Don Hahn
(Photo: Alex J. Berliner/ABImages)
Don Hahn was at the heart of the Disney Renaissance, which he chronicled in his documentary Waking Sleeping Beauty. As the producer of the 1991 Beauty and the Beast and an executive producer on the 2017 live-action adaptation, he has a unique perspective on the “tale as old as time.” We were honored to spend a few moments talking to Don about the upcoming film:
Laughing Place: Congratulations on what seems to be the third successful iteration of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. How do you wrap your head around that? It seems like pre-sales are going great; it’s hard to get a ticket for that opening night, so is that hard to fathom?
Don Hahn: Yeah it is. There’s no guarantees in life, and there’s even fewer guarantees in the movie business, so I suppose a lot of it goes back to the original movie in 1991 and the good will that that built. But goodwill is no guarantee that the new movie’s going to be appreciated or do anything, and I think what the audience, hopefully, is starting to see and what you saw was that there’s a real appreciation and homage to the animated movie, but there’s also kind of artistic bravery to retelling that story, and bringing more dimension to Belle and the Beast and bringing more to that story that was there before. I love that. I love that about what Bill Condon brought to this. I love it about what the cast has brought to this, so it’s humbling to be honest, and I can only hope the audience enjoys it as much as we enjoyed making it for the last 25 or more years. It’s always wonderful when you can get a group of filmmakers under the direction of a great director to bring something to the screen that the audience appreciates. There’s no guarantee that that’s ever going to happen, and when it does, it’s a little bit of a miracle.
LP: There have been plenty of movies that have tried to reboot, or sequel, or re-quel, that have not been successful, but this one seems to walk that line between playing homage to the classic while also bringing something new. Was that a hard line for everyone to walk to figure out what to keep, what to change, what to enhance?
DH: I think Bill did it with a great amount of respect for the original, but not so much respect that it just became a kind of regurgitation of the original one. So much of it goes to him and the cast and what they brought to this, and the song writers. You know, what Alan was able to bring to this. He’s known this property, as you say, through the trifecta of animation, Broadway, and live action, and was able to bring some great new songs to it, so yeah. It’s difficult, it’s scary, terrifying perhaps, but in the end you’re trying to bring a sincere retelling of the story to the screen, and the audience is too sophisticated to know when it’s not.
The audience knows, or senses at least, when it’s a cash grab. When it’s just something being done for monetary reasons, as opposed to something being done as a sincere form of storytelling, and I think here you have a cast, and a director, and a team that wanted to sincerely go back and revisit this material. That also is something the audience can sense. They can sense, not just the effort, but the intention behind it. Hopefully that’s what you saw when you saw the movie is a sense of trying to add on to the bones of the story, but also do something that’s done in a way that when the lights go down and you can suspend your disbelief and be transported entirely to this new world. That’s the trick of it all.
LP: Do you think the Broadway musical prepped audiences to know that you could retell this classic Beauty and the Beast and pay tribute to it, while also giving it something new?
DH: Yeah, I think in part that’s right, but it also a story that’s been retold for probably 10,000 years, going back to Cupid and Psyche, so it’s something that you can look at and say, “This is a story about looking within. About breaking a curse. A story that has some really traditional, wonderful fairy tale aspects to it.” So it really is a tale as old as time as Howard said, and it’s a chance to retell it in a modern age, as we did in ’91, and now to flesh that out a little bit more now, so yes. I think the audience, the Disney audience knows it as something on Broadway and knows it as something that can be retold in a few ways, but the audience in general, had they never seen the original movie, would know, or at least sense, that this is a story that’s been around for a long time.
LP: Do you have one piece of, out of all the advice you gave them that as they were starting to undertake this, based on your experience making the ’91 film?
DH: I think if I did and if I would give anybody any advice in remaking this or any movie, it would be to not be so precious about staying so close to the original movie that it just becomes boring for the audience. You have to take risks, and you have to step away and say, “Okay. Yes, the original movie was revered and wonderfully so,” but you have to take some risks and step away and say, “What can we add to it? What can we embellish on? What can we delete from it that didn’t work? What can we do to take some bold steps?” And whether it’s this film, or we did the same on Maleficent, you know, just to be able to say, “What’s this? What’s the appropriate approach to this material? Yes, with respect to the original, but more boldly with respect to the audience and what the audience can and wants to see in this movie.” You know, usually my advice is to, yes, thank you very much, be true to the original movie, which Bill and his team really were, but also take some risks and tell us more about Belle’s back story. Tell us about Belle’s mother. Tell us about the Beast’s backstory. Show us more that we didn’t see when the movie came out 25 years ago. That’s I think rewarded ultimately by the audience if it’s done right.
LP: Your films seem to last. Beauty and the Beast is obviously coming back, The Lion King, there’s the “live action adaption”, as well as The Lion Guard. Do you look back at your work, not that your work is complete, and understand why your products might have had such staying power?
DH: I really honestly sometimes wonder about that. I know personally it’s because, not only the talent, but the times lined up. We were able to pull together a group of the people in the 80s and 90s who wanted to reinvent animation and show that they also could do animation. We studied at the seat of the animators that animated with Walt Disney and invented the art form, so we just wanted to show, you know, our generation can do the same thing, and whether it’s lived up to, or exceeded, or could compare to Walt Disney’s films, I don’t know. In a funny way it may not matter.
The satisfying thing and mystery to me is why they resonate, and the best excuse that I can come up with is that they’re stories sincerely told with great attention to characters, and great attention to the human condition, and even though they’re animated and done with pencils, or pixels, or whatever they’re done with, they’re about human beings, and they’re about what it’s like to a human being, and what it’s like to love, and care, and lose, and be hated, and be abused. You know all those things that fairy tales deal with, and if they’re told in a sincere and plausible way with great beauty and great care, the audience really responds to those.
There’s no guarantee they’re going to respond to those, so you try and you work on movies that some connect more than others, but with films like Beauty, it was a great fairy tale, thousands of years old, and the planets were in alignment to get Howard Ashman and Alan Menken on the film, along with Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale, and the team that did the original, and yet again 25 years later, the planets are in alignment to get Bill Condon, and Emma Watson, and Dan Stevens to do the same thing. They were brave enough to reimagine it, and they were brave enough to bring their own heart, and soul, and humanity to it, and I think that’s what the audience feels when they see it.
LP: Is it great that this film will help bring the storytelling of Howard Ashman, from whom the amount of stories we got from him was cut unfortunately short, to a whole new generation?
DH: Yeah, it really is. In fact, I haven’t talked about this a lot, but I’m working right now on a documentary about Howard, and for that very reason, he’s one of the great songwriters of our generation and of the 20th century, and his life was cut short, and there’s so much of him in this film. This is the last piece of work he did, and he died without seeing it. It breaks my heart to think of him, and what he might have given us, but in the end he gave us these great movies to look at, and live with, and remember him by. To be able to pay tribute through a documentary or through a film like Beauty and the Beast is terrific, and most of the audience will know Howard or his name, but to you and me he means a lot and he means so much of a huge part of the kind of Disney legacy that’s what our generation grew up with as filmmakers or as audience members.
Beauty and the Beast opens in theatres March 17th.