Tuesday, October 3, 2017






2017 is the year that Bill Condon’s Beauty and the Beast obliterated a slew of box office records. Resting with worldwide tickets sales of over $1.2 billion, it’s currently the highest grossing movie of the year domestically with a take of $504.01 million.
However, even with a resume scattered with smaller films such as Gods and Monsters and Kinsey, he’s no stranger to monsters hits having helmed the final two Twilight movies that alone made $1.54 billion worldwide ($573.61 million domestic unadjusted for inflation).
With Disney's Beauty and the Beast expected to receive a glut of Oscar-nominations this year, it’s a situation he’s no stranger to. Dreamgirls, his 2006 musical drama, received eight nods and walked away with two wins.

I caught up with Condon to talk about his box offices beasts, Angelina Jolie rumors around his Bride of Frankenstein as part of Universal Studios’ Dark Universe franchise, as a Twilight revival and the release of his Director’s Extended Edition of Dreamgirls on Blu-ray and Digital HD.

Simon Thompson: Recalling your experience with Dreamgirls, how do you how do you look back on it?
Bill Condon: With great fondness. I have kind of show business forgetfulness and everything unpleasant fades away but in this case there really there's nothing that stands out as being anything but positive. It was a really exciting thing to figure out. I was I was thrilled personally to get the chance to make a musical movie, something that I loved and have loved my entire life and especially this musical which will always seem so big and ambitious and so rich. It was really a high point for me.
ST: How often do you revisit past projects?
BC: It depends. With this one, it was very fun to go back because we put this longer edit together at the time and then there was the idea of a 10th-anniversary edition but we missed that by a few months. We did a new mix and there were a lot of other things that we tweaked, a few of the cuts and things like that. I'd say that with Dreamgirls I will admit that if you come across it on cable I will find myself sitting there and watching it. It's a movie, even as a fan, I am kind of a partial to.
ST: Movies based on musicals are a hard sell for Hollywood and a lot of the time audiences don't get on board. Why do think this, and Beauty and the Beast, worked so phenomenally well and clicked?
BC: They're different in each case. If you look at the history, audiences started rejecting musical movies three years after they were invented, in the late 1920s and early 1930s people were like, 'Oh God! No more musicals!' It's sort of been this cycle ever since of embracing it and then moving away from them. I think this was sort of the beginning of what I would say is the most recent revival of the form that includes Moulin Rouge, Chicago, and then Dreamgirls. It's kind of nice because every year or two there does seem to be something that hits. Obviously, recently with La La Land, that was a wonderful surprise and had a big audience accepting it worldwide. I think there's an unfair burden that's placed on the form. Every genre has movies that are either good or bad. With musicals, with a lot of them, they're hard to make work and when they don't work the audience rejects them. I think they are more back in the mainstream than people might acknowledge.

ST: It's a little over a decade now since Dreamgirls was nominated for eight Oscars and Eddie Murphy didn't win Best Supporting Actor. To this day there will many people, including myself, who believe that he was robbed. What do you think?
BC: With awards, it's always tough because whoever wins, you don't want to talk an Oscar away from anybody. Alan Arkin won and he's an amazing actor and he deserved it. I do think that Eddie's achievement in that role, to me, was the highest level, it's what they give those awards for. It's a shame that he didn't get it and you hope that, as with others like Cary Grant and Judy Garland, that it will all lead up to something wonderful and they might get a special award or for something else. He's certainly got a lot of years left.
ST: This has been an amazing year for Beauty and the Beast with a worldwide box office take of over $1.2 billion. Did anyone see it landing and resonating as well as it did?
BC: No but I have to say you can obviously underestimate the appeal of the animated film. Taking it on, I did know how loved that movie was but this success incredible. I started as just a member of the audience and thought, 'Gosh, that score, imagine seeing that in the context of a live action movie. How exciting would that be?' I think the scope of it took us all by surprise but it always felt that if we'd done our jobs well there would be a substantial amount of people waiting to see it and there were.

ST: You have had success with musical movies while others have failed. What is the special sauce that you have that just makes it work?
BC: I think that there are a few basic rules and one of them is that you can't stop the story for a song. There has to be there has to be a real forward movement to bring characters to a different place by the end of a number than where they were at the beginning. If you take a look at Beauty and the Beast and the new number that we wrote, that's a song where he's in a completely different place of acceptance of his fate at the end of the song than he was at the beginning. On stage an actor can sing something for three minutes and you can just take pleasure in the music and the dramatics but in a movie it also has to be about the story and moving things forward.
ST: Talking about moving things forward, you had great success with the final two Twilight movies. There has been talk about reviving that in some way. As the guy who rounded that franchise off, would you consider returning in some capacity?
BC: No. I don't think I would do that again. It felt like that was fun to do, I was excited by the idea of bringing it to an end. Of course, with something like that that resonated with people, like anybody else I'm going to be interested in seeing what the next take on it is. I can never complain, as the person who took Beauty and the Beast from animated to live action, I'd be the last person to complain about taking a different look at something.

