“They’re legends,” music producer Rachael Moore says about George Jones and Tammy Wynette. “They’ve always been kind of ridiculed and made fun of… and the thing that I appreciated about Abe [Sylvia] and Jessica [Chastain] and everyone involved with this project is they really wanted to do them justice and they really wanted to make them real humans.”
Starring Michael Shannon and Jessica Chastain as the titular George Jones and Tammy Wynette, Showtime’s George & Tammy takes a look at the complicated and emotionally-charged relationship between the country music power couple. “The story was very dignified for them,” says Moore. “It didn’t shy away from their imperfections and their flaws, but it made them very relatable.”
A major part of Moore’s job on this project was preparing Chastain and Shannon to sing these well-known country hits. “That was a very tricky thing,” she says. “Its these two mammoth voices that are very distinct, and we knew that no one is gonna sound just like them.” Since they didn’t want Chastain and Shannon to sound like parodies of real people, the focus was more on allowing the actors to insert themselves into the music. “Don’t get me wrong, there’s certainly times where they sound like these people, but it was more important for them to insert their emotions and themselves into these scenes.”
Moore met the pair for the first time in a recording studio in Nashville for 10 days to record all of the songs, as a sort of “boot camp” for them. “It was decided that we were going to try to have them sing live on set, which is a huge risk, lots of variables involved,” she says. “So, we decided let’s at least have really good prerecords in our back pocket.” Although they had the prerecords to fall back on, Moore was very happy that they only needed them to deal with minor sound issues. “90 to 95 percent of what they sing on set, we used. When you see a scene, that’s them.”
Click on the video above to watch the full interview.
