Shooting In The Real World

Giselle’s transition from Andalasia to Manhattan was anything but easy. Lima explains the filmmakers’ thinking behind her grand entrance: “We thought we needed to throw this character into absolutely the most difficult situation we could devise. In an early version, she landed in Central Park, but we thought that was too soft. So, she ends up climbing out of a sewer in the middle of Times Square.”

And it was with that scene that production began. The first day of principal photography (Monday, April 17, 2006) found the more than 100 cast and crew members of ENCHANTED filming at night in one of the most recognizable locations on the face of the earth—New York City’s glamorous, electric, bustling, chaotic Times Square—with our fairytale almost-princess Giselle emerging from a manhole wearing an enormous white wedding gown right in the center of the crossroad (crosswalk?) of 46th Street between Seventh Avenue and Broadway, with passers-by looking on. Needless to say, the event stopped traffic both literally and figuratively... and, more or less, this was how filming progressed day after day.

For the woman at the center of this activity, Adams could barely contain her zeal: “I’m really excited to be involved with ENCHANTED. It’s a true fairytale with a modern twist to it. I get to play this princess who’s funny and mischievous and her own person. What girl doesn’t want to do that?”

Director Lima was just as enthusiastic—for a different reason: “From the pristine, fairytale land of Andalasia to Manhattan—what an incredible 180 degree turn, and what a wonderful expanse for me, as a filmmaker, to traverse. Manhattan is to our animated characters-come-to-life what Manhattan is to any one of us visiting this magical city for the first time. It’s both enthralling and frightening at the same time. In the film, we push the envelope, so that when our characters first arrive, they are scared to death of this world, which couldn’t be more different from where they came from. I like to equate it to Snow White in the Evil Forest. So, Giselle is going through all those feelings, of being in a place that is incredibly frightening to her, at first. But then, as she gets to know this world, she becomes more and more attuned to it. She sees it through a wide-eyed sort of naïveté…to get to see the beauty of Manhattan as only a first-time visitor can. You live in a city all of your life and you don’t see things that are around you after a while. Giselle gets to see them as if they’re all new, with childlike eyes.”

Many of the landmarks Giselle gets to discover are some of the city’s most recognizable, iconic and romantic places: Times Square, the Woolworth Building, many areas of Central Park, Columbus Circle, the ultra-hip neighborhoods of Tribeca and Soho, and the Brooklyn Bridge (with production practically commandeering the entire bridge for shooting). Shooting also took place on three state-of-the-art soundstages at Brooklyn’s Steiner Studios and on the grounds of the famed Brooklyn Navy Yard.

To design the distinctive look of the live-action majority of ENCHANTED, filmmakers signed accomplished production designer Stuart Wurtzel, who elaborates, “I really wanted to bring a visual splendor and romance to the film. The movie plays on old icons and modern New York icons, and I am bringing those together in my interpretation of the script. We combine the fairytale elements and represent them in an elaborate, flowery, art nouveau style. And then we contrast that with the hard-edged, geometric angles of the city of New York. Essentially, this is about an innocent girl coming to the big, bad city. She transforms the city, which becomes softer and, at the same time, the city transforms her into a real, fully-rounded human being. The film is about being true to your heart. In an animated world, the characters take everything at face value; in the real world, Giselle learns about emotional depth.”

Costume designer Mona May’s contribution to the production cannot be overestimated. May says, “This is like a designer’s dream, because you create a whole ‘other world.’ We’ve gotten to re-invent characters that have been around Disney for such a long time. Because we are re-inventing Disney classics and the essence of what Disney is all about, it was important that the costumes match the animation in all its splendor and wonder. It has been challenging, because the animation is two-dimensional, traditional flat animation, and we have to make the characters and their costumes come to life.”

To accomplish this, the costume designer utilized extreme layering and detail for the live-action version of the costumes—lots of beautiful detailing, with intricate butterflies and flowers—the result of theoretically combining the classic style of Disney animation art with the style of art nouveau. To exaggerate the differences between fairytale and real life—fanciful and straight lines—Giselle’s look evolves from feminine, frilly and puffy, to sleek, sophisticated and slick…a Manhattan woman. This is most evident in the contrast between her glittering, butterfly-adorned, white wedding dress (which she wears as she falls down the well and emerges for her first day in New York) and the gown she wears in the grand ball (which is a clean-cut, figure-hugging knock-out number in lavender).

Sarandon’s Queen Narissa is clad in wear that transfers more convincingly to the capital of fashion which, May explains, “looks slinky and sexy....but there is also a metro-dominatrix element to her costume, which is made of leather. It’s purple and black, silver leaf, shiny, painted in enamel, with scales on it to make it look like a dragon, all of which reflects her innate evil.

“For Prince Edward,” the costume designer continues to explain, “we designed his look with enormous sleeves and padded shoulders made out of foam…again, to emulate the animator’s proportions on a human, so they are quite large, and were also quite challenging.”

The costume designer also designed the transition that Patrick Dempsey’s character goes through. “Patrick’s Robert gets to go through a nice change in the movie. He comes in very rigid and closed up in a grey suit, a real ‘lawyer’ feel. We open him up throughout the film, with a little bit more color, so by the time he gets to the ballroom finale, he has this wonderful, 17th Century French fantasy outfit—which is not completely period correct—but very, very handsome.”

The challenges of combining a litany of filmic styles with a head-spinning list of filmic techniques was made glaringly apparent in the creation of the film’s final sequence… and being a Disney-inspired fantastical journey, where else would such a scene take place, except at a grand ball? The director offers, “The whole ending of the movie—from the point where they arrive to the end of the ball—is really a conglomeration of everything that is Disney. We literally tried to take every single element that exists in the climaxes of Disney movies and pull them together in this movie and, needless to say, it was a huge undertaking.

“So, to start,” he goes on, “we’re at a ball, with around 100 dancers and about 150 extras just to populate that world—and the whole thing is choreographed, so there were two weeks of rehearsals just to get the dance down. All of our leads had to learn the dance. Then, the scene turns into a big spectacle, in which you have physical effects happening at the same time that you have digital effects interacting with the physical effects. I remember one shot specifically, Narissa’s transformation—we had to rehearse just that one moment for a whole day to make sure it could work, to make sure that the actors were all responding at the right time. And we had actors that we flew backwards based on the impact of what happened at certain moments in the scene. We have 150 extras all responding and looking at the same place on the screen, where we’ll later put Narissa as she’s growing, transforming. Of course, there’s interactive lighting all happening, because she transforms in a cone of fire.”

The upshot: five minutes of film took more than a week’s worth of filming, and the entire time, actors were interacting with something that wasn’t even there…a 35-foot-tall dragon, which, at prescribed times, grabs this actor, bites that actor, pulls another actor down the stairs. All of this was executed on a set that also had to ‘react’ from the dragon’s wrath.

To keep the crowd reaction consistent, Lima utilized an enormous Styrofoam head, standing in for the Narissa beast (just as a small strand of wire with a red ball on the end stood in for Pip, the CG chipmunk). Once the beast grabs Robert, it races up and out to the top of the Woolworth building. Per Lima: “We created our take on the classic ‘Beauty and the Beast’ / ‘Snow White’ climax. We filmed on six small set pieces that, when assembled onscreen, become the balcony. We had physical effects, because it’s raining. We have lightning. And we have Robert in the beast’s hand, so he’s being shot in a rig. We have this big old dragon on the side of the Woolworth building, hanging on to Patrick Dempsey, with Giselle and Pip climbing after to try and rescue him. It’s a great sequence and, most probably, one of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to accomplish… but boy, is it great.”