Bill Condon on the challenges of adapting a 'tale as old as time'

The Business

KCRW

Tv & Film

4.6 • 676 Ratings

🗓️ 25 March 2017

⏱️ 29 minutes

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Summary

Beauty and the Beast director Bill Condon is no stranger to musicals -- he wrote the screenplay for movie versions of Chicago and Dreamgirls -- the latter of which he directed as well. But when Disney approached him about making a live-action adaptation of its famous animated classic he was initially hesitant to take it on. He talks about what changed his mind and how he set about making the movie his own.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From KCRW, I'm Kim Masters, and this is the business.
0:04.6	This story has been around for three centuries now, and it keeps getting told, and it's about
0:11.1	this basic thing of looking beneath the surface and looking deeper and accepting people for
0:15.4	who they are, and if you're going to make that in 2017, you want to be more inclusive.
0:20.5	Reports of a gay moment in Disney's live action Beauty and the Beast made noise around the
0:25.2	world before the film even opened. Director Bill Condon swears he wasn't trying to create
0:30.4	an international incident. Any blowback was inconsequential, to put it mildly. The movie broke
0:36.6	box office records in its first weekend.
0:39.4	Condon talks about overcoming his misgivings about taking on a classic
0:43.0	and explains what his earlier Twilight movies have in common with Beauty and the Beast.
0:48.5	But first on the news banter, it's turning into a tale as old as time.
0:53.1	Bob Eiger re-ups at Disney again. Stick around. It's the business from KCRW.
1:03.9	I am joined by my buddy in banter, Matt Bellany of the Hollywood reporter. Hello, Matt. Hi there. So, Matt, for the fourth time, Disney has extended CEO Bob Iger's contract to 2019. At this point, we all sort of expect it. I find that the newspaper reporting on this, you know, frustrated in the search for a replacement, the board re-ups Bob Iger. It seems almost like Kabuki.
1:28.4	I don't know how hard they're looking.
1:30.0	We don't hear anything about some search for a replacement.
1:32.7	We just sit here and wait for Bob Iger to extend.
1:35.6	Now he says this time he's serious.
1:38.0	I don't know.
1:38.8	Maybe he is.
1:39.3	Maybe he isn't. If you look at this and you take it comically, you think, well, how hard do you have to be looking
1:45.8	to uncover people that you haven't seen before in all of these years of looking for a potential
1:52.4	successor? I mean, they went so far as to groom a guy, Tom Staggs, that they later decided
	...

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