LOS ANGELES—Rob Marshall has gone where no director has gone before—he's become the first person in motion picture history to direct a movie that can claim six Academy Award-winning actors on the day of its release. Talk about potential ego problems!

Nine, a musical based on the Broadway play of the same name, stars two-time Oscar winner Daniel Day-Lewis (My Left Foot, There Will Be Blood), Nicole Kidman (The Hours), Marion Cotillard (La vie en rose), Penélope Cruz (Vicky Cristina Barcelona), Judi Dench (Shakespeare in Love), and Sophia Loren (Two Women). Add Academy Award nominee Kate Hudson (Almost Famous) and pop diva Stacy “Fergie” Ferguson and one would assume that Marshall would be overwhelmed.

Not so, according to Kidman. In a New York hotel room, she says that the stars were supportive of one another and inspired by Marshall.

“They (egos) are not a part of it if you love what you do because you are just happy to be around people who love what they do," says Kidman. "I came into the rehearsal room and I saw Kate dancing up a storm and I thought ‘that is amazing. Maybe she will get a Broadway show out of this because she so deserves to be the lead in a show.’ But it starts with Rob. He was in the trenches working every day and that is what you need to be around to do good work. It is contagious and inspiring.”

The movie, which opens Christmas Day, stars Day-Lewis as a Federico Fellini-esque Italian film director named Guido Contini who needs a hit. He assembles his cast and has a title but still doesn’t have a script. As he tries to create a screenplay for his star (Kidman) and makes a feeble attempt to separate his wife (Cotillard) from his mistress (Cruz), he finds sanctuary in the memories of his mother (Loren) and a prostitute he knew when he was a child (Ferguson). Meanwhile, a Vogue writer (Hudson) is trying to learn more about the movie and Contini. As things start to spin out of control he comes to the conclusion that the only person he can turn to for support is his long-time costume designer (Dench).

Marshall, himself an Oscar winner for directing Chicago, says that if he found the film to be overwhelming it had more to do with the cast’s support of him and each other.

“I had to sort of separate who these incredible women were from the work we had to do. We had so much work ahead of us. We had this huge mountain to climb and all of us were just focused on the work. But this really is a dream cast and putting it together was one of the great joys of this. There is a luxury that happens when you do a musical film. You have to rehearse. We had six weeks of rehearsal and two weeks of pre-record and it was during that time that we created a company. It is a scary time when you are putting together a musical. The support that I saw amongst the company was extraordinary. I saw people watching other people’s rehearsals. I remember Daniel coming to the shoot for Penelope’s number. It was a hard number and he was saying you are a warrior it was a beautiful thing and that is what I felt amongst the company everyone was so proud of the work everyone was doing. So every day I was overwhelmed by this extraordinary cast.”

Marshall had a crop of good actors in Chicago, a movie that starred Richard Gere, Renée Zellweger, Queen Latifah, and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and he says that casting has always been the key to making a movie for him.

“Not only am I looking to cast specifically to fill the roles but I have to like the people I am working with," says Marshall. "I remember when I was starting to direct, a director I knew came to the set and said ‘remember, everyone is here to serve you’ and he walked off the set. I thought ‘it is exactly the opposite. I am there to serve them.’ I have the greatest actors and the best company I could imagine and they have magic in them so it was important to me to create an atmosphere where they felt they wouldn’t be judged. There was fear every day and to me the most important thing was to make them feel that they could do their best work.”