Leave it to the guy with the musical skills to convince Disney to do a musical.

Speaking in a new profile piece over on Vanity Fair this week, the Dreamgirls director revealed that Disney was initially against making their live-action Beauty and the Beast a musical.

“With all due respect, I think you’re crazy,” he said to Disney, “The songs are too good. You’re going to spend all this time making a huge, gorgeous live-action Beauty and the Beast and not do ‘Be Our Guest’?”

Those remarks were seemingly enough to convince the studio to set their sights on a musical adaptation. And thankfully for fans of the animated movie, songwriter Alan Menken is back to make sure the film lives up to expectations (and he’ll write some new songs while he’s at it).

Elsewhere in his interview with Vanity Fair, Condon revealed that they’ll be using this new chance at telling the Beauty and the Beast story to answer some questions fans have had over the years.

“There are so many people who love the original film and love the Broadway show, and they’ve had two decades now to pick them apart and point out big questions and plot holes,” he said, “and in a lot of places we looked at those and said, ‘Hey, that’s a good question,’ or ‘That’s an excellent point, why don’t these townspeople know anything about this huge castle that’s like a mile away from their village?,’ and used those as jumping off points for our own discussions. So hopefully, this will be a film where a die-hard fan can jump up and say “exactly!'”

Beauty and the Beast stars Emma Watson and Dan Stevens. It opens in March 2017.

Related: Josh Gad explains why Beauty and the Beast will “blow people’s minds”

‘Beauty and the Beast’ without the music? Could you imagine it?

We would’ve been far, far less interested in this if it didn’t involve the cast singing the classics.