Angela Bassett talks about directing 'Whitney'

From the Television Critics Association's winter meetings in Pasadena, Calif.:

What's love got to do with telling Whitney Houston's story?

Everything, says Angela Bassett. The actress, whose directorial debut, "Whitney," premieres on Lifetime Jan. 17, on Thursday defended the film's focus on a five-year period that encompassed the late singer's relationship with husband Bobby Brown.

And she did it with some passion.

"This is the glorious time," Bassett said. "This is the beginning of it, you know, '89, from the night that they met. But it's also she's at the height of her career, so it's great. We know how this tragic story ends, do we really need to see that?" (The movie ends well before Houston's death.)

When I suggested that it could also be said that an iconic woman's story had been reduced to her relationship with a man, Bassett countered:

"And we forget that she was a woman, a mother, a sister, a friend. We forget that. We see her as an icon. And I think we as a public, we consumed her talent, we would want to know everything about her life. But she was sensitive, she would say, 'I just want to be normal, I just want to, you know, can I just have a normal day? Can I just be a person? Can you just see me as a person and not as a commodity?"

Bassett, who's herself played some icons -- Rosa Parks, Tina Turner, Coretta Scott King -- hopes the focus on the personal will help humanize her subject.

"That's what living is about. It's about relationships. It's not about you standing on stage and 20,000 people are screaming, 'I love you,' at the top of their lungs…It's nice, it's real nice. But then you go back to the hotel and pack up the gear and move on to the next city, with 10,000 screaming people and then pack up the gear, give them all you've got on stage, then pack up the gear and move on to the next city, and do five tours and then the next town and the next, and run through airport to go to give all that you possess and all that you're gifted and all of your talent and your abilities to screaming people sitting there in the dark that you can't even make out a face, or a smile, or a joy. You don't have a real conversation," she said.

Then, making it clear that she identified with Houston's plight, she complained to the half-dozen or so reporters surrounding her that she didn't even know our names or anything about our lives, "I want to know you, too, I want to know who you are, because when I go to stand on a stage and try to bring about human nature, I've lived, and connected, and this is what it's like. And you recognize it. But if I stay in my hotel room, ordering room service, how do I connect? When I get up to perform, how did my humanity connect to your humanity?"

(In our defense, we wear name tags, get limited time with interviewees and aren't really here to talk about ourselves. But it's nice -- not to mention unusual -- of her to care.)

"Whitney," which stars Yaya DaCosta as Houston (Deborah Cox handles the vocals) and Arlen Escarpeta as Brown, presents a more sympathetic view of Brown than viewers who followed the relationship through the gossip columns might expect.

"I remained open to the story, to reading, but I remember," said Bassett, who considered Houston a friend from their time working on "Waiting to Exhale."

"They got together, '89, we did "Exhale' shortly after they got married. Of course, I'm thinking, 'Yeah, he's the bad boy of R&B. Oh, yeah. she's the pop princess.' Or at least this is the image that has been packaged so beautifully and so professionally and so awesomely. And that just doesn't connect, in my mind and everyone else's. But the day he visited us on set, on 'Exhale'…I really got to touch and see and talk to and observe something different than the perception that I had made up in my mind, read about previously. He was caring, he was nurturing, he was attentive. He was quiet, he was respectful. He was your brother. He was charismatic. He was all of those things," she said of Brown.

Asked if she'd asked any other directors for advice on her first venture, she singled out Kathryn Bigelow ("The Hurt Locker," "Zero Dark Thirty"), not only for her moral support -- Bigelow told her, "you'll be great," and offered to bring her coffee on the set -- but for introducing her to the illustrator she uses to storyboard scenes.

As for experts on Houston, "we went to the family…you must out of respect," but "they have their own objectives. They want to see, and do, a big feature film" about Houston, Bassett said, and she's chosen to see their largely ignoring her project as "support."

When a reporter asked about an Entertainment Tonight story that suggests otherwise, she was dismissive:

"Yeah, I saw that written. I didn't see that come out of the mouth of Cissy Houston. I saw a picture and I saw a quotation and I saw some type written, OK? Now she could have said that or she could not have said that, or the representatives could have said that or whatever," Bassett said.