Bill Condon Talks BEAUTY AND THE BEAST & Future of Movie Musicals

In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, BEAUTY AND THE BEAST director Bill Condon discusses the challenges of adapting the animated Disney classic to a live-action film, while at the same time, fulfilling fan expectations.

The 'Dreamgirls' helmer believes that the 2016 award-winning musical LA LA LAND will have a big impact on bringing movie musicals back to the big screen in the future. "It's going to be enormous," he says of the film's potential influence. "It's a rom-com musical, sort of a double-genre. It's so unique, you hope it suggests the way for people to be open to the idea of musicals of all scale, sizes and genres. La La Land points the way to the original musical, which has been rare onscreen. BEAUTY AND THE BEAST points the way toward animated musicals, which were kind of Broadway musicals brought to the screen. And Beyonce's Lemonade points the way to a whole other form - music and artist-driven 21st century songbook musicals. Maybe the classic Broadway canon may not be the place where future movie musicals come from."

Speaking on the challenges of turning 2D animated objects into 3D CG characters for the upcoming film, Condon shares, "The toughest one was probably Mrs. Potts. Fans have a rabid interest and sense of ownership of Mrs. Potts. Famously, her spout was her nose, but there was no way not to make her look like a pig. There was no way to make that appealing in three dimensions. So there was a lot of trial and error. We built all of these objects, but Mrs. Potts was the one that really only came together in post. When they were finally able to use reference footage of Emma Thompson reciting all the lines as we recorded them. I didn't want a tiny little Emma Thompson face. It's more just the elements, the way her mouth moves at certain points or her eyebrows, her essence."

The director also marvels at the amount of autonomy he was given by Disney which enabled him to bring his own vision of the timeless tale to life. "I have to say I'm very relieved that they trusted me," he says. "It was clear that I was as protective, even more protective, of what had been created. I knew it so well. To their credit, there was not a sense of second-guessing."

He goes on to share one example of the freedom he was afforded on the project. "There are a few songs that came out of the stage show that I would've liked to have used, but they didn't fit dramatically in terms of the script," he begins. "There's a big Beast aria in the show that became a hit in its own right called "If I Can't Love Her," but it was written as an Act 1 curtain number. The Beast sings it when he drives Belle away, right before she runs out to the wolves. It's not the right place for the Beast to sing it in a movie. In the movie, there's only really one place, and it's when he finally lets her go and he thinks he's lost her. Now, unfortunately, those lyrics don't work at that dramatic spot. You could change the lyrics to "Now that I've lost her," and that's something that [composer and lyricist] Alan Menken and Tim Rice and I considered, but collectively we thought, "Let's write something that specifically fits this moment." Onstage, you can have a character express his feelings for three minutes in a beautiful, powerful song and that's enough. In a movie, that character has to be somewhere different at the end of the song from where he starts, the story has to keep on. So literally, that became the story of the new song.

Read the interview in full HERE

Image courtesy of Walt Disney