BILL CONDON Biography

Transcription

1 BILL CONDON Biography BILL CONDON (Director) is a celebrated film director and Oscar - winning screenwriter. His most recent projects include the drama Mr. Holmes, starring Ian McKellen as an aging Sherlock and Laura Linney as his long- suffering caretaker, and, on stage, the celebrated revival of the musical Side Show, which premiered at Washington D.C. s Kennedy Center before coming to Broadway. Condon s film adaptation of the Broadway smash Dreamgirls won two Academy Awards and three Golden Globes including Best Picture Musical or Comedy. Condon directed from his own screenplay and was nominated for a Directors Guild of America Award. The cast featured Jamie Foxx, Beyoncé Knowles, Eddie Murphy and introduced Jennifer Hudson, who was honored with numerous critics prizes, as well as the Oscar, Golden Globe, BAFTA, and Screen Actors Guild Award for her performance. Condon also wrote and directed Kinsey, for which he won the 2005 Best Director Award from the British Directors Guild. An uncompromising portrait of one of the 20th century s most influential and controversial figures, Kinsey also earned a Los Angeles Film Critics Best Actor Award for its star, Liam Neeson, as well as an Academy Award nomination for Laura Linney as Best Supporting Actress. He also wrote and directed Gods and Monsters, which earned Condon an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. The film also won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Feature and was named Best Picture of 1998 by the National Board of Review. The film, a poetic meditation on the final days of Frankenstein director James Whale, also garnered Oscar nominations for its stars, Ian McKellen and Lynn Redgrave. Condon wrote the screenplay for the big- screen version of the musical Chicago, for which he received a second Oscar nomination. The film, which starred Renée Zellweger, Catherine Zeta- Jones and Richard Gere, won six Academy Awards, including Best Picture of Condon also directed the two- part finale of the blockbuster Twilight film series Breaking Dawn, as well as The Fifth Estate, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Daniel Brühl and Alicia Vikander. Born in New York City, Condon attended Columbia University, where he graduated with a degree in Philosophy. An analytical piece he wrote for Millimeter magazine brought him to the attention of producer Michael Laughlin. Condon subsequently co- wrote the feature film Strange Behavior with Laughlin, who also directed the film. The movie became a cult hit, leading to the unofficial sequel,

2 Strange Invaders. Condon made his directorial debut with Sister, Sister, which starred Jennifer Jason Leigh, Judith Ivey and Eric Stoltz. Condon has served on the Board of Film Independent and on the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Q&A: 2 # # # 1. What was it that attracted you to the project? A. I think it was my love of the animated film. I saw it in 1991 when I was already in my 30s (and I know it means a lot to people who saw it when they were a kid), but even at that age I thought it was the most perfect movie. Dramatically, it is just so powerful. The film was truly groundbreaking at the time, 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 because the film did usher in a golden age of animated movies. 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. The dance in the ballroom, for example, and those amazing, swooping shots that hadn t been possible until then. 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. Someone who s more interested in books and seeing the world and figuring out who she is than in finding a guy and getting married. She happens to do those things by the end of the film, but it s not because that is her main focus. So that was really a bit of 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 everything that dazzles, and that real beauty comes from within. And that s a message worth imparting, especially now, especially to children. For Disney, this title is one of the great jewels in the crown, and I knew the studio would give us all the means necessary to make it everything it could be, and those kinds of opportunities don t come along too often. I feel very lucky to have been given this chance to work with this material, especially now that 25 years later, technology has caught up to the ideas that were introduced in the animated movie, so it is possible, for the first time, to create a photo- real version of a talking teacup on a practical set in a completely realistic live- action format. I think all of us feel like the Beast at some point or another, so I think that s one way that I connected with it that and the fact that he finds the way to his own humanity, which is such a beautiful story. 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. There s just something about this story and the score that is magical, and I think that is what still draws people in and makes this such a special experience. 2. What was your primary objective when adapting an animated film into a live- action one? A. There are recent movies that have been top- to- bottom reinventions, or stories re- told from another character s point of view or something this is not that. What we wanted to do was bring the story into reality, not create a new story, and it is an honor to have a chance to create something that is

