including best picture.
Two years later Condon's critically admired Kinsey, starring Liam Neeson as the pioneering sexologist Alfred Kinsey, was regarded as a formidable awards contender, but it got just one Oscar nomination, for Laura Linney as Kinsey's wife, Clara. "I couldn't believe it when Liam was not nominated," Condon says. "He gave a wonderful performance. The Los Angeles critics named him best actor of the year for the film. Liam came to our premiere last night, and it was great to see him again." There were mixed fortunes for Condon when this year's Oscar nominations were announced. Dreamgirls did not get shortlisted for best film or best director, but it received eight nominations, more than any other film this year, and that will look good on the posters and give the movie another boost at the box office, where it has been performing strongly.
Dreamgirls originated on Broadway, where musicals continue to thrive. The film version opened to a number of rave reviews in the US, but some reviewers have found it difficult to accept that people burst into song when they communicate with each other - even though the same people seem quite willing to believe that a man can fly or that apprentice wizards play quidditch while zooming around on broomsticks.
Condon shakes his head in evident dismay. "That's true," he says, sighing. "It has to be because there are so few screen musicals any more, and there is a generation now that has little or no experience of them. I suppose the heyday of the screen musical is a long time ago. They thrived for decades, but movies changed very significantly in the 1960s. They became harder, more grounded in realism. But there is something primal about musicals. They can get under your skin in a way that a straight drama cannot."
He cites Bob Fosse's marvellous film of Cabaret as his favourite screen musical, as well as Alan Parker's work on films from Bugsy Malone and Pink Floyd the Wall to The Commitments and Evita. "I love what he did with those films," he says. "They were certainly an influence on me."
Now 51, Condon grew up in an Irish-American neighbourhood in the New York borough of Queens, where his mother fostered his early love of cinema. After he graduated, with a philosophy degree, from Columbia University, an article he wrote for a film magazine, Millimeter, attracted the attention of the producer-director Michael Laughlin, who invited him to work on the screenplay for his next film, Strange Behavior, a cultish horror movie.
Condon recalls the thrill of being in the back row of the Imperial Theatre in New York for the opening night of the stage version of Dreamgirls, in 1981, wallowing in its drama and savouring the innovative, influential staging by the director Michael Bennett, to whom Condon's version is dedicated.
"The songs are full of emotion, and hopes and pain laid bare," he says. "We all know what it's like to desperately want something we cannot have, and what it means to be left behind, or to sacrifice everything for something you think you want, only to realise too late what you want."
Nothing in his film expresses those feelings more powerfully than the show-stopping song Effie performs midway through the musical, And I'm Telling You I'm Not Going, which Jennifer Holliday sang in the Broadway production and which became a minor hit on this side of the Atlantic. Hudson rises to the challenge of emulating Holliday, giving everything she's got to a powerhouse performance of this searing song of betrayal and defiance.
"We left filming that sequence to the very end of the shoot," Condon says. "Jennifer had never acted in a film before this, and I knew she would gain in confidence and experience during the shoot, before she had to perform her big scene all alone in this big, empty theatre. I wanted her to completely inhabit the character before she reached this watershed stage in the film.
"It took four days to shoot that one scene and to get it exactly right in every respect, shooting it from so many camera angles and changing the lighting. Jennifer simply poured her heart and soul into the song over and over. I know it was exhausting for her, but she gave it her all every time, and she gave us something very special."
Condon has mixed views on American Idol and its many equivalents around the world. "I don't like the element of cruelty that's involved," he says. "Are so many people watching it for the musical performances or for the humiliation these unknown performers are put through? On the other hand, I don't know how someone like Jennifer would have got her break if she hadn't been on the show, and now she's proved herself and her talent is out there for everyone to admire."
Hudson's journey - from obscurity to fame and then rejection on national television, and on to the accolades for her film debut, and the strong likelihood of an Oscar for it - is the stuff of which screen musicals are made, just like Dreamgirls.
Dreamgirls is on general release