DVDizzy Forum

nomad2010 wrote:I find it funny that anyone complains about Gaston being a bad villain. I never saw him as the true villain anyways. Isn't the Beast and his issues more of the villain? Gaston is more of a side character who happens to be evil in my opinion. Sure, he serves the antagonist role but only to push the characters to where they need to be I've never really thought of Gaston as the true villain of that movie until this thread, strangely enough. I'm sure I'm the odd man out, but I do think it's interesting.

Having recently completed Beauty and the Beast for Disney, he struggled to sing in a French accent despite having a French wife and four bilingual children, though he described his time on set with Emma Thompson, Stanley Tucci and Sir Ian McKellen as "fantastic fun."

The Scottish star has signed up to play singing maitre’d-turned-candalebra Lumiere in Disney’s live-action remake of Beauty and the Beast. He revealed: “I got to sing Be Our Guest, which is a wonderful song to sing – in a French accent, which is not as easy as it sounds. But it was fun, yeah, I really enjoyed it.”

Currently in production and due for a 2017 release, Bill Condon’s live-action remake of Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” (1991) will feature the Crieff-born actor as Lumiere, the Beast’s servant and singing candelabra. It’s fourteen years since McGregor starred and sang in Baz Luhrmann’s “Moulin Rouge!”, and he found the process this time around terrifying. “I’d forgotten how scary it is. You’re standing alone, and behind this glass there’s forty people. That was quite tricky. After that I went away and really got to work on my French accent.”

McGregor has also been filming the part of Lumiere in Disney’s Beauty & The Beast directed by Bill Condon “I liked it very much; it’s mostly sound work with animation.” There were about three days of shooting live-action alongside a cast including Emma Thompson, Stanley Tucci and Ian McKellen, “We all had a great time.”

The actor enjoyed recording the song “Be Our Guest” for the film, even if he was joking that his French accent wasn’t up to snuff. “I had to do a French accent. I’ve lived around a French accent for 20 years [his wife is French], but I couldn’t do it – I sounded Mexican,” he said with a laugh and a quick impersonation.

Q: I'm very excited for the Beauty and the Beast movie. I heard that they just did a test screening recently. What can you tease people about your experience being part of that?

Ewan McGregor: It's very exciting. It was great to put work with Bill Condon on that. Our experience on set was great. [...] The backstage side of things was great. I think Bill is really the right guy to make that film and I think the actors he's got are really really great. I'm sure it's going to be great. It's too early. I haven't seen any of it. We've still got some more work to do on it vocally, like some more recording. I got to sing Be Our Guest which was great. I hadn't sung in a movie for a while, so that was nice. I think it will be very very good.

Q: How to you play a live-action candelabra?

Ewan McGregor: We're animated mainly, and then there's this sort of live-action bit towards the end. It's a bit of both. So, I didn't have to deal with any real flames. But I get to sing a great song Be Our Guest, the great number Lumiere sings in the film.

Q: What was that experience like, making that film with Bill Condon?

Ewan McGregor: It’s no different to anything else. It’s interesting because it’s partly animated, but partly not. Voicing an animation is a process. They partly animated off of what you’ve done, and you partly perform off of what they’ve done. It’s a nice collaboration. I really like working with Bill Condon. He’s a director I’d love to work with again. And there are some great actors in it – Stanley Tucci, Emma Thompson, Sir Ian McKellen. We had a great time together when we were working on set. And then, I’ve enjoyed working with Bill on the post-production side of it, as well. And recording the big “Be Our Guest” song was just fantastically fun, and nothing something I’ve done in quite awhile. I haven’t recorded a song for a movie since Moulin Rouge, so it’s been quite a long time.

Q: Can you tell me about the audition? ‘Cause I understand members of the cast had to sing a song from The Lion King.

Ewan McGregor: Oh, I didn’t. I didn’t have to audition. They asked me to play the role. It was great fun to do. I was surrounded by fantastic people. We had a great cast and it was fun. But it was sort of a daunting role because so many people are familiar and fond of the original. And then there’s a temptation I feel from some of the other people involved to recreate, musically speaking, what [Jerry Orbach] did. I was thinking ‘Well, I can’t do that. I can’t recreate what someone else did. I want to make it my own’. We’re still in that process. We haven’t finished. We still are due to do some more recording with the dialogue and the song. I found the French accent really difficult to do. I thought it would just come naturally but it sounded definitely more Mexican than French. So, we’re still working on that.

Q: You play Lumiere in next year’s live-action remake of Beauty and the Beast. Do you get to sing?

Ewan McGregor: I really wanted to do it for my 5-year-old, Anouk. It was great fun, plus I did get the opportunity to sing one of the great Disney numbers, “Be Our Guest.”

Q: I was wondering how do you approach a character like Lumiere in Beauty and the Beast? That was originated in an animated feature.