3 3 both reverential of the original and somewhat of a modernization at the same time. But it is intimidating as well, 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 realized they had about Belle and about the Beast specifically, and how they came to be who they are today. The delightful animated film from 1991 plays as classic animation, but if you want to go a level deeper into the story and into the songs and into the emotions, that s what this live- action film delivers: a greater depth of emotions. It s not just taking something that is drawn and making it photo- real the characters have to behave in a way that is recognizably human and be given an emotional core. Like when Belle is leaning over the Beast and finally says, I love you our challenge was to make the audience believe that, as humans, there was no one else in the world for them. Or when Belle is in town in the first big musical number where she is walking through the village: how did she get there? I m not saying we added scenes, but as the movie progresses you understand what it is that led her and her father there, and also what it is that makes her feel like such an outsider. And it s the same with the Prince: not just, Boy, he sure was nasty that one night, but what turned him into that man who deserves to be cursed. So those are the kinds of things that the film fills in, and that s what excited me about doing it. It was like a really fun puzzle. 3. How did Emma Watson come to be cast as Belle and what does she bring to the role? A. 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. Her activism with the U.N. has really become her life s mission. I remember writing her a note and pointing out that actors making their careers become part of their own autobiography and that this seemed to be such a great fit in her life that I was hoping she was interested. It turned out she was. She had been interested for years, and had been developing her own version of it, so it was very exciting when she came on board. 4. Talk about Dan Stevens as the Beast. A. I d worked with Dan Stevens 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, and I talked to him, and was thrilled to find out he was interested. Taking this part on was more than just playing a role, because of all the incredibly complicated technical challenges he had to face, and the trust he had to place in everyone s hands that all this work would actually shine through at the end. Dan brings such warmth and nuance to the character, and was able to evoke all of the pain and the humanity that was still there and give a powerful performance, which is told predominantly through his eyes and voice. It was really quite astonishing. With a short temper, the Beast can easily lose control when anyone or anything crosses him, which became an interesting way to take something that was cartoonish and turn it into something authentic.

4 5. What can you tell us about the look of the Beast and how that came about? 4 A. 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 next step, because the Beast is the lead of the movie, the romantic lead, and he has to sing a big song as well. So that was something where you really just had to make sure that this was going to be something that didn t ever give you that feeling that he wasn t somebody who was real. So 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. It s hasn t been used all that often but has been developed in a way that is really shown off to a good effect in this film. Dan wore a body suit with big stilts that gave him the height of the Beast, so that Emma Watson 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. 6. Can you talk about the actors cast as Gaston (Luke Evans) and LeFou (Josh Gad) and how their characters differ from those in the animated film? A. Luke Evans is someone who is well known in London theater circles. He s done a lot of musicals on the West End and, of course, I knew him from some of the movies he made, and he s the kind of person who can come in and just blow you away in a room this size it s sort of impossible to get him out of your head, but he was born to play Gaston. And here s the thing about Luke: he has all the qualities that are right for Gaston, but he also has this other thing which comes from years of working on stage and is so important to have in a movie musical and that is the joy of performing and putting over a song and knowing how to do that. It can be a sad song, or one of Gaston s songs like the mob song, Kill the Beast, but even as he s doing something that makes you scared, there s still something about his sharing his pleasure in singing and performing that is just infectious. Our Gaston has the same values as the character from the animated film, but in a way that is more contemporary and more realistic. We now think of him as a war hero, who, at the age of 17, helped save the town from invaders, and now it is 12 years later and he still has not moved on. A wonderful comic creation from the original, Gaston is just this dumb, gorgeous guy the essence of beauty being only skin deep but he has to be somebody whom you believe could be walking around in our world, so we started to develop a different character for him. I knew Josh Gad as well. He was in the original cast of Book of Mormon and has this great big voice and is just a brilliant comedian, and Josh was pushing to give LeFou a slight turn, having him grow a little more skeptical of Gaston and everything he stood for. This actually involved a new lyric that Alan Menken had changed from Howard Ashman s original lyric as they re going to kill the Beast at the castle, which tells how he fears the wrong monster has been released he s sort of wondering if Gaston isn t more dangerous than the Beast. If you think back to the original, there is a lot of very broad comedy between LeFou and Gaston. LeFou used to be somewhat of a punching bag, and that s just not funny or interesting or credible in live action, but I think we were able to find the right balance. Josh has a very contemporary sense of humor, which is great.

