The last time Laurence Fishburne and Angela Bassett shared the screen, things worked out pretty well.

In the 1993 drama "What's Love Got To Do With It," she was Tina Turner and he was the abusive Ike. The biopic took in nearly $40 million domestically and earned Oscar nominations for both stars, but it took more than a decade for the duo to reunite.

The Lionsgate drama "Akeelah and the Bee" stars 12-year-old Keke Palmer as Akeelah, a gifted speller whose rise from South Central to the National Spelling Bee is aided by a moody college professor (Fishburne) and by her strict-but-loving mother (Bassett).

For writer-director Doug Atchison, the pairing wasn't something he planned.

"Laurence got on first as both a producer and an actor. He read it a few years before we started shooting," Atchison says of the script, which spent years circling the industry. "And then we found Keke, because the studio wasn't going to go forward until we found Akeelah. And we found her. And then it just seemed logical for me to try to put [Fishburne and Bassett] back together. I just thought that would be great. I met with Angela and she wanted to do it."

Of course, having Fishburne and Bassett together forced Atchison to write additional scenes where the actors would share the screen. He stopped short, though, of the temptation to artificially create a romance for their characters.

"It was only joked about, because we knew it would tip the balance of what the story was about," he says. "If it suddenly went that way, you're not paying attention to Akeelah anymore."

Fishburne agrees that he and Basset were determined never to upstage their young co-star.

"This was an opportunity for us to sort of support this new talent and to be her supporting cast," he says. "With respect to me and Angie, it was nice to work together. It was as if no time had passed at all and this experience made us really want to do some more work together in the future."

As befits their very different personalities, Bassett is a good deal more effusive about working with Fishburne again.

"Oh it was just sweet and wonderful," she laughs. "I have a great deal of respect for Laurence and we both just love and honor the craft of acting. We love it and we speak the same artistic language."

The voluble actress continues, "People do it different ways. He went to the school of acting on the set of 'Apocalypse Now' and 'Cornbread, Earl and Me' or whatever. I went to Yale School of Drama. You can come at it from different ways. People go to whatever acting class or whoever acting coach or not at all or from the music world. But where do you meet? Do you have a common language?"

See the fruits of that common language with "Akeelah and the Bee" hits theaters nationwide on Friday, April 28.