Ewan McGregor: You just approach every character like it’s a brand new thing, it’s a new clean slate. The fact that it’s been done before is neither here nor there really or me. I mean I think if they wanted to just that character again, that’s not true because he sort of did create that character. I don’t know the answer to your question. [LAUGHTER] I just approach it like I would everything else. I mean I didn’t spend time watching the original animation and trying to make my Lumiere like that. I mean I must have seen it in the past. And I got a very strong sense of who he was from the script. And I assume that the script was this version of this film we were making, not the animation. And so I sort of made him like that. But the nice thing about Lumiere and in this case was that I got to do it several times. He is animated in most of the film and then at the end, when we’re released from the curse, it’s me. And that meant I was allowed to record all of the dialogue just fresh. And then I was able to do it again. The challenge was the French accent because they wanted a sound. They didn’t want me to do the French R sound. And when you take the R sound out of French accent, and you just replace it with an R, it sounds Mexican. [LAUGHTER] So I had to try...

Q: Did you speak French?

Ewan McGregor: My wife’s French. I mean I speak a bit of French but I’ve lived amongst French, you know, most of my adult life. But I found that a bit of a challenge. So anyway, we went back and we re-recorded it all again and I’m happy to say it sounds a bit more French though.

Q: So, it's live-action. What is that? How does that go?

Ewan McGregor: It's a mix of both. We're animated and then we're real people at the end. The job was interesting 'cause we recorded most of the part just with our voices and then we did a week's work in the end on set which was fun.

Q: You had to speak with a French accent?

Ewan McGregor: Yeah. I was not very good. I'm married to a French woman for twenty years, my children speak French and I was dreadful because they asked me not to do the French 're'. You know, French speak with a 're' sound. They said don't do it with a 're', do it with an 'ar'. So, I was doing it with an 'ar' and it suddenly became very Mexican. But then we got a chance to go back and redo it and I made it a bit more French.

“I’ve got four girls,” says the Trainspotting and Moulin Rouge actor. “My eldest is in her twenties now, of course, but still I’ve got a little one, who’s 5, and when an opportunity like this comes along, to be in a film they will watch, then it’s nice. It’s nice to get the opportunity to sing again in a film. It’s been a long time since I got the chance to do a big number, like I had the opportunity [to do] in Moulin Rouge. And I get this great number, ‘Be Our Guest,’ which Lumière sings.”

The problem came when McGregor first tried to tackle the French accent of his character, who in Disney’s original 1991 animated version of the tale was voiced by Jerry Orbach.

“When they were shooting, they wanted to have all of our voices to act with, so Emma and Darren had characters to work with — that being our voices,” says the actor. “So, we went to London, we did some very quick accent-coaching [laughs], which in my case didn’t work out terribly well. My French didn’t really sound very French to begin with — it sounded a bit Spanish or something. And then some time later, I went over to New York, where Bill Condon [the film’s director] was doing all his post-production and I recorded the whole part again. I’d done a bit more work on the accent, so it sounded more French and I got rerecord the song. So, I got to do my whole performance again, which was a really nice opportunity. You don’t often get offered that. But I got a chance to have another crack at all of it!”

Old Fish Tale wrote:They only have a couple of scenes in the film. Everything else will be CGI.

Sotiris wrote:Ewan McGregor will be doing a French accent as Lumiere. I'm skeptical though if he can actually pull it off.

Bill Condon wrote:When I first spoke to Disney about doing Beauty and the Beast, they actually weren’t sure they were going to do this new version as a musical, and I said, “With all due respect, I think you’re crazy. The songs are too good. You’re going to spend all this time making a huge, gorgeous live-action Beauty and the Beast and not do ‘Be Our Guest’?”

Q: Did you have Emma Watson, Dan Stevens, or Luke Evans sing certain songs from the movie when they auditioned. If so, what?

Bill Condon: Actually, I had them all sing “Hakuna Matata,” just to confuse them.

Q: How are you changing the story to reflect the third dimension that the animated original did not have?

Bill Condon: We’re actually here in Belle’s poor provincial town right now, corralling an angry mob, which has always been a dream of any Frankenstein fan . . . I wouldn’t say we’re changing the story so much as sort of making connections that in a lot of cases were right under the surface. Honestly, there are so many people who love the original film and love the Broadway show, and they’ve had two decades now to pick them apart and point out big questions and plot holes, and in a lot of places we looked at those and said, “Hey, that’s a good question,” or “That’s an excellent point, why don’t these townspeople know anything about this huge castle that’s like a mile away from their village?,” and used those as jumping off points for our own discussions. So hopefully, this will be a film where a die-hard fan can jump up and say “exactly!”

Q: Would you please give us one clue about the ballroom dance sequence? Thank you!

Bill Condon: It was one of the first scenes we shot, and it was really magical. You will believe a beast can waltz.

Disney Duster wrote:Wow, they're even going as far as to close plot holes. They really are working on the details! That's excellent!

DisneyJedi wrote:

Sotiris wrote:Ewan McGregor will be doing a French accent as Lumiere. I'm skeptical though if he can actually pull it off.

Well, he has pulled off an American accent in Robots.

Sotiris wrote: Bill Condon: ... I wouldn’t say we’re changing the story so much as sort of making connections that in a lot of cases were right under the surface.