Disenchanted director Adam Shankman on summoning the magic of a fairy tale during a global pandemic

When Disenchanted director Adam Shankman took on the challenge of following up a beloved fairy tale, 2007's Enchanted, itself a movie that was already a fresh spin, he needed a Eureka moment — and he got one.

"Why does 'true love's kiss' have to be romantic?" he tells EW via Zoom, remembering his breakthrough. "Can it be the love of the mother and her daughter or her child? That's not a thing that I've ever seen really explored. I think I've seen parent relationships explored, but never the idea that true love's kiss could be between a mother and child."

Taking it a step further, Shankman decided to use the 15 years since Enchanted first hit screens to his advantage. Giselle (Amy Adams) and Robert (Patrick Dempsey) would be married with a new baby, and Disenchanted would also make six-year-old Morgan (originally played by Rachel Covey) a full-fledged teenager (now portrayed by Gabriella Baldacchino).

"If she's a New York teenager, she's going to be difficult," Shankman adds. "And how is Giselle handling that?"

There was also Giselle's status as a stepmother to consider. "In Giselle's world, a stepmother is wicked," says the director. "So what does that look like? Those were literally all of my entry points into the movie."

With a story developed and fine-tuned (it's credited to J. David Stem, David N. Weiss, and Richard LaGravenese, with a script by Brigitte Hales), Shankman was free to dive into a universe fans know intimately. "We're not shy about our Easter eggs in the movie," he laughs. However, shooting during a global pandemic proved more complicated than imagined. "The hardest part for me was that I, to this day, don't know what 98 percent of my crew looks like — I never saw their faces," he says, remembering the fully masked seven-month shoot, much of it done virtually or remotely. "I don't even know how to properly thank them for everything that they did."

Making Disenchanted required new tactics for Shankman, a veteran of several classic music videos as well as features such as A Walk to Remember and the 2007 movie adaptation of the Broadway rethink of John Waters' Hairspray.

"One of the things that I love about making movies is the sense of community, the tribe of it all and the being together and collaboration," he says. "The pandemic really forced everybody into isolation, and we couldn't really do anything together, ever. I mean, it was: Go to work and go home. And when I say go home, it's also not having people over at your home. So we were all incredibly separated the entire time."

Still, going to work — production began in Ireland before vaccines began to roll out — was a special opportunity the director doesn't take for granted. "For many of us, it was legitimately the first time we'd left our homes," he continues, "and suddenly it wasn't just walking out of the house, it was getting on an airplane and going to a country we didn't really know and making this crazy thing."

The intensity of the time period can be felt during one of Amy Adams' more powerful ballads in the film, "Fairytale Life." Shankman says that Adams recorded the ballad from a "teeny tiny closet" in her home during a very chaotic moment, which added to how Giselle felt. "What's in the movie now was her original recording of that in the closet."

Shankman recalls the recording session vividly. "She was so emotional, and I knew — I think we all knew — we were never going to get that performance again," he says. "We were all literally trapped, and there was so much that felt wrong with the world. So the idea of hankering for a simpler time was so big for her, and all of us really. And so, I'm sitting there on a Zoom as we're recording her in this dark — it's not just a closet, it was a teeny tiny coat closet. And she's surrounded by coats with a light bulb above her head for four hours trying to sing about this expansive, beautiful world that she was imagining. I mean, it was really intense. But it's an incredible performance."

Despite all the complexities involved with the production, the director recalls that, somehow, magic was summoned, as so often happens while making a movie. "When I would roll and I would see everything come to life," Shankman says, "it was just chef's kiss. Heaven."

Disenchanted is now streaming on Disney+.

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