'Phantom of the Opera' started in my little 100-seater converted church in Britain with a stage where we did what we did. But it was the score itself was what made it.
You're the luckiest person in the entire world if you know what you really want to do, which I was lucky enough to know when I was very young. And you're the luckiest person in the world if you can then make a living out of it.
I loved medieval architecture when I was very small; I don't know why.
In Evita I wasn't really hugely involved with it. I gave a little bit of help but they needed a bit of technical help on the movie and so some of my music people went in at the end of the movie and helped out with it.
I'm wondering whether to have someone go around with my mobile to completely throw everybody off the scent. I could appear in weird places.
If you look at my career... I couldn't possibly have chosen those subjects if I was thinking, 'That's a great commercial idea.' I'm not aware of a great musical where someone has done that.
We try to get the best performance out of the artists. There is no point in saying to them, 'You're useless.'
I haven't written a score that's going to change the Western world or the musical as we presently know it.
I often think how lucky we were with 'Jesus Christ Superstar.'
I want to get every church in the country on Wi-Fi.
And it sort of jogged a memory of something that I read at school and I read it, and I thought God this is it. So you never can tell. I could find something this afternoon.
Because her voice is, it's like the muscles and it develops all the time. That was the fantastic thing for us.
Corny answer is of course is that everyone who wants musicals are children in different ways, aren't they? So you think of them in different ways. There are things of mine I'm sorry haven't come here.
I began to think, now is the time. I found quite a lot of opposition in Hollywood about the idea of doing a film musical and we ended up having to buy the rights back. I'm glad we did because it meant John and I were able to make exactly the movie we wanted.
I guess the thing is that we remained huge friends after the original Phantom movie, when we decided it wouldn't take place and we just saw each other socially over the years so we were friends.
I guess we've had a very close relationship because I don't pretend to know about cinema and I think I do know a bit about theatre but he does, he respected that and so we really just had a collaboration which went completely like this.
I knew nothing about film at all. I suppose the biggest surprise is all these things. In the theatre we sort of do, I might do two or three key interviews and that would be it.
I said, look, do you think you could bring Gerry through, and they said yeah, absolutely, they thought that. Joel was very keen to cast him. If all my music team were happy, I was happy.
I think back at the time, if it had been 1988, I would have thought Michael and Sarah probably would have been cast but I don't think, I think it's much better that the girl is younger and if Sarah would have been 26 or 27 then.
I think that the wonderful advantage we have in the film of being able to cast a girl as young as Emmy and which we couldn't do in the theatre of course because no girl of 16 or 17 could sing 8 shows a week, couldn't sing two.
