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Oh, and there’s the small matter of designing and building an entire castle.
“As a story, you think, ‘Oh, that’s simple.
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It’s a village, it’s a wood, it’s a castle,"’ Greenwood says.
“It’s so complicated.
Greenwood and director Bill Condon wanted their take onBeautyto feel even more luxurious and magical than ever before.
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The designers used the1991 animated filmand Jean Cocteau’s1946 romanceas a reference, complemented with some good old-fashioned imagination.
“To design a fairy-tale castle,” she says, summing up the experience.
“Are you telling me that’s not the biggest treat in the world?”
Laurie Sparham/Disney
monogram honoring Walt Disney.
“All our draft people had to do rococo boot camp,” Greenwood says, laughing.
“What we didn’t want was something that was going to get kind of dank and overgrown.
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Rococo worked really well because it’s so effervescent.”
One of the crew’s biggest challenges was constructing the intricate music boxes Maurice crafts for his daughter.
“She’s overprotected in a way by her father because she’s lost her mother.”
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set decorator Katie Spencer says.
“So although it’s still fantastical, it definitely came from somewhere real.”
“We kind of poached the best elements and put them in our village,” she says.
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The filmmakers named their quaint town Villeneuve, after originalBeauty and the Beastauthor Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve.
To build the literary sanctuary, Greenwood took inspiration from a library in Portugal and added elaborate ceiling frescoes.
“It didn’t have to feel like a place you wouldn’t be allowed into.
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It had to have a warmth and openness about it.”
