Tina Turner documentary: love has everything to do with it
Tina Turner overcame the abusive relationship with ex-husband Ike but carried the scars of her mother’s abandonment, according to a new film.
At the height of her fame in the 1980s, Tina Turner, the R&B singer turned rock star, was as big as the Beatles. Fans of all ages clamoured for her and went wild at her concerts as her voice erupted like a volcano. Mick Jagger was a huge fan, inspired by her gyrating moves.
Still, as we see in a new documentary, Tina, even when she was promoting her starring turn in 1985’s Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (and of course her song, We Don’t Need Another Hero) Turner’s incredible career reinvention was sidelined by a question about her past, namely the abuse she endured at the hands of Ike Turner, her husband of 16 years (though they were together longer).
In part to quell the interrogations, in September 1986 Turner and Kurt Loder published a tell-all autobiography, I, Tina, which was turned into the 1993 film, What’s Love Got to Do With It, starring Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne.
Both actors received Academy Award nominations for their screen performances.
Bassett in the movie mimed the songs, and told this writer in a 1993 interview: “I would listen to a song last thing before going to bed and I hoped by osmosis that I would internalise it … I think the story of Tina’s life can be an inspiration to everyone, whether you’ve been in her situation to varying degrees or whether you’ve never had that situation. Tina had been the underdog for a long time and she finally said no.”
Turner appeared briefly at the end of that movie; the difference with the new film is that we watch the music icon telling her story in her own words — and this time there’s a happy ending.
Tina, the documentary, is directed by Dan Lindsay and TJ Martin, who won the 2012 Oscar for their previous documentary, Undefeated, about a volunteer football coach helping underprivileged students beat the odds.
A similar story of a steely individual who overcomes great hardship also drives the narrative of Tina.
The film is a kind of farewell to Turner’s fans. Most of the interviews were shot during three trips the filmmakers made to Turner’s luxurious lakeside home in Zurich, Switzerland.
Seated in a chair in the middle of a spacious room, Turner, then 79, secure in her Buddhist beliefs that she says helped save her, certainly seems content.
At one point she asks her hugely supportive husband, Erwin Bach, how long they have been together. “Twenty-seven years,” he replies from a distance. They had married in this very home in the northern summer of 2013.
Bach, a German music executive, whom Turner met at Dusseldorf airport while on a European concert tour, is an executive producer on the film, and on camera he describes the electric charge he gets from his wife to this very day.
At first Bach had been reluctant to be on camera, as had Roger Davies, the Australian artist manager who transformed Turner into a rock star. She had told Davies she wanted to be the first black woman in rock to play in stadiums like the Rolling Stones.
Davies was behind her 1984 Grammy award-winning album, Private Dancer, which included the hits What’s Love Got to Do With It and Let’s Stay Together.
Davies, who began as Turner’s manager in 1979, was briefly played by another of his clients, James Reyne, in What’s Love Got to Do With It; in the new documentary here he gives a surprisingly long interview. In a sense, Davies took over from Ike Turner — Tina filed for divorce from Ike in 1976 — as the svengali who helped shape Turner’s career.
“He’s a little bit nicer,” Lindsay says of Davies, in an interview at the time of the documentary’s premiere at the Berlin Film Festival.
“He has a different vibe. We first met Roger in London and he did the interview in Los Angeles and was fantastic.
“In all candour, he took a bit of convincing, as he’s usually behind the scenes and doesn’t like to be on camera. And like a lot of people who are close to Tina, he’s very protective of her. Obviously the fact that she was kind of authorising this movie was what ultimately made him agree.”
Did they approach Mick Jagger for an interview?
“He was in some material from Tina’s personal archive about Ike and Tina’s first trip to London, but that started to fall into music doc territory and it didn’t feel right for the (personal) film we were making. The Stones were going to come to LA and play and we might have spoken to Mick then, but he had a heart attack or something, I can’t remember what it was, so they cancelled their tour.