5 7. Tell us about the characters Cogsworth (Ian McKellen) and Lumière (Ewan McGregor)? 5 A. I ve done a few movies with Ian McKellen, and we have a very special connection. I knew he s always wanted to do a musical and had come close to doing one a few times and I know how funny he is and that his favorite performer is Jackie Gleason (which is not what anybody would expect). We gave Cogsworth a slight change in character, this kind of major domo who runs the place becoming more of a tin horn general so as to give a contemporary twist to some of the jokes and that characterization. We were thrilled when he agreed to do it, and at the table read before we began shooting, he came in in his typically flustered way and started to read and just killed every line. It was so much fun from the very first minute, to see how perfect he was for the role. When casting the character who would sing what we know is the film s most well- known number, Be Our Guest, we needed someone who could really sell it in the way that Jerry Orbach, a great Broadway showman, did. I mean, who in our movie culture could do that now? We ended up finding the one person on the planet, Ewan McGregor, who had never heard the song before, so he was learning it as a new song, and thank God for that. He was so excited by the fact that we were doing something new with it that he quickly took ownership of it. Ewan brings a bit of that Moulin Rouge kind of joy to the character, and there s something so infectious about the way he sings and sells the song. 8. What about the rest of the cast, which includes Kevin Kline (Maurice), Emma Thompson (Mrs. Potts) and Audra McDonald (Madame de Garderobe)? A. I was so thrilled, and shocked, when Kevin Kline agreed to do this, because I know how particular he is about what he does, and like so many others, I ve been a huge fan of his for a long time. I remember him as a musical performer when he was very young, so to get him singing again was very exciting for me as a director. But more than that, all the deeper substance, the sense of loss and fear for Belle that is so beautifully captured by Kevin. Maurice is a good example of taking someone from the animated world and bringing them into the real world. He was a wacky inventor in the animated film, but here he s an artist who is trying to recreate a moment in his life that was perfect when he was living in Paris. That s something that was lost to him, so he s retreated from the world. I was so excited to spend time with him and Emma and Dan talking through the scenes and hearing everyone s wonderful ideas. And Kevin, especially, figured out how in really concise ways to communicate so much about who his character is. As for the character of Ms. Potts, Angela Lansbury in that part is iconic, and recently sang Beauty and the Beast again in concert and made everyone cry. But Emma Thompson has that same kind of warmth and connection to and history with an audience. It actually took a good deal of courage for her to take on such an iconic role and make it her own, so we gave her a little bit more of a backstory as to how Mrs. Potts connected to the Prince as a younger man and Emma was able to use the new stuff to better inform who she is and what she would do. And we got the genius of Broadway, Audra McDonald, to play Madame de Garderobe, the wardrobe, who is somewhat reinvented here. We had this idea of expanding the prologue with a maestro and his diva performing for the Prince at one of the balls in his castle, and Stanley Tucci plays the maestro, who then turns into a harpsichord, and the diva becomes the wardrobe. So now we get to see her as both a diva before the spell was cast, and a diva after. To be there to hear her sing, not only a new song but one of the old songs as well, was thrilling.

6 6 9. Talk about the interaction between the live- action and animated characters? How was that accomplished? A. So many scenes take place between actors like Emma Watson (Belle) 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- visualization so that I can show the actors exactly what that character is going to look like in the shot that we re filming. Then, there were maquettes or objects with lights on them to represent the household staff as they move and speak. So there was a whole array of tools that serve the same goal, which is make everything feel as real as possible. 10. Can you talk about the film s visual effects? A. It s interesting because it is such a hybrid in a way. The movie is completely photo- real, and almost all of it was shot on vast and intricate built stages, but there are aspects of the movie that are made almost exactly the way you would make an animated film. Take, for example, Be Our Guest. Emma Watson is the only human being in that scene, which takes place in the castle s dining room and kitchen and all the flatware is choreographed and all of the main household staff are singing and dancing, none of which actually exists. You have to completely imagine it just as an animator would. 11. What about the look of the film and the extraordinary crew you had in place. A. One of the great breakthroughs right from the start was working with our production designer Sarah Greenwood and deciding that this story was going to be set, not in some fairy tale alternate universe, but in a very specific time and place. We decided it would be the early 18 th century in the south of France, so approximately when the original fairy tale was written. Once you do that, it informs what the dress is going to look like, and how we do the teapot and candelabra. It really came out of the gorgeous and unbelievably ornate style in France at that time. When we started to go through it, it was like, Oh God, this is going to work because you could look at a candlestick and see that there was so much detail and so much adornment that you could almost see what looked like eyes and a nose. Sarah had a huge job in this as production designer, and that job can change from film to film, but also, in this case, she was in charge of everything visual in the movie. The Beast s castle is under a spell, and Sarah managed to effectively convey that feeling. It s like the air around and inside it is filled with some kind of black magic. We also had Jacqueline Durran doing the costumes and Tobias Schliessler as our DP. Tobias is someone I ve worked with many times before, and we ve done movies that have extremely different looks, like Dreamgirls, The Fifth Estate and Mr. Holmes. But for this film we spent a lot of time talking about what the feel of it was going to be, and I would say we took our cue from the design and the sense of period being somewhat stately, creating what I think are kind of painterly compositions with really carefully- wrought lighting. Also, just a sense, in terms of the movement of the camera, that in a movie musical, the camera is the choreographer and has to dance on the beat. And often it s just the sweep of a camera that can give you the sense of music and being inside the music, whereas on the stage you would depend on the dancer to do that. This was something we had a chance to do once before with Dreamgirls, but the big difference now is that, while both films were plotted out before we began to shoot, now the sets, all of which were built, were scanned and recreated in CG in a previs 3D format, allowing us to create a real movie (in terms of what the camera would be doing) before we even started

