The HBO documentary about Tina Turner, simply titled Tina, opens with her singing the lyric, ask me how I feel, from her song of the same title, off 1989’s Foreign Affair album. It’s not as beloved as “Simply the Best” or “What’s Love Got To Do With It,” but it aptly sets up what’s to come over the course of the next 2 hours. We, as viewers will learn how Tina Turner—or rather Anna Mae Bullock—feels about being Tina Turner.
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Directors Dan Lindsay and T.J. Martin, who won an Oscar for their 2011 documentary Undefeated, bring their gift for allowing the humanity of their subjects to shine through, to this, approaching it as more as a film than a music documentary. As Lindsay tells American Songwriter, “A lot of people have asked us, ‘Why make this film? There’s other versions of this story. And funny enough, that was Tina’s first question to us: ‘There’s a book [the 1986 autobiography I, Tina], there’s a movie [the 1993 biopic What’s Love Got To Do With It? with Angela Bassett as Tina], there’s a musical [the Tony-nominated Tina – The Tina Turner Musical], what are we going to make a documentary about?’”
The key, they told everyone—Turner included —was they wanted to share the story in a different way. As much as Tina is a documentary about one of the greatest singers of our time, it’s also about the person who has lived that life. Using rare footage and archival material from Turner’s own collection, the filmmakers assembled the well-known narrative of her life but, through in-depth interviews done with the superstar in her Swiss home, add much more to the story than we ever really knew.
Lindsay recalls when they were setting up for the first interview and he asked Turner how she was feeling. “She said, ‘I don’t really want to do this.’ And it was like, ‘Okay, what does that mean? You don’t want to make the film?’ And she was like, ‘No, I just don’t like doing these interviews. I woke up this morning and I felt stressed. And I said, ‘Well, let’s start there then.’” Their process centered on encouraging her to talk from her personal experience as Anna Mae Bullock, rather than slip into how Tina Turner would usually respond.
“I think she looks at a lot of press interviews like a performance, like she needs to be the character of Tina Turner,” says Lindsay. “I’m not going to say that character of Tina Turner didn’t come out in our interviews. But as much as we could, we tried to drive her back to how she felt now.”
It makes for a searingly honest account of the lows and the highs of the Grammy-winning singer’s life; a life, she says, where the good didn’t even out the bad. After surviving a physically and mentally abusive marriage with Ike Turner, she endured a stroke, cancer and kidney failure. “It was early on in talking with her and understanding that the relationship she has with this, the story of Tina Turner, was a pretty complicated one, and that we didn’t feel people really knew,” says Lindsay.
Her relationship with Ike Turner is still a painful part of her story, something Martin says they found out when she would bring him up in the interview. “It was a bit of a revelation to realize that even at this chapter in her life, when at the time, she was almost 80 years old, Ike still brings so much pain to her. As she told us, if she talks about it too much, or if she has to do an interview about that time, he comes to her in her dreams,” he says.
The film is shaped by honoring the hurt that still exists from the abuse she endured. “What we’re starting with, the person we’re sitting down with, is someone who’s still processing these things, not overcome them,” says Martin. “She is making the decision to survive every day. It’s not, ‘I survived and then it was over.’ We felt that if we can be a conduit for Tina’s POV on her own story, then we might be doing something to add to her narrative.”
We are reminded how she truly only hit her stride as a musician and performer, playing to tens of thousands of people and scoring hit records when she was in her forties—a remarkable role model still today. “We also knew there’s a whole generation of people that don’t know the story of Tina Turner. And so it’s about finding that balance of, we’ve got to tell the tale to then get to the place where she can talk about what that has meant to her,” says Lindsay.
To be sure, there is a lot of music—it wouldn’t be a story about Tina Turner without “River Deep, Mountain High” or “What’s Love Got To Do With It.” There is also the treasure trove of Turner’s personal archive, which allowed the filmmakers access to multitrack recordings, and jubilant footage of her 1988 record-breaking Rio concert, attended by 180,000 people.
The film doesn’t go through the ‘best of’ hits and the directors were slightly concerned that fans might not be happy about that. “But at the end of the day, we see it more as a film,” Lindsay says. “And it’s a film about this person who has this very particular and specific journey. Tina’s catalog is massive. So instead of thinking about it as a whole, and dwindling down and curating and selecting from the point of view of the catalog, we curated and selected from the point of view of servicing the film itself.”
Although she didn’t ask to sign off on it, Lindsay and Martin were nervous to show Turner the finished documentary. “We were just anxious about her watching some of this footage and the possibility of us re-traumatizing her. We’re walking a fine line, just even making the film, pointing out that telling the story is painful for Tina, and yet we’re doing it again,” says Martin. “Ultimately, though, we talked a lot with her husband Erwin [Bach], about how we manage this and he said she wanted to watch the film.”
To their joy, Turner really liked it. “She said, ‘You guys got it right; that felt like the experience it was,’” says Lindsay. It’s a parting gift from Turner to her fans that she lets us hear how the experiences of her life made her feel. But in relaying how she still found happiness and fulfillment despite it all, she gives us more reason to long cherish Tina Turner—and Anna Mae Bullock too.
