Laurence Fishburne's Labor Of Love

It's been 13 years since Laurence Fishburne and Angela Bassett received Academy Award nominations for their amazing portrayals of Ike and Tina Turner in the film "What's Love Got To Do With It."

Now, they've reunited as the mother and the tutor of a brilliant 11-year-old girl who has a gift for words in "Akeelah and the Bee." Fishburne visited The Early Show on Friday and told co-anchor Julie Chen that working with Bassett again was a special experience.

"It's a great collaborative thing that we have. We have a kind of chemistry. Any opportunity to work with her is, you know, something I always jump at," he said.

In "Akeelah and the Bee," Fishburne's character is a professor on sabbatical. "I've taken a break from the classroom. This young girl, Akeelah Anderson — one of my colleagues takes me to look at her. And I say, 'Oh, yeah she has potential. She needs to be coached.' And I kind of reluctantly, we kind of reluctantly come together and I start coaching her."

Akeelah is played by a young powerhouse named Keke Palmer. "She's fantastic. She's a tremendous actress," said Fishburne. "She blew my mind."

Fishburne appears in three films showing at the Tribeca Film Festival this week in New York, but he told Chen that this movie has been his special labor of love. "This movie speaks to issues of education and young people, black contemporary life that's not focusing on drugs and gangsters and thuggishness and violence and all of those things that are, you know, popular and can be fun in the movies," he said. "There's a place for that but this creates a kind of balance."

Fishburne said it wasn't easy getting the movie made, but that he was not planning on giving up until he did. "I came on board as a producer and as an actor to make sure it got made," he said. "I was committed to doing this movie even when nobody was interested. Everybody that read the script, we shopped it to every studio in town, they'd go 'The script is great, it's wonderful.' 'Will you make it?' 'Well, no.'"

As to why he met so much resistance, Fishburne thinks it was the novelty of the main character. "You've seen this character before in 'Rocky,'" he told Chen. "You haven't seen this character in this context as an African-American girl involved in a mental sport. It's easier for people to put a gun in somebody's hands and sell their movie than it is to be creative and sell a movie, and pitch a movie that's about, you know, learning and education and pushing somebody beyond their own expectations of themselves."

Fishburne has a couple of other big projects premiering this week. In the thriller "Five Fingers," he plays the head of a ring of kidnappers who take an idealistic Dutch pianist hostage in Morocco. The film's world premiere is scheduled at the Tribeca festival on May 1.

Fishburne is also in "Mission: Impossible III," which will premiere at the festival on Wednesday, May 3. He plays Tom Cruise's CIA boss in the action film.

"Akeelah and the Bee" opens nationwide Friday night.