Beauty And The Beast: Exclusive Interview with Emma Watson and Dan Stevens

Read our Beauty And The Beast: Exclusive Interview with Emma Watson and Dan Stevens.

Disney has so many beloved iconic films under their belt and if you grew up in the 90’s, one favorite films from that era has to be Beauty And The Beast. When I heard that Disney would bring this film and its character to life in a live-action production; my teen-self couldn’t contain itself. Every single time there was a new trailer, character’s posters, and coloring pages I couldn’t wait to tell you all about it. When I heard that we would be screening the movie, interview the main characters, the director, and the film’s music composer, my excitement was through the roof. Last week, we sat down with Emma Watson and Dan Stevens and chatted about their roles, working on such an iconic film, and a lot more.

Beauty And The Beast:
Exclusive Interview with Emma Watson (“Belle”) and Dan Stevens (“The Beast / Prince Adam”)

Before we continue, here is the official film’s synopsis and official movie trailer.

Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” is a live-action re-telling of the studio’s animated classic which refashions the classic characters from the tale as old as time for a contemporary audience, staying true to the original music while updating the score with several new songs. “Beauty and the Beast” is the fantastic journey of Belle, a bright, beautiful and independent young woman who is taken prisoner by a beast in his castle. Despite her fears, she befriends the castle’s enchanted staff and learns to look beyond the Beast’s hideous exterior and realize the kind heart and soul of the true Prince within. The film stars: Emma Watson as Belle; Dan Stevens as the Beast; Luke Evans as Gaston, the handsome, but shallow villager who woos Belle; Oscar® winner Kevin Kline as Maurice, Belle’s eccentric, but lovable father; Josh Gad as Lefou, Gaston’s long-suffering aide-de-camp; Golden Globe® nominee Ewan McGregor as Lumiere, the candelabra; Oscar nominee Stanley Tucci as Maestro Cadenza, the harpsichord; Oscar nominee Ian McKellen as Cogsworth, the mantel clock; and two-time Academy Award® winner Emma Thompson as the teapot, Mrs. Potts.

“Beauty and the Beast” will be released in U.S. theaters on March 17, 2017.

So, without further ado, here is our Exclusive Interview with Emma Watson and Dan Stevens. Of course, after having previewed the film, we all had 101 questions and the first thing we had to find out was, how did Emma and Dan get these roles?

Emma:

For Disney, it was about wanting to explore whether or not I could sing.  I think, really, that was, that was the major question mark, so I scouted an audition tape, and I went away and I did, and then kind did that classic thing of waiting on tentative hooks to get the call, and to hear to whether or not it was up to standard. Thankfully it was, so I got offered the role which was just very, very exciting.

Dan:

And yes, for me. I put a song on tape for Bill Condon, and I sang the Beast song from the Broadway musical which we end up not using in the movie. But there is was, because the Beast doesn’t sing in the animated film, of course. And fortunately, he like it.

Of course, as for many of us. Beauty And The Beast has had such an enormous impact in our lives from the wonderful songs, which we all know by heart, to the amazing costumes, which we all dreamed of owning. So, how was it for Emma and Dan seeing themselves in full costume for the first time?

Emma:

It was kind of amazing! [LAUGHS]. I think because Belle, it’s a fairytale; I play a kind of an archetype, really. She’s more of a symbol. The kind of the way that I got into character and I sort of started to feel like I was understanding her really well, was through her costume, so it was like working on putting together the boots that she wore and she had kind of these slightly scruffy socks, and she had the bloomers underneath her skirt which meant that she could swing her leg over a horse.

And creating the kind of tool belt that she has on for when she’s inventing things, and it will carry her books and all these little details. She actually has a ring on this finger which actually one that I wear which is one from my mom and all these tiny things, I really felt like I was starting to get to know her, so her costume was really important for me. Actually, It was, the way in.

Dan:

I didn’t really have a costume. Well, I did have a costume. They made costumes for the Beast. They were really giant coats that he wore and this massive shredded cloak, but I never actually got to put it on. I spent the whole time, as the Beast, in a forty pound muscle suit on stilts covered in gray lycra. So I looked pretty odd, but nothing like the Beast that you see in the movie.

As I said before if you grew up in the 90’s, Beauty And The Beast made a such a profound impact. So in which way was Emma able to shape the character of Belle to help continue the empowerment of future generations that will be seeing this new version?

Emma:

There was talk of a wedding, perhaps at the end and that had not been in the original, and I was sort of like; oh, sorry, can I just point out this isn’t in the original. We need to stay faithful to the original, and I felt strongly about that. I felt very strongly that she needed to have a vocation to fill her time with, and this is very important to me.

