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A recent national survey found that ice-skating is America’s second most popular sport, with only pro football gathering more votes from sports fans.
For all these reasons, figure skating seemed like a fantastic backdrop for a contemporary story of a young girl’s transformation and personal empowerment to ICE PRINCESS producer Bridget Johnson and Walt Disney Studios’ vice-president of production, Karen Glass. They envisioned a kind of circa-2005 Cinderella story about a smart but awkward teenaged girl whose humdrum life as a high school brain changes overnight when she discovers she has the talent to become a figure-skating champion—if only she can believe this crazy-sounding dream is possible. Through hard work, faith and fierce determination against the odds, an “Ice Princess” is born. “We were interested in a story about a young girl who overcomes all kinds of tough and entertaining obstacles to live out her most secret dream,” says Johnson.
Taking off from the tradition of inspirational films like “Flashdance” and “Bring It On,” Johnson and Glass first approached screenwriter Meg Cabot, who previously wrote the acclaimed family film “The Princess Diaries,” the winning tale of a teen faced with a very different larger-thanlife fantasy—discovering that she’s royalty. Cabot brought her trademark touches of modern fairy tale and contemporary humor to the story of ICE PRINCESS, and screenwriter Hadley Davis built upon Cabot’s story, using her own experiences as a teenage ballerina to shape the dramatic conflicts and humorous skating characters. “ICE PRINCESS was inspired by my own story,” says Davis. “Like the film’s Casey, I grew up on a pond in New England, where I skated on winter afternoons. My passion, however, was not skating but ballet—a world with many similarities to that of figure skating. The girls I danced with as a child and teenager in Boston Ballet—and their stage mothers—were indeed the prototypes for the three competitive ‘Ice Princesses,’their parents, and skating coach Tina Harwood. But it is the central conflict of ICE PRINCESS that hits closest to home. Like Joan Cusack’s character, my parents wanted me to attend a top-notch college—rather than dance—and at times forbade me from performing on a school night. At their urging, I gave up ballet to attend the University of Pennsylvania. I do not have regrets but I occasionally have ‘what if’pangs. ICE PRINCESS is the answer to my fantasy: what if I had gone after my Sugar Plum Fairy dream...” When executive producer William W. Wilson read the script for ICE PRINCESS, he was taken aback not only by the humor and athletic suspense of the story, but by the story’s emotional impact, even on an adult. “I was really moved by the story of this young girl who grew into an incredible skater against all odds,” he comments. “I found it really inspiring to watch someone stick by her dream, no matter how difficult, and go for it.” In the search for a director, Johnson looked at over a hundred feature films, short films and television movies trying to find a director who was able to capture real performances with a light touch and comic timing.
“Tim is a really gifted person who cares passionately about storytelling,” says Bridget Johnson. “He wanted to make a film that would resonate not only with a younger audience but would also be a lot of fun for adults as well, and we all shared in that vision.” It was the underlying theme of a girl’s empowerment that most captured Fywell’s attention. “This story is about the way that teens need to discover their own dreams—not their parent’s dreams or the dreams they think they are supposed to have because that’s really not going to work—but the things they most want to do in life for themselves,” he says. “It’s really about a girl finding her own way, and it’s also a very funny story about a teenager in a strange new world, and those are the kinds of stories that most interest me.” Always a big sports fan, Fywell also saw ICE PRINCESS as a chance to provide a dynamic and different visual take on the increasingly athletic and extreme world of triple jumps and lightning-fast spins that skating has become today. He was excited to take on a challenge that would push him to his own creative edge. “I didn’t know that much about figure skating when I took on ICE PRINCESS, but I was definitely intrigued by it, and I knew that I wanted to find a way to really go into this world and make it involving for everyone,” he says. “The task for me was to try to really bring skating to life and put the audience out there on the ice with Michelle as she experiences the thrill of flying through the air. With some innovative camerawork, I think we were able to capture skating in a new way.”
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One of the most beloved of the Winter Olympics events, skating has become not just a showcase for amazing speed, power and gravity-defying beauty but a sport celebrated for giving young firebrand athletes a chance to make their wildest dreams come true. It’s the rare sport in which a young woman can hope not only to become a champion, but to live out the enchanted life of a fairy-tale princess. 
“We also felt that today’s world of figure skating was a youth subculture just waiting to be explored on screen. Skating is filled with fascinating characters, dramatic conflicts, the most extreme dedication and, like all sports, its own funny, dirty little secrets. It’s also an amazingly precise and difficult sport—and we wanted to capture how awe-inspiring the power, the grace and the sheer magic of it all can be up close.” 
She found what she was looking for in Tim Fywell, the British director who recently won acclaim for his magical portrait of an eccentric family living in a decrepit English castle in “I Capture the Castle.” Despite the fact that Fywell had no personal experience with figure skating, his ability to spin a compelling story with teens at the center was clear.