The 10 ‘Purple Rain’ Movie Facts You Need To Know

2: Prince and his bands enrolled in acting and dance classes for the shoot

During the months of pre-production leading up to shooting Purple Rain, Prince and his band, The Revolution, along with the members of The Time and Apollonia 6, undertook a rigorous course of acting and dance classes throughout the daytime, before attending band rehearsals at night. The gruelling regime enabled them to perfect the live performances that would feature in the movie, and also provided moments of comic relief for the hardworking young stars.

“It could have been a movie in itself,” Revolution keyboardist Lisa Coleman told this author, for the book Lives Of The Musicians: Prince. Under the guidance of Loyce Houlton’s Minnesota Dance Theatre, acting exercises included pretending to melt like an ice cream and miming being trapped inside an invisible box. “We were a bunch of goofballs,” Coleman said, “going into a dance class with trench coats on and jumping through the air.” As a thank you for Houlton’s help, Prince staged a now-legendary benefit concert for her company at Minneapolis’ First Avenue, on 3 August 1983, where he premiered many of the songs that would end up on Purple Rain – including the title track itself, the live recording of which would, with a few edits, become the album’s closing track.

3: Apollonia nearly died of hypothermia during filming

In one of the Purple Rain movie’s most quotable scenes, Prince, as The Kid, encourages Apollonia to “purify yourself in the waters of Lake Minnetonka”. After Apollonia strips down to her underwear and jumps into a nearby lake, The Kid tells her: “That ain’t Lake Minnetonka.”

Apollonia’s shocked reaction had less to do with acting and more to do with the sub-zero temperatures of a freezing-cold November in Minnesota, in which the cast and crew would regularly find themselves waking up to two feet of snow on the ground and three inches of ice on their windows. “It was freezing – I actually broke a little sheet of ice,” Apollonia told Minneapolis radio station The Current, 30 years later. After three more attempts at jumping into the lake, she was rushed to a tent, where a nurse called for an ambulance: Apollonia was going into hypothermia.

“And then Prince came in, because I remember feeling his warmth, he helped me, and he says, ‘Please don’t die. Please don’t die Apollonia,’” the actor recalled. Eventually coming round, she told her co-star: “No, I’m not going anywhere!… We’ve got to shoot some more!”

4: Prince recorded more than 100 songs for potential use in ‘Purple Rain’

Prince “was constantly on output” during this period, his studio engineer Susan Rogers said in Lives Of The Musicians: Prince. After signing Albert Magnoli to the project, Prince invited the director to his home studio to review the overwhelming number of songs he had recorded for potential use in the movie.

“He essentially had a hundred songs… that he had written and produced, created and done either by himself or with other people in the group,” Magnoli told Prince archivist Duane Tudahl, for the book Prince And The Purple Rain Era Studio Sessions: 1983 And 1984. After Magnoli took the tapes back to Los Angeles, he was able to whittle the collection down to the core songs that would make up the Purple Rain album. Prince would deliver yet more, however: When Doves Cry was the final addition to the soundtrack, recorded after Magnoli asked for a new song that would help move the film’s narrative forward.

5: An early version of Prince’s “Love Symbol” appears on the ‘Purple Rain’ motorbike

As featured on both the album cover and film posters, Prince, as The Kid, rode a customised 1981 Honda CM400 Hondamatic in the Purple Rain movie. Painted on several parts of the bike, and standing out in pink against the purple finish, is an early version of the “Love Symbol” that would go on to give Prince’s 1992 album its name.

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A mix of the astrological signs for Mars (male) and Venus (female), the symbol first appeared hidden among the illustrations on the 1999 album cover. Prince would take a later adaptation, copyrighted as “Love Symbol #2”, for his name throughout much of the 90s, after announcing that he would be identifying as the symbol from his 35th birthday, 7 June 1993, onwards. He would revert to using his birth name in 2000.

6: The movie also featured a cameo from future members of Prince’s New Power Generation

Although Purple Rain is rightly heralded as the breakthrough moment for Prince And The Revolution, the film offers a small glimpse of The New Power Generation, the band Prince would form in the early 90s, almost exclusively from Minneapolis musicians. Glimpsed in silhouette on the balcony of First Avenue, Tony Mosley, Damon Dickson and Kirk Johnson – later known as The Game Boyz – were all granted roles as extras in the movie after their respective dance crews won talent contests at First Avenue. After Prince spotted the trio devising their own routines between takes in the First Avenue restroom, he gave them visibility on the set during an entire day’s shoot.