So we kind of co-opted what was originally kind of crazy ole Maurice’s identity, and well, that’s not the direction that Kevin’s taking the role in. Could I co-opt that for Bell, and we had her design this washing machine that allows her to have more time to read and to teach. That was super important to me. Also, people ask me a lot, what’s it like being a Disney princess? And I go, actually, Belle isn’t a princess, [LAUGHS].

She’s actually one of the few young women who actually isn’t a princess. She is an ordinary girl from an ordinary village and actually, that’s very important about her. And she has no aspirations to be a princess. She has no aspirations to marry a prince. And so there was a line in the movie, originally, where Audra, the chest of drawers says to me, we’ll make you a gown fit for a princess. And I asked Bill, could I say actually, I’m not a princess?

And he said, yeah, sure.  And so just like little things like that where I just felt like I was protecting and defending Belle’s sort of original DNA and just making sure that we stay truthful and, and faithful to this very independent young woman.

As you can see from the stills and the movie’s trailer and just as in the original animated movie, Belle and Beast get to Waltz in this version of the film. So, how was this dance accomplished and how did Emma and Dan prepared for it? As Dan chimed in with “Wow, it was about three months” but the training didn’t stop there, it was actually a four-step process. Here is what they had to say about that.

Dan:

We did the Beast Waltz and I have three dances in the film. Two, unless you’re counting your walk through the village. A lot of dance training for this particularly iconic waltz. First of all, I learned it on the ground.

Emma:

But it- that’s kind of a four-step process, so we learned, we learned to pass.

Dan:

Yes, with different partners.

Emma:

We learned it together.

Dan:  

Then I graduated to the stilts.

Emma:

And then we graduated to the ballroom because that ballroom is so huge that actually kind of filling the space and really making it seem as if we were filling that room was a kind of challenge in itself.

Dan:

It’s quite a process.

Emma:

Yes,  It’s quite a process.

Dan:

Yeah, waltzing on stilts.  Not something I thought I would ever be able to say.

After screening the film and seeing Bell’s iconic ball gown at the press junket, we certainly had to know if Emma had any input into Belle’s dress? Of course, both Emma and Dan had extremely interesting responses to this question.

Emma:

So yes, I was very heavily involved in the dress. Trying to get the dress right was really difficult because we needed to dress her to serve a number of different purposes and functions. So it needed to be of the period. Originally, she started off with a very kind of seventeenth-century traditional dress, but then we realized that it didn’t do that cute twirly thing that it does in the animation. You know, when the dress spins behind her?

It has to do that, otherwise, it’s not right. So back to the drawing board. It’s gotta twirl. All right, so it’s gotta be seventeenth-century, but the bottom gotta be different, so let me try another version of it, which kind of did have that movement. It was lightness, so we made it out of chiffon. And then, she’s also gotta ride a horse in it, and she’s gotta be able to kind of go into the third part of the movie which is where she goes back to see her father.  So it also kind of needs to feel like an action hero dress which is why the front of the dress looks a bit like a coat of armor.

It’s got gold flecks in it. It had that kind of warrior element to it, as well. So, we kind of created a warrior, modern seventeenth-century twisty, twirly dress hybrid. 

Dan:

[LAUGHS] There was a lot of chewing and throwing with that dress design, and during that extensive design period, Emma came over to my house in London for dinner, and we were talking about the dress.

And what the dress was gonna look like, and my five-year-old daughter at the time sort of overheard our conversation, and she scurried into the next room with a pen a paper and came back about a half an hour later with five different dress designs. 

And Emma was very sweet. She sat down with Willow and she looked through them all and they chose which one they thought that they should go with. Anyway, a few weeks later, Willow came on set and saw Emma in the finished dress, and she’s said, that’s the one. So in her mind, she designed that dress. 

Speaking of dresses and costumes, how much of the current version of The Beast was CGI and how much was actually Dan? San had this to say about it.

It’s all me! [LAUGHS]. So, it was motion capture puppeteering of the suit. I’m inside a giant muscle suit on stilts, so the Beast’s body was me moving inside there. The facial capture was done separately, and every two weeks, we’d go into this booth, and ten thousand UV dots would be sprayed on my face, and twenty-seven little cameras would capture everything I’ve been doing for the past two weeks just with my face. So it was my face driving that Beast’s face and they turned that information digitally into the Beast’s face and map it onto the body that I’d been working on the set.

So in answer to your question, lots of CGI and also, it is me driving it all and, and it’s an amazing new technology that’s never been used this extensively before. Very exciting.

