Song Sung Blue director Craig Brewer said the true-story film was denied by several studios that thought audiences wouldn’t “like” its Midwesterner characters.

“Everyone said no, and they were very, very vocal in saying no,” Brewer told Variety in an interview published Wednesday, Jan. 7.

He added, “Even places that I had made a lot of money for were like, ‘We don’t think audiences are going to like these people. Just look at the way they’re living.’ And I’d say, ‘What do you mean the way they’re living?’ They’d say, ‘Well, their house is cluttered and dirty.’ I was like, ‘Well, wait a minute. Hold on. These are some magical people. These are the type of people that I’m related to. This is like my grandmother’s house.’”

Song Sung Blue stars Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson as Mike and Claire Sardina, a musician duo from Milwaukee who gained notoriety as a Neil Diamond tribute group named Lightning & Thunder.

Brewer, 54, credited production company Focus Features and distributor Universal for ultimately seeing the potential in the film, now in theaters.

When Variety asked the director if “regional bias” led other studio executives to pass on the project, he replied, “I always face that.” Brewer is known for past movies, including 2005’s Hustle & Flow, 2011’s Footloose and 2019’s Dolemite Is My Name.

“My whole career has been focused on two avenues, Southerners and African American stories,” he said. “Every studio that you meet with immediately tells you how limited those audiences are. They go, ‘Well, African American stories don’t travel overseas,’ or ‘We’re not going to make anything that remotely talks about the South because of the accents.’ And I was like, ‘Okay, Forrest Gump had some Southern accents.’ And they’re like, ‘That’s different.’ “

In the case of Song Sung Blue, Brewer said, “Here I thought, there’s no Southern accents in it. It’s not particularly diverse. It’s about this White couple. Yet, that mentality still existed. They worried audiences weren’t really going to be into the story of these people in Milwaukee.”

Hudson, 46, earned a Golden Globe nomination for her performance in the film. She told W Magazine that she met the real-life Claire Sardina. (Jackman, 57, plays Mike, who died in 2006.)

“You can’t believe what these people went through,” the actress told W. “When I read the script, I remember thinking, ‘This can’t all be true.’ I met Claire on set. She’s wonderful. I’m so lucky I got to play her.”