Many UCLA students are not strangers to parental pressures to
excel in everything from athletics to academics. But sometimes
being on the pre-med track for Harvard Medical School just
won’t cut it when your true desire is to be a filmmaker or a
world-class athlete.
Disney’s new film, “Ice Princess,” is
primarily about following your heart and your dreams. The story
follows Casey Carlyle, a nerdy, physics-inclined high school
student played by Michelle Trachtenberg, as she discovers her love
of figure skating. The central conflict in the film revolves around
Casey and her mother, Joan (Joan Cusack). Whereas Joan wants her
daughter to attend Harvard, something Joan herself was never able
to do, Casey’s true passion is figure skating.
And like Casey, director Tim Fyell had to convince his mother
that pursuing the career he wanted was the best thing for him to
do.
“I related to this movie because my mom never wanted me to
go into theater originally or film or TV,” Fyell said.
“A lot of parents don’t necessarily initially support
their children. I think that’s a very strong theme, a
universal theme.”
While Fyell was successful in getting to do what he wanted to
do, Hadley Davis, who wrote the screenplay for “Ice
Princess,” was not. Davis, who was a dancer growing up, says
her parents were never very keen on her chosen extracurricular
activity.
“My parents made it clear to me that the life of a
ballerina was no life for their daughter,” said Davis.
“There were a couple of times where they prevented me from
being in performances if they were on a school night. I always knew
it wasn’t what I was supposed to do.”
Davis eventually gave up ballet to pursue a degree in English
and write for television shows such as “Dawson’s
Creek” and “Spin City.” But she was able to take
her discouraging experiences and translate them into sources of
artistic inspiration.
In fact, Cusack’s character is modeled after Davis’s
own mother. Cusack, who has two children of her own, ages 4 and 7,
has very different views about parenting than her character of the
same name.
“(With parenting), it’s not about making a
mini-you,” she said. “It’s about making them into
the best that they can be.”
It doesn’t always take a parent to discourage your dreams,
though. Trachtenberg worked with a particular coach on the film who
said to her the first day before training for the film began,
“You’re not an ice skater; you’re an actress.
Don’t kid yourself.” The coach told her to let her
skating doubles do everything.
In the end, after Trachtenberg trained on the ice for five hours
a day, five days a week, and went through extensive ballet classes,
she was able to prove the coach wrong.
“I did tricks and I did spirals and spread eagles, and at
the end of the day, I had that satisfaction of knowing that I did
what someone thought I couldn’t do,” Trachtenberg
grinned.