Having to act with stilts on, might be a hard thing to accomplish. What did Emma and Dan do during filming to maintain their chemistry on and off camera?

Dan:  

[LAUGHS] I think I made you laugh just by being in this monstrous muscle suit on stilts, [LAUGHS].

Emma: 

That’s true.  I think, honestly, the dance scenes are very bonding because when you’re this close away from somebody else’s face and it’s kind of awkward and you’re trying- it, it feels very intimate, and you don’t really know that person, it kind of like forces you to kind of break down a certain number of barriers that would be there without that.  I think also Dan is a, is a feminist in his own right.

I actually found out on this tour, which I can’t believe he never told me, but he was one of the first people to review Caitlin Moran’s, How to be a Woman, which was one of the books I chose for my family’s book club.  He wrote a review of it for one of our English newspapers.  You know, and coming into the project he was, like, so excited by the speech I’d given at the UN, and he wanted to make sure the- that we were collaborators and exploring the masculine and the feminine energies that are in this movie- how to celebrate them both; how to serve them both; how to make sure that they interact in a way which is really dynamic and fun for people to watch.

So I think all of those shared interests- books; our conversations about feminism. He was a dream collaborator, really.  

If you were following our conversation with Emma Watson and Dan Stevens on Twitter, we asked you to submit your own questions and we would do out best to get them answer. Thanks to everyone that submitted your questions, and here is the answer to What was the most exciting scene that they filmed from the original movie, and how you felt when they did it? Dan’s responded and Emma reaffirmed the following.

Dan:

Ah, I mean, I’m gonna say the waltz again. I suppose, the most iconic scene that we were really looking to replicate, and the feeling of the waltz, I highly recommend you all go and try it. Take a partner; go and take a waltz lesson. It’s an amazing feeling when you get it right and there’s something about the sort of swirling motion of two people doing that, especially in stilts which is quite weird. But it was, it was very satisfying to have completed that sequence and feel like we captured the magic of that original dance, I suppose.

Many of us have children and this version of Beauty and the Beast is going to be the only one that they remember or that they grew up with. So, we had to ask Emma and Dan, What is important for both of them, for girls and boys, to take away from this movie?

Dan:

There really are.  I remember even for me, the animated film as being a Disney film that was immediately loved by boys and girls. I actually have a great friend of mine who’s now in his mid-thirties. He grew up in the west of England in the countryside, who for him, Belle was his greatest hero, and he used to go into the fields of Somerset and sing, I want to venture in the great wide somewhere, because there is something about the spirit of Belle that is to be championed in all of us. I think that curiosity, that imagination, that, that ability to see beneath the surface deep, but also to see beyond your immediate surroundings. And she has tremendous vision in all ways, and I think that’s something to be applauded.

Emma:

I think as a child, I had a very hard time working out to why people weren’t kind to other people, and trying to understand and I think what is so beautiful about Belle is that she’s so nonjudgmental. It’s her ability to see beyond the surface of things and to understand that everyone has a story, and you don’t always know what that story is, and to look deeper into things before you make a judgment.

And, so there’s a compassion and empathy there which I think is a relief because I don’t think anyone is inherently evil. I think there’s light and dark in everyone, and I think that she symbolizes that very well.

Thanks to Emma Watson and Dan Stevens for taking the time to seat and chat with us. What an amazing opportunity to interview such talented people. This last reply from Emma goes to all that have ever felt different in our own way.

Emma:

I remember being so torturous about school was that is your whole world. It’s like this microcosm; the people that are in your class, that’s your entire universe. That is your planet, and if you don’t fit with that, it’s miserable.

And I think what my mom really said to me was, look, it might feel like the end of the world right now, that you don’t quite fit, but one day, you might be really grateful for that. And it’s very hard to see at the time but it’s, there’s a big wide world out there with people who have diverse interests, and perspectives, and opinions. And you kind of have to just go out there and find your tribe; find your kindred spirits; find the people that resonate with you and that you feel at home with.

And it takes a bit of persistence, and it doesn’t necessarily come overnight and really easily, but actually when I look back on not feeling like I fitted at school, I’m really grateful that I didn’t because I actually don’t really particularly want to be like any of who were the cool girls in my class anymore. Like, and I’m glad that I was different. I’m glad that I was a bit odd and I didn’t really fit in. So, you know, obviously, all of this is easy to say in retrospect, but anyway, I hope that’s helpful.

I invite you to keep following along here on the blog and on all of our media channels for even more fun.

Disclosure: I was provided with an all-expense paid trip to Los Angeles, California to attend the #BeOurGuestEvent. No additional compensation was received.