“Ultimately, we didn’t want to populate the film with stars,” Lindsay continues. “Angela Bassett is in there because she portrayed Tina Turner and Oprah is a very close friend of Tina’s, but she’s also representative of the media who helped to celebrate her story.”
In what is essentially a heart-rending tragedy, we watch how Tina, born Anna Mae Bullock, was drawn to Ike after being deserted by her mother when she was a child.
She tolerated his violence because she felt he was looking after her, though the trauma of her mother’s desertion remained.
“We picked up on that in the research and then in talking to Tina,” Lindsay explains.
“People understand that her mum left her, but the weight of that hasn’t been as much explored in the other iterations of her life.”
He’s referring to director Brian Gibson’s film What’s Love Got to Do With It, and the recent musical, Tina, that opened on London’s West End in 2018 and on Broadway in 2019.
“Those (dramatised versions) are inherently going to be a step removed, when in this film you actually get to hear the story from Tina herself.
“I think that idea of the trauma of her youth and what that did to her — how much that has an influence, we’ll never know, but we wanted to draw on how much of an influence that had been on her relationship with Ike and that search for love and acceptance and belonging and a sense of home. That’s another reason we have those shots of her house in Zurich, it’s like she’s finally found this peace of mind in this home.
“As Rhonda Graam, one of her best friends, says in the film, ‘I think she was able to somewhat get past what happened with Ike, but she’s never been able to get over her mum’.”
(Graam, formerly a road manager for Ike and Tina Turner, passed away this year, with the Tina Turner blog noting: “Like Roger Davies and Erwin Bach she was an invisible pillar to Tina’s career, someone she could always rely on without worries.”)
Tina and Erwin’s love story features prominently and is one of the major themes of the film, says co-director Martin.
“It follows the trajectory of Tina struggling with her narrative and trying to find acceptance and peace. But at the centre of that is someone who’s struggling with the pursuit of love, not just with Erwin and others, but also self-love.
“The way we entered (that narrative) is through the exploration of trauma and how someone manages and deals with trauma even at this chapter in their life.
“The yin to the yang of trauma in our case is love.
“So it was really important to make sure that we were showcasing the journey of love — and Erwin’s narrative in their relationship was a critical story point to that idea.”
While going through Turner’s ordeals with Ike and her tough upbringing, the film depicts her as a vibrant survivor and showcases some of her stunning performances throughout her career.
She was a powerhouse on record and on the concert stage.
Even so, recent footage of the premiere of Tina the musical shows Winfrey and Bach supporting Turner on either side.
While her PTSD is noted in the film, she has had other health concerns, including a stroke only weeks after her wedding — after which she had to learn to walk again.
She also has suffered from intestinal cancer and kidney failure, conditions that aren’t mentioned. Would including those health problems in the film have been too much of a downer for audiences to bear?
“There’s an upbeat version of the telling of her illness in that Erwin gave her his kidney,” Lindsay notes of her 2017 transplant surgery after her kidney failed.
“Honestly, there’s so much we could have explored. This could be a miniseries. Each part of her life is its own movie.”
There wasn’t room within the scope of the documentary to include all of Turner’s songs. Nutbush City Limits, We Don’t Need Another Hero and the GoldenEye theme, written by Bono and The Edge, aren’t in the film, and many others also couldn’t be included.
“Her catalogue is vast and the choices we made were not because we were restricted, it was because we wanted to stick to the narrative we were telling,” says Martin.
“So there are massive plot points where you can’t talk about Tina without talking about What’s Love Got to Do With It. You can’t talk about the process of Tina starting to understand and come into her own without talking about River Deep, Mountain High. Everything else was about servicing the tone of the scene.
“Hopefully, even dire fans might discover some new tracks that they just kind of forgot about or were never really on the radar,” he says.
Tina has received a whopping 9.2 out of 10 on IMDB and 93 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes. Still, there’s room in this extraordinary life for a miniseries, don’t you think?
Tina is on Fox Showcase from Sunday, March 28.
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