Twilight director Bill Condon on his other life as an indie auteur
As well as big-budget event movies, the Oscar-winning director and screenwriter has made a handful of smaller, more intimate films, including a new take on Sherlock Holmes
If Bill Condon had his way, he'd rather not be remembered for his big-budget event movies. "It's as if all I've ever made was the final Twilight movies," he protests over the phone from New York. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1 (2011) and Part 2 (2012) are two of the director's biggest hits.
"I mean, other than that, most of the movies have been pretty small - except Dreamgirls [2006], I guess, but that was a different thing," he adds of his Oscars-winning musical. "They were just projects and scripts and stories that I was drawn to. There was never any design in that."
For the director who first cemented his status as a prominent screenwriter with an Oscar win (for 1998's Gods and Monsters) and a nomination (for 2002's musical adaptation Chicago), this difficulty in pinning down his creative tendency is evident if one compares, side by side, the film he's promoting and the one he's making.
When the Post reaches Condon for this interview, we're primarily meant to be chatting about his independent film Mr. Holmes. It has an actor in his mid-70s (Ian McKellen) as its lead, and tells a Sherlock story that's more interested in tracing a personal past than in solving a great mystery.
But it's hard to neglect the elephant in Condon's room: he has just returned from a nine-month London shoot for the live-action musical movie Beauty and the Beast, which is based on the 1991 Disney animation and features Emma Watson as Belle and Downton Abbey's Dan Stevens as the Beast. The director hopes to finish the first cut by Christmas.