Respect behind the scenes Los Angeles Premiere Clips, Broll,, interviews
This film is dedicated to Aretha Louise Franklin (March 25, 1942 — August 16, 2018)
“Be your own artist, and always be confident in what you're doing. If you're not going to be confident, you might as well not be doing it.”
— Aretha Franklin
Aretha Franklin’s voice is considered the best, most powerful, and culturally significant voice of all time. The Queen of Soul’s hit songs “Respect,” “(You Make Me Feel Like A) Natural Woman,” “I Say a Little Prayer,” and “Think,” to name a few, have become a part of the American music canon — all classics that defined the resistance and resilience of Black people during the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power Movement, and the Women’s Movement — and still resonate today at a moment in time where the world is in crisis and in need of soulfulness.
Soul music is an art form born out of the Black experience from slavery to emancipation, to the Great Migration to the creation and development of the Black middle class. Culled from spirituals, coded freedom songs, juke joints, gospel music, the blues, jazz, doo-wop, and protest music, soul music is exactly that — music and vocals that come from the depths of the Black experience in America and are filled with emotion, love, generational trauma from slavery, structural and systemic racism, and optimism steeped in unshakable faith.
The core of soul music is a deeply emotional expression of a confluence of joy and pain — often influenced by love, sorrow, and release — in an attempt to find salvation in a world that subjugates, oppresses, marginalizes, and attempts to belittle or erase the very existence and contributions of Black people in America. But, there is also a sense of optimism and encouragement to not only survive but to thrive, overcome, and conquer oppression in the quest for Black joy. Aretha Franklin’s voice, music, life, and legacy represent the struggle of the Black experience and offer a reimagining of Black liberation, excellence, and emotional rescue that speaks to African Americans, but also the greater human experience globally.
Ms. Franklin’s story is one that profoundly resonates right now in the Black Lives Matter Movement when the world is going through a cathartic racial reckoning and a tipping point of a cultural revolution where diverse identities are unapologetically declaring their voices and visibility. People are tired of white supremacy, patriarchy, and hypermasculinity and finding freedom in their own authenticity at every intersection of their being — they want to be seen, heard, and respected.
Aretha Franklin created a road map through her own life experience from being a child music prodigy who grew up with great privilege in a household in Detroit that understood the importance of social protest, racial justice, and community organizing which was centered squarely in the foundation of the Black church — faith, service, and self-actualization. And while Ms. Franklin will always be remembered for having the best voice of all time, the finding of her voice is not widely known. The challenge for Aretha Franklin is a masterclass in navigating and
overcoming grief that would become the artistic inspiration that created musical masterpieces that have saved lives, moved culture, and shifted the soundtrack to Black America. Ms. Franklin’s gifts quite frankly made room for her and in turn, anyone who listened to her music.
Respect Director Liesl Tommy considered all of this as she was conceptualizing the cinematic narrative of Aretha Franklin’s life. “I'm an artist myself. I'm always interested in how people became the headliner, what was that journey? I knew that she had been considered a musical genius when she was a child. But she had all those albums at Columbia Records that were not hits. What I thought would be the most compelling was starting in the church and ending in the church and the journey in between. So I knew what the beginning should be. The thing that kept coming to me was the idea of telling the story, wanting to tell the story of a woman who has the greatest voice in the world but who still doesn’t know what her voice is. And, that was the story that I felt like I wanted to tell, and that was what ended up being the center of the film, the spine of the film.”