Scratching beyond the SURFACE

IT’S ONE of the most popular fairy tales of all times, spawning four animations, five musical adaptations and countless video games over the last 30 years. Now “Beauty and the Beast” is back on the big screen, this time as a live-action remake of Disney’s 1991 animation. Directed by award-winning filmmaker and screenwriter Bill Condon of “Drramgitls” fame, the film features an ensemble cast that includes Emma Watson as the titular beauty with Dan Stevens, Luke Evans, Kevin Kline, Josh Gad, Ewan McGregor, Stanley Tucci, Audra McDonald, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Ian McKellen and Emma Thompson.
Condon recently took time out from his busy scheduled to answer some questions. Excerpts:

WHAT WAS IT THAT ATTRACTED YOU TO THE PROJECT?
I think it was my love of the animated film. I saw it in 1991 when I was already in my 30s but even at that age I thought it was the most perfect movie. The film was truly groundbreaking, in the way that the story was told, with that incredible score from Alan Menken and Howard Ashman. It was a wonderful surprise when the animated film was nominated for Best Picture, and then soon after that, the Academy created a new animation category.
 So “Beauty and the Beast” had a big impact back then. It was a big step forward in terms of the animation…it was one of the first films to incorporate CG-animation. But more than that, it really gave us the first modern Disney heroine, someone who doesn’t want to be a princess, who doesn’t really care about finding her prince. That was a cultural leap, certainly in the world of fairy tales. The general theme, which was relevant when the story was written in the 18th century and is still relevant today, is that we shouldn’t be distracted by surface beauty and that real beauty comes from within. And that’s a message worth imparting, especially now, especially to children.
Plus, musicals are something I’ve always been interested in, so the opportunity to take something that had been written as an animated film and be able to really bring it into the tradition of live-action musicals was very exciting.

WHAT WAS YOUR PRIMARY OBJECTIVE WHEN ADAPTING AN ANIMATED FILM INTO A LIVE-ACTION ONE?
What we wanted to do was bring the story into reality, not create a new story. That’s intimidating, because this is a story that has lived in many forms and in many languages, and has so many fans. I wanted to make sure that instead of pushing aside what people love about the story, our new telling really answered questions about that story – questions fans may not have even realised they had about Belle and about the Beast specifically, and how they came to be who they are today.
HOW DID EMMA WATSON COME TO BE CAST AS BELLE AND WHAT DOES SHE BRING TO THE ROLE?
Emma Watson was a name I immediately thought of, as did Disney. It was a question of meeting and gauging her interest and, because it’s a musical, making sure she had the chops, which she did. We all know how intelligent and worldly and sophisticated Emma is, and while that doesn’t describe Belle, it is what Belle aspires to be and it is the innate intelligence that Emma brings to the role that is such a crucial element when doing a live-action film. That was a big reason for casting her, because I think that of all the actresses of her age or of her generation, she is the one who is most closely defined with women’s issues.

TALK ABOUT DAN STEVENS AS THE BEAST.
I’d worked with Dan before…he had a part in a movie I’d made called “The Fifth Estate,” so I was a fan of his and already knew he could sing. Plus, I had been following his career for a while and knew he had been taking roles in interesting movies and wasn’t pursuing the big mainstream thing. He has an amazing range and I think he’s one of our best actors. I talked to him, and was thrilled to find out |he was interested.

HOW DID THE LOOK OF THE BEAST COME ABOUT?
Creating the Beast was a very complicated and challenging process because of the amazing CG work that’s been done over the past few years with characters like Gollum and the apes in “Planet of the Apes” raising such a high bar. However, this was yet another step, because the Beast is the lead of the movie, the romantic lead, and he has to sing a big song as well. We tried a lot of different variations on method, and spent a year trying to figure things out before we finally landed on a process that is quite exciting.
Dan wore a body suit with big stilts that gave him the height of the Beast, so that Emma was always playing to somebody who was as big as the Beast, but not in a typical CG way. Dan was there, his face was completely visible, and he gave this full performance that Emma was able to play off of. Then later he would step into a facial motion capture rig where every pore in his face was sprayed, and all the information in his performance was fully captured – a performance that then gets covered with the Beast’s fur and features. It takes a very specific actor, a well-trained actor, who is game to try something new, but this process became something that he almost looked forward to because he saw it as a technical challenge.

HOW WAS THE INTERACTION BETWEEN THE LIVE-ACTION AND ANIMATED CHARACTERS ACCOMPLISHED?
So many scenes take place between actors like Emma and other actors like Ian McKellen (Cogsworth) who actually aren’t there on the day you are filming. We rehearsed all together so the actors could play off each other before we actually shot it, then we recorded them and played those recordings on the set. We also did pre-visualisation so that I could show the actors exactly what that character is going to look like in |the shot that we’re filming.
There was a whole array of tools that serve the same goal, which is make everything feel as real as possible.