Bill Condon and Ian McKellen talk about 'Beauty and the Beast'

• Bill Condon

What has the future in store, anything after Beauty And The Beast? 

That is my future [laughs], for the next two years until we finish it. You shoot a movie like this and that’s almost like the prep for the production which becomes the editing and creating so much of it in post [production]. In the case here, the household staff and creatures are computer-generated. 

It’s an important movie to a lot of people. I was a young adult when it came out and I loved it and there’s so many people in their 20s, 30s, 40s who saw it as children and love it. In a way that’s a good thing and a bad thing because people have strong feelings and memories of it - so we have to make sure we don’t screw it up. It’s great so far. Big and complicated but very, very fun. 

Will your Beauty And The Beast be a reimagining of the 1991 animated classic, or are you sticking strictly to the source? 

It’s interesting. First of all it’s a really perfect movie. What I’m hoping is, we’re expanding on things and bringing it into a third dimension means that characters can’t behave exactly in the same way. You know, Gaston and LeFou can’t be literally as cartoonish as there were in the movie. I’m hoping it’s a satisfying expansion of what people already know.

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• Ian McKellen

“The cheek of it made me want to do it,” he says. “They had written this fantastic character. He is a butler that gets turned into a clock. It is based on the Disney animation, although here animation is used for the characters that the prince sees when he is under the spell.” 

The prince-cum-beast, played by Dan Stevens, won’t be animated. “He will be a monster, a beast. Basically, I just have had to supply a voice and the animators will do the rest. Then, at the end of the film, the characters all turn back into their real selves and then I sing and dance in a Disney movie.”

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