Posted in: Disney, Movies | Tagged: disney, film, halle bailey, the little mermaid

The Little Mermaid Director Reveals His Biggest Concern for the Film

The director of Disney's The Little Mermaid recently addressed the difficulties of making an underwater musical in live-action form.

For many, Disney's beloved animated film The Little Mermaid serves as a cherished memory, with unforgettable musical numbers, the all-too-common forbidden love story, and obviously, a colorful depiction of life under the sea. So when it was announced that the film would be getting a big-budget Hollywood adaptation, plenty of fans had concerns about how it might translate those important elements on-screen.

Thankfully, the early buzz surrounding the film is saying it might just be Disney's best live-action adaptation so far, which means that the film's creative team has managed to overcome a few prominent challenges which were unavoidable roadblocks for mainstream audiences.

The Obstacles of Making an Underwater Musical with The Little Mermaid

When discussing the challenges of making an underwater musical in live-action form with Deadline, The Little Mermaid director Rob Marshall explains, "That was the most daunting aspect of this whole thing and why I almost didn't say yes. I thought I don't know how to do that; it's impossible. No one's ever really done a live-action underwater musical. There have been beautiful underwater sequences, but to do production numbers, songs, scenes with live actors underwater, how do you do that? You can't sing and speak underwater. So it became a blue screen stage situation. I brought on a great team of people, our visual effects supervisor, Tim Burke, our editor Wyatt Smith, and our DP, Dion Beebe."

Marshall adds, "Myself and the producer John DeLuca, we sat down with them and started to actually create storyboards and then went right directly into pre-visualization so we could literally choreograph in advance the entire underwater part of the film. Every single move of every actor, like Hitchcock used to do. Here, it had to be like that so we could figure out how the camera would move and how the people would move. We knew they would be on different kinds of rigs, and we actually kept using newer rigs. Each time we turned around, there was something new that came out. Like one they call the tuning fork, this huge crane arm with a disc that an actor can sit in and spin around and move. We used that, teeter totters and wires, and pre-planned it all and put it into almost like a little mini-movie."

The Little Mermaid officially arrives in theaters on May 26, 2023.

Enjoyed this? Please share on social media!

Stay up-to-date and support the site by following Bleeding Cool on Google News today!