Disney's live-action remake of its 1991 fairy tale animation, Beauty and the Beast, is nothing if not lavish.
The film’s opulent sets featured up to 9,000 candles. The Beast’s castle ballroom was constructed using 12,000 square feet of faux marble, based on the ceiling of the Benedictine monastery in Braunau, Germany.
The 10 glass chandeliers in the ballroom – each measuring two metres by four metres – are based on chandeliers from Versailles which were then frosted, covered in fabric and candlelit.
To add to the romance, 1,500 red roses were either grown or purchased for the production, while the enchanted forest surrounding the Beast’s castle features real trees, hedges, a frozen lake and 20,000 icicles, taking 15 weeks to complete.
The costumes get even sillier. Figures such as 55 metres of feather-light satin organza, 914 metres of thread and 2,160 Swarovski crystals scream out from the production notes. But why the need for a remake?
The 1991 film was, at the time, the highest-grossing Disney animated film as well as the first to gross US$100 million (Dh367m) at the United States box office and the third-highest grossing film of that year.
Now the 2-D classic will be updated with a new 3-D setting and healthy dose of CGI.
"It's a huge challenge turning a beloved 2-D animated film into a more human 3-D story, but it's a great story with great characters so I was very excited. My wife and kids were very excited, too," says Dan Stevens, of Downton Abbey and The Guest fame, who plays the titular Beast.
“I also like that the film is a blend of the real and the virtual. We’ve obviously got some green screen and some CGI, but there’s also a great deal of real going on, too. I was in my early teenage years when the animated film came out and I remember seeing it at the cinema and it being hugely popular, so it was fun for me to think about all the different aspects of the character that I could play with.”
Stevens says the film pushes the envelope when it comes to special effects. “We’re doing something which has not really been done before – and certainly not to this extent – called Movaware, which is a separate facial-capture technology which is entirely separate from the physical body-capture, where you have to think yourself back into the scenes that you’ve already shot without moving your body so that you’re just moving your face to the scenes whether you have any dialogue or not,” he says.
“There was one instance where I had to do the entire ballroom waltz with just my face, which was quite interesting. I would walk on the set to film a scene where I am speaking to Lumière but I would be looking at an LED light on a stick and hearing Ewan’s [McGregor] voice. It was like an extra level of weird that we had to deal with.”
But no amount of technological wizardry can work if the cast are not in sync. Perhaps the most important role in Beauty and The Beast is that of Belle (played by Emma Watson), the iconoclastic female lead taken captive by the beast.With the film's fortune resting on the chemistry between Stevens and Watson, the duo spent a lot of time together discussing how they wanted to portray the characters.
“I was very keen to calibrate the Beast according to the Belle that Emma wanted to be and to play, so we spent a lot of time together just talking about beauty and beastliness, men and women, and masculinity and femininity, good and evil, and all sorts of polar opposite things,” says Stevens.
“We tried to work in some of those things and ultimately realised that the tale is not so much about an ugly thing and a beautiful girl but about the beauty and the beast that’s in all of us and the two sides each person has, and learning to live with that balance.”
Adding some humour and wisdom to the affair is the Beast’s servant Cogsworth, performed by veteran actor Ian McKellen.
"One of the first films I saw was [Jean] Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête, and I remember the excitement of the, albeit, rather primitive technology when the Beast sheds his mask and turns into the beautiful Jean Marais as the Prince," says McKellen.
“I enjoy a good fairy tale, and that’s what this is. A traditional story that deals with morality and good versus evil.”
• Beauty and the Beast is in cinemas on Thursday.
cnewbould@thenational.ae