TLC was the first female R&B group to cover The Source Magazine.

Chilli holds a copy of TLC’s June 1992 Source cover.

The Source Magazine had the opportunity to sit down with the lovely ladies of TLC: Chilli and T-Boz to discuss their epic VH1 biopic “CrazySexyCool: The TLC Story.” They executive produced the film, consulted on the script and helped Lil’ Mama, Keke Palmer and Drew Sidora nail their roles. 

Q: Tell us how you pitched “CrazySexyCool” to VH1 and what that process was like?    

Chilli: Bill Diggins, our manager, and myself had a meeting with Jeff Olde, when he was at VH1, and I started telling him about stories that people didn’t know about and just kind of going in depth about the stories that you knew about or thought you knew and that did it and he went back to his boss and they were like, “yes we want to do this” and from that point on that’s when it really started to move, from there to getting with Kate Lanier to pin the script. It was just awesome.

Q: Can you speak about the highlight of executive producing this film?  

T-Boz: It was amazing just to have the opportunity to do a movie at all, but throughout our 20 years of our career, we’ve always been hands on everything so we were like “Oh God, I hope they let us do it,” because most times they do movies about artists that are deceased, we’re still here and you know they didn’t allow Tina Turner on her set. We were like “if they do us like that I don’t know what the hell we’re gonna do,” but VH1 was so gracious in letting us be involved, so we were involved in the script, we put on dance clothes, put them through TLC Boot camp…so we spent a lot of time with them, had sleepovers, but we really wanted them to understand the script more than just words, so they would get the emotion behind each feeling and why we did certain things we did, to do the role better.

Q: Can you speak about helping Lil’ Mama prepare to play Lisa?

Chilli: We spent time with them collectively, individually, and we spent more time with her for that reason because we were the voice for Lisa and it was great and it was just kind of…weird at times because Lil’ Mama has things like Lisa naturally. They are very similar. Their character! It’s like “Wow.”

T-Boz: Her mannerisms, it’s crazy! The way she holds her little pinky, we were like “ohh freaky Jason.”

Chilli: I knew that she was going to nail the part.

“CrazySexyCool:  The TLC Story” Premieres on VH1 Monday, October 21st, 2013 at 9:00 PM ET/ PT.