“We had a little boombox, we were dancing,” Mosley told Andrea Swensson of their life-changing encounter with Prince. Speaking for a liner-notes essay included in the super-deluxe reissue of the Diamonds And Pearls album, he continued, “Prince walks in while we were dancing and doesn’t say a word. Just stands there and smiles. And we didn’t stop. We just kept with our little routines and just doing what we do.” A snippet of the future NPG members doing what they did was cut into The Time’s performance of signature hit Jungle Love.

7: Advance screenings were so popular, Warner thought they’d been tricked

Ahead of Purple Rain’s premiere, Warner Pictures held an advance test screening of the movie, and the reaction was so positive the company accused Prince’s then management team, Cavallo-Ruffalo (along with soon-to-be partner Steve Fargnoli), of filling it with members of a Prince fan club. “They voted the highest number that you had ever seen,” manager Bob Cavallo later said.

Suspicious of the feedback, the production company arranged another screening, in Denver, but refused to tell the Prince camp where it was being held until everyone was on the plane over. By the time they landed, pandemonium was about to break loose, and a panicked Warner staffer greeted Cavallo with the news, “There’s going to be a riot if we don’t put on a second show.” Eventually, Warner had to screen the film three times in a row, in order to satiate the demands of both the crowd and the owner of the cinema, “who was frightened that his seats were going to get torn up”.

8: Prince became the first artist since The Beatles to simultaneously hold the US No.1 album, single and film spots

Following its nationwide release on 27 June 1984, Purple Rain made $7.3 million in its opening weekend – $100,000 more than the movie’s $7.2 million budget. After increasing the number of US cinemas it would be shown in from 200 to 900, the movie eventually pulled in more than $68 million – almost ten times the cost of filming – making it the highest-grossing movie in North America.

With When Doves Cry topping the Billboard Hot 100 and the Purple Rain album sitting at No.1 on the Billboard 200, Prince became the first artist since The Beatles to simultaneously top the US single and album charts while also holding the country’s No.1 box-office draw.

9: He also won an Oscar for Best Original Song Score

Held on 25 March 1985, the 57th Academy Awards marked the first time that more than one Black nominee won an Oscar. Motown legend Stevie Wonder came away with the Best Original Song award, for I Just Called To Say I Love You, from The Woman In Red, while Prince won in the Best Original Song Score category.

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Meeting the criteria for what presenters Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner described as containing at least five original songs that “serve a dramatic purpose” and which “move the story along”, the Purple Rain album was up against The Muppets Take Manhattan, by Jeff Ross, and Songwriter, by outlaw country star Kris Kristofferson.

After being announced as the winner, Prince, wearing a glittery hooded robe and flanked by Revolution bandmembers Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman, approached the podium to receive his Oscar, and then passed it on to Melvoin as he delivered his acceptance speech: “This is very unbelievable. I could have never imagined this in my wildest dreams. I’d like to thank the Academy. Mr Albert Magnoli. My managers, Steven, Bob, Joe. Bobby [“Z” Rivkin, Revolution drummer], Mark [Brown, bassist] and Matt [“Dr” Fink, keyboardist], who couldn’t be with us today. And, most of all, God. Thank you very much.”

10: The ‘Purple Rain’ movie brought the “Minneapolis sound” to the world

The synth-heavy funk that would come to be known as the “Minneapolis sound” has its roots in Prince’s debut album, 1978’s For You. On the sonic developments he spearheaded, Prince told the Minneapolis Star Tribune, “I created a different kind of horn section by multi-tracking a synthesiser and some guitar lines.”

With its musical performances by Prince And The Revolution, plus his protégé acts The Time and Vanity 6, and even a spot for The Modernaires, led by former Prince guitarist Dez Dickerson, Purple Rain captured the point when the “Minneapolis sound” went global. It also made Prince’s hometown venue First Avenue a landmark destination for fans from all over the world. “When the film first came out, a lot of tourists started coming. That was kind of weird, to be in the club and get a lot of, ‘Oh! There he is!’”, Prince told Rolling Stone. “It felt a little strange. I’d be in there thinking, Wow, this sure is different than it used to be.”

It would never be the same again – for Prince or the world.

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