7 7 shooting. There were some things that, again, are so iconic from the original that you want to either do them or make a point to do them differently. For example, in the song Beauty and the Beast, it s that shot in the animated film which sweeps up onto the ceiling of the ballroom, and our version is different but still gives you a similar feeling. We sort of sweep off of them onto the ceiling and see that all of the carved instruments in the walls are actually coming to life and playing music, so we re sort of taking that again, translating it into a realistic world. The movie really is a tribute to the Golden Age of Hollywood musicals, and, in general, we wanted it to have a timeless feel to it, so that the camera moves would feel like they ve kind of always been with us. 12. Let s talk about the importance of music in the film and the addition of three new songs written by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman. A. When I was growing up people would say theater was dying, and theater has been dying for centuries now. I think the same thing can be said about the movie musical, not for centuries, but it has sort of been dying for the last 50 years. I want audiences to embrace the form and understand that, at its best, music and movies and musical numbers in movies don t distract, they don t interrupt, they deepen and help create meaning. If you re moved by something, you re more moved when you hear some of those Alan Menken notes or hear some of those Howard Ashman lyrics. At the end of a song, you should feel as though you ve arrived somewhere different from where you started otherwise it feels like the story just stops. Alan and Howard wrote the original music for the animated film, but when it came time to adapt the music for the Broadway production, Howard had, sadly, already passed away. That s when Tim Rice came on board, so both Alan and Tim have been involved with this project for quite some time, which is very fortunate for us. Alan is so generous, because I was filled with so many ideas and things I wanted to play with and it was all so new and exciting for me, and he just dove right in, not only writing three new songs but also rethinking some of the old ones. It is an 80- minute score, a spectacular, huge contemporary movie score, and it was so inspiring to work with him and to just see how alive this is for him. Fortunately, we have the score of the animated film which is great, and there was no way I was cutting one of those numbers they all work so perfectly, and we use all of those numbers in this film. And there s a Broadway version, which has a wonderful score as well. I tried to incorporate some of it, but that music was written for that medium. For example, there s a wonderful ballad that the Beast has, If I Can t Love Her, that has become iconic in its own right, but it s a first act curtain number. It fits the theatrical form, but it is not where a movie number should come, so looking at that, and looking at the ways we expanded the backstories of the Beast and Belle, it became clear that there were three important spots where we needed new songs. The first one is Kevin Kline s song, How Does A Moment Last Forever. It is an incredibly emotional new beat for the story, and for anyone who cares about the story, it will really ring true. It has the same wonderful musical qualities that the other songs do, and it really sits right beside the originals in that you can t get them out of your head. The song then develops throughout the movie and, in fact, becomes the song Celine Dion sings over the end titles. The second song is called Days In The Sun and really is the heart of the movie, right at the mid- point, where you hear from all the household staff what they hope for, what they re living for and what they hope will happen when the curse is lifted. And it also brings you back into the Beast s past because it was a song that was sung to him by his mother. And then the final new song, Evermore is the great eleven o clock number. The Beast has lost Belle and he sings about how that feels and what faces him as he watches her leave. And again, written with the movie in

8 8 mind, I gave Alan and Tim the image which was the Beast seeing Belle as she s riding away on her horse and he s trying to climb as high as he can so that he will keep seeing her, because he knows it is the last time he will ever see her. So it s all about that movement up the tower and him singing his heart out at the same time. And they came up with an absolutely spectacular song