For me, someone like the Eddie Murphy character doesn’t live anywhere; he lives on a stage and when he’s not on the stage he’s on a bus getting to the next stage.
That day I think we really saw each other for the first time. I mean, saw beyond the bag of bones on the outside. You take away her pretty and my plain and what you get underneath is about the same: a couple of lost girls looking to be found.
I had a couple of movies that I was passionately involved with that I could never get made. ‘Richard Pryor,’ I wrote for – gosh – over a year. That was close to getting made for two-and-a-half years after that.
From its inception by Michael Bennett, ‘Dreamgirls’ has always been an epic story with an ensemble cast. I didn’t change that. The screen version remains, really, a group story.
But you really – I always think that a director has got to adapt to whatever the needs of the actor are. You know, so if you take someone like Eddie Murphy, who is not a big fan of rehearsal.
When it comes to two of the big social earthquakes in the last fifty years – which are the gay movement and the women’s movement – I think there is a direct line from Kinsey to those.
