'JOHN Travolta is the perfect mom, " says Nikki Blonsky, a chubby Long Island teenager with oodles of talent who cheerfully subverts stereotypical ideas of female beauty in Adam Shankman's terrific musical remake of the 1988 John Waters cult comedy Hairspray. "The first time he hugged me, I felt I was hugging my own mom." Never mind that Travolta had to spend several hours every day putting on prosthetics and a 300lb fat suit to look the part of the iconic Edna Turnblad, originally played by the late lamented transvestite star Divine. "It just comes naturally to him, " Blonsky assures me.

While Travolta makes the character his own with a riproaring song and dance performance that may well win him his third Oscar nomination . . .he's like a rhinoceros moving with the grace of a ballerina . . .

Hairspray itself is a triumph for former dancer Shankman, a journeyman director of such profitable pot-boilers as The Wedding Planner, The Pacifier, Cheaper By The Dozen 2 and Bringing Down The House. "I've made a lot of movies that were just jobs, " he says. "This didn't feel like a job. It just flowed out of me. It seems like my entire life has been preparing me for Hairspray."

Not that he immediately stood out to New Line Cinema chiefs Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne. "I wasn't their first choice, " he says.

"I'd basically gone in and begged for it. I'd made movies that regardless of critical reactions had made a lot of money. I'm one of the very few choreographer directors around in Hollywood.

So I felt pretty qualified considering I was also good friends with the writercomposers Mark Shaiman and Scott Whitman and the writer of the screenplay Leslie Dixon.

"But they ended up going for Jack O'Brien and Gerry Mitchell, who had choreographed their Broadway musical version of Hairspray. I was heartbroken but I understood because the material was very precious to them. They'd been with it right from the start and this was its third reincarnation. Then after eight months there were scheduling difficulties and it opened up again for me. I was back in there like a tiger and I got it."

Hairspray doesn't need to update the original idea of a teen talent spoof set in segregated 1960s Baltimore. Its story of a local TV pop programme called The Corny Collins Show on which fame-hungry teenagers try out the latest dances . . . there's a 'Negro Day' for blacks . . . readily taps into the current American Idol mania but spiced with racial paranoia. The twist is that Blonsky's character, Tracy Turnblad . . . the fattest and least glamorous girl, who cheerily pushes herself forward in a black beehive hairdo having been assured by her dad that "big is beautiful" . . . wows not only the judges, despite attempts by scheming producer Velma (Michelle Pfeiffer) to rig the result, but the programme's heartthrob star Link Larkin, played by High School Musical's Zach Efron. She ends up leading a protest march against the station's colour bar.

"There was no point in just doing a remake of a John Waters movie, " says Shankman. "There had to be some compelling reason to do it. That reason is the music. Mark and Scott wrote all these incredible songs that feel like records and hits. They just really make you hum. I think we need movies like this right now because the world is so stressed out.

"As far as Velma is concerned, Tracy is a terrorist. Fear is the seed of prejudice and hatred.

What Tracy becomes is fearless and that's why she breaks through. But it's all in the singing and the music. The message is in the material. Hatred is not something you have to play out. It just exists."

Shankman is an outsider like Tracy. "Being Jewish and gay, I feel very much like her, " he says.

"I approached this entire movie seeing the world through her eyes and came to discover that they were my same eyes. As a child I was a minority because I grew up in a very non-Jewish area of Los Angeles. I've totally felt like an outsider but I've never believed in can't as a word. I will and I can. That's the bottom line for me."

He didn't start dancing until he was 18. "I'd been a competitive gymnast until I was 15, " he says.

"Then I stopped and got involved in musical theatre. A choreographer told me I should be a dancer. I auditioned for Julliard in New York and got in.

And that was miserable because they beat me with sticks and things like that because I had no training. I realised what I really wanted to be was a chorus boy. I wanted to do shows but they didn't regard shows as legitimate dancing. Who's to say what's dancing and what's not dancing?

It's ridiculous. Why can't we all just get along?"

He remembers going to Hairspray when it came out in 1988. "I was waiting tables in New York. I'd just dropped out of Julliard and I was starting to do regional theatre. My parents were like, what are you going to do with this? In my family you were supposed to be a lawyer or a doctor. But I just wanted to dance. They were very supportive of me emotionally, but they pretty soon stopped helping me financially. And then I was just making it on my own. And all these years later here we are."

It's the morning after Hairspray's world premiere in London, which, despite a torrential downpour, had a packed audience rocking. He's standing at the window of a private suite in the Savoy Hotel, looking out on the Thames and the great white Millennium Wheel. "I got lucky, " he says.

Dancing on Janet Jackson's 'Escapade' video won him acceptance in Hollywood as a choreographer. Soon he was coaching Marlon Brando and Johnny Depp on how to move in Don Juan De Marco. He was choreographer on The Out-ofTowners, Boogie Nights and dozens of other movies.

"All movies involve movement, " he says. "You have to move people. They have to be staged. I happen to be able to stage for the camera pretty fast and pretty well. I can make a scene move very convincingly just knowing how long you have to shoot it. I love having constraints like that.

That's the real challenge. If you give me a blank piece of paper, I'm lost. Anytime anyone says you can do anything, I'm lost."

Hairspray pulsates with movement, full of playful variations and shifts in tone.

Each number flows into another with a bounce reminiscent of classical musicals. Shankman draws on the fact that the cast are too young to have known the 1960s . . . even their parents were too young. "They've no preconceived notions, " he says.

"They're able to express the innocence of the time. It's like watching a lot of great question marks."

He rehearsed them for two months before they even saw a camera. "The way we did the read-through was like rehearsing a Broadway show, " says Zach Efron. "None of us were alive in the 1960s. So Adam told us to go watch all the movies from then.

And we could always ask John Travolta or Michelle Pfeiffer.

Between scenes John and Michelle were always sitting around together like two women talking about their children."

John Waters plays a cameo role in Hairspray. "He didn't want a big role, " says producer Craig Zadan. "He said he'd be a flasher because that's typecasting. He loved the script and gave us great freedom. Make it your own, he said. When he saw what we had done he sent an email: 'Thank you for making me a happy grandfather.'" After saying yes to Hairspray, John Travolta dithered for 14 months. "A lot of people thought he was scared of playing a woman, " says Zadan. "But he told me, 'Look, I've lived 30 years in the shadow of Grease . . . I'm afraid of doing another musical that might take away from that, I have to be careful I don't diminish it."

Shankman will next film Seventeen with Zach Efron, before directing Adam Sandler in Bedtime Stories. "The two Adams, " he smiles. "I think we're going to be funny together. We make each other laugh.

"Adam is making it for his daughter. There are a lot of computer graphics. It's a comedy fantasy. I like to be given stories.

I don't think I've any stories of my own that I feel I particularly need to tell. I just don't think I'm that important a person. I don't really feel I have to make important movies. I just want to make entertaining movies. I like entertaining people."

He set up his own production company with his sister Jennifer Gibgot. "We're doing a sequel to Step Up. I'm very proud because my best friend Anne Fletcher directed it. We used to dance together."

Maybe he'll never get another movie that's as personal to him as Hairspray. "I've a feeling it's going to be pretty defining for me. Because that is me up on that screen. It's like a oneway ticket into my brain. All that singing and dancing, that's how I see the world and approach the world. I can't seem to find another thing that's going to be that much how I am. I can't see it happening, but I hope it does."

'Hairspray' opens nationwide on Friday