ST: You've done big budget films and you've done smaller budget projects. You're working on Bride of Frankenstein as part of Universal's Dark Universe franchise which, by comparison to Beauty and the Beast, is smaller. Do you find the transition between budgets quite easy?
BC: I've actually really gotten small for movies like Kinsey and Mr. Holmes and those films I really enjoy making too because you trade one set of pressures for another, you don't quite have all the money but you do have a great amount of freedom from any kind of expectations, frankly. Bride of Frankenstein isn't a small movie. I've got the same team together that made Beauty and the Beast and we're building big sets and designing big set pieces so it's a pretty big movie.
ST: You're in pre-production on that right now. How is that going? Do you have a start date?
BC: We start on February 1st, 2018 so it's the early days but just to be here in London, starting to see locations and to talk about sets that we're building, it's very exciting. For me, the James Whale movie is really right there in the pantheon for me. As you know, the Bride is a character who appears in the last five minutes and then is destroyed so it's a way to almost continue the movie that you imagine the movie he might have made the third Frankenstein movie but in 2018.

ST: There's been a lot of speculation around who is going to play the Bride with Angelina Jolie's name being mentioned. Have you sealed someone for the cast with the initials A and J?
BC: Not yet, no. Nothing is set yet. I think pretty soon but I think we're trying to figure that out now but obviously, pretty soon we're going to have to start really honing in on it. I'm not trying to be coy but I really shouldn't say.


collider

Condon revealed that Bride of Frankenstein is scheduled to roll into production next February through June, and while the filmmaker is currently gearing up for filming in London, where the director says he plans to shoot most of the film, he was kind enough to take some time for a chat with Collider on the occasion of his Director’s Extended Edition of Dreamgirls, which arrives on Blu-ray and DVD next week. Stay tuned for the full interview, but when it came to Bride of Frankenstein, Condon was happy to share how the dream project came about.
“It’s very rare and I’ve been so lucky, I’ve got to say, between this and Beauty and the Beast, the kind of movies that are being made at studios, you just kind of grow resigned to the fact that that’s not things that you’re going to connect to. But they were both things I heard about, and Bride was something I hear about a year and a half ago maybe and was always hoping that if it became real that I could at least take a look at it and talk about it because I’ve thought about it [over] the years. Luckily then they decided that they were going to go ahead and they approached me, so it was one of those things where exactly what you were hoping would happen, did happen.”
Condon also talked about the responsibility of taking on a film that’s so iconic and beloved.
“The movie is obviously in the pantheon for so many people and I’m one of them. I love that film so much. So I do feel again that responsibility I felt to Dreamgirls, the one I felt to Beauty and the Beast, I feel the same response to what Whale created.”

“What I love about David Koepp’s script is he turns everything on its head. This is Eve before Adam, the bride comes first. So in its own way — you know, we all know the Bride only exists for 10 minutes in the Whale movie; she’s there and the movie’s over. So I keep thinking [it’s], in a way, at least a tribute to what Whale might have done if he’d made a third Frankenstein movie and he’d done it in the 21st Century. I think there are just things about the sensibility of that movie. Also his genius in solving that basic problem you still see when people approach monster movies now, which is you’ve got to create a monster that you’re afraid of, that you’re terrified of, but you can still identify with, and that line was never walked better than by James Whale.”
Despite the fact that Koepp also wrote the script for The Mummy, Condon says the shared universe is not the priority. Asked if he was worried about ties to the Dark Universe or if that would come later, Condon replied,
“I will tell you this — what I’m doing is 100% making a really good monster movie. It has nothing to do with anything else. Nothing. Zero.”
Javier Bardem is in talks for the role of Frankenstein in the Dark Universe, but despite early reports that Angelina Jolie would play the Bride, that key casting still remains unconfirmed. Condon confirmed that they’re still in the casting process, looking to announce soon. As for the crew, Condon is reuniting with the Beauty and the Beast team, including cinematographer Tobias A. Schliessler, who also worked with Condon on Dreamgirls and  Mr. Holmes, costume designer Jacqueline Durran, creature designer Dave Elsey, and production designer Sarah Greenwood.
Bride of Frankenstein is scheduled to arrive in theaters on February 14, 2019.

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