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  • Beauty and the Beast, really, if you think about it, is like four movies in one.

  • It's an action movie, we're making a live action film.

  • There's a huge amount of stunts and there's wolf fighting and horse riding and guns and sword fights and all of that going on.

  • It's also a comedy.

  • The comic timing of characters like Cogsworth and Lumiere and Mrs. Potts, it's just hysterical, in my opinion.

  • Then, on the other hand, it's a romance.

  • It's a romantic drama.

  • And then it's a musical.

  • And then there's music, just to really add it on the top.

  • Music and dance and theatre, really.

  • So you need someone at the helm of a movie like this that can really do all of those things.

  • And it takes someone quite special, I think, to get all of that working very well.

  • And I think Bill has done a brilliant job of that.

  • We wanted to make sure that we know she loves reading, we know she loves to travel, but we also wanted to give her this element of being quite industrious and quite practical and very inventive.

  • So in the animation, Maurice is kind of the inventor, but in this movie, it's actually Belle who is really forging forward and innovating and coming up with new ways of doing things, which I thought was really interesting and was an idea that I loved.

  • Belle also does some teaching in this film.

  • Not only does she love reading for herself, but she actually loves sharing her love of books and she loves sharing the things that she finds special and interesting.

  • And I loved that too, that she wants to share.

  • She also has a new song.

  • It's only a small baby song.

  • It's a reprise, so it's only a verse and a little bit of a chorus, but it's very beautiful.

  • We expand a bit on her past and we see what is the story of Belle's life before she goes to the castle and she meets Beast, which I think is really lovely extra detail, which we didn't get from the original.

  • So I started rehearsing the movie in January.

  • We started filming in April, March kind of time, so I had a few months just to really start learning, particularly the waltz, which is really kind of...

  • For me, and this is what I realised, I remember saying this to Anthony as we were filming, it's kind of that dance is the story of them falling in love.

  • And so it had to have so much communicated through it, not just as a dance, but as how two people interact and how their perception of one another changes.

  • And it's all wrapped up in this two- or three-minute moment and we wanted to try and communicate so much.

  • So I realised I couldn't just be a dancer, I couldn't just sort of know the dance steps perfectly.

  • Actually, what was going to make the dance special was if I brought what I'm hopefully good at, which is acting, and that was what was going to really bring it to life and tell the story.

  • So it was a really special experience for me.

  • I love to dance, I've always loved to dance, and getting to learn to do this specially choreographed dance between Beast and Belle was definitely a highlight.

  • In the end, what we decided was that the most important thing for this dress to do was it had to dance beautifully.

  • That was...

  • We wanted the dress to feel like it could float, like it could fly, like it was kind of the third... almost like the third person in that dance.

  • And we started off with a much heavier, more intricate, more probably historically accurate dress, but we realised it just wasn't going to tell the story that we wanted it to tell, and we went for something a lot lighter, made of chiffon.

  • And it does, it just is perfect for that moment.

  • And we were pleased with it in the end.

  • I think I was so actually focused on trying to support him through what he had to do for that dance, it really helped me because I couldn't focus on how nervous I was.

  • Both of us were just trying to figure out the logistics of how do you do a three-minute, you know, Strictly Come Dancing-esque waltz routine with a beast?

  • I mean, he's like three heads taller than me.

  • It was really challenging.

  • I think we were just so focused on the task at hand, it actually helped, it really helped carry us through it.

  • And it was a very bonding experience.

  • I actually think I'm going to suggest that on all of my movies, my co-star, my romantic co-star has to learn to do a dance with me because there's just no better way to bond with someone.

  • So Days in the Sun is a song about longing.

  • It's kind of everyone in the castle is brought together by their... by just like that awful heartache of missing something or someone that you deeply love and care about.

  • And it kind of takes you through all the different characters in the castle and hearing their sort of internal thoughts at that particular juncture in the movie.

  • Maurice, who's Belle's dad, his job is that he makes these music boxes, which is interesting.

  • I'm not actually sure whether Bill took this from the original, but Chip was actually originally meant to be a music box, not a cup.

  • But so we incorporated that idea and he makes these.

  • They're not just music boxes, they're kind of like little portals to other worlds and getting to see those and do that scene with Kevin Kline, who is such a well-respected actor and such an interesting man and the way that he just became so...

  • He's a method actor, so he learnt how to put together and how to disassemble these music boxes and it was just so...

  • That scene for me perfectly encapsulates what we've tried to do, which was just give it more, just give it more depth, layers, details, and that was just done so perfectly in that scene and I just loved working with him.

  • No one is better, no one is more perfect for Gaston than Luke Evans.

  • He is...

  • He just is Gaston, whilst also managing to be incredibly likeable and charming and he's just perfect, he's just perfect.

  • Josh Gad, one of my favourite human beings on the planet.

  • He's just so fun to be around.

  • He's incredibly intelligent.

  • Oh my goodness, he's so interesting to talk to.

  • He...

  • Yeah, I mean, there's just no one better to play that role.

  • No one better.

Beauty and the Beast, really, if you think about it, is like four movies in one.

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