@ The Movies Interview: Joel Schumacher

It was a project that came his way via the graces of Andrew Lloyd Webber in 1988, but two years before acclaimed director Joel Schumacher first met with the famed composer to make his opus, "The Phantom of the Opera," a curious event took place: Emmy Rossum was born.

Rossum arrived in this world on Sept. 12, 1986, just shy of a month before "Phantom" made its momentous debut in London's West End on Oct. 9. Could it be that the film role of Christine Daae -- an ingenue whom a disfigured "Phantom" composing genius (Gerard Butler) obsesses over in 1870 Paris in "The Phantom of the Opera" -- be one that Rossum was born to play?

"Whenever Andrew and I have been doing press conferences, one of the questions is, why have you waited so long to make the film?' and I always say, we were waiting for Emmy Rossum to be born and grow up so we could offer her the role," Schumacher told me, laughing, in an @ The Movies interview this week.

"It's a very scary and sobering thought for me to know that she was two the day Andrew offered me this film," Schumacher added about "The Day After Tomorrow" actress. "But now she's a formidable young woman and we're extraordinarily proud of her. She's much smarter than I am on many levels."

Without question, a lot of fascinating things have been gestating between the birth of the stage musical and its growth into a feature film. It's been showered with more than 50 major awards (including three Olivers, seven Tonys and seven Drama Desk awards) and played more than 65,000 performances in 18 countries worldwide.

The second-longest running musical in Broadway history (behind Webber's "Cats"), it has also played to 10.3 million people on the Great White Way and its soundtrack -- featuring several gems including "Music of the Night," "Think of Me" and "Angel of Music" has sold 40 million copies worldwide.

Yet for all its success, one more vision of Webber didn't come to fruition -- until now. But it's not for the lack of trying.

"Andrew asked me to do this in 1988 -- which was extremely surprising to everyone, most of all, me, because I had only done four films, the last of which was 'The Lost Boys.' Andrew was already a legend and the show was already a legend and I get a call, saying Andrew Lloyd Webber wants to meet me to make a film," Schumacher said, musingly. "Honest to God, I thought he made a mistake -- that he didn't know much about film and somebody gave him the wrong name. I thought I was going to meet him and have him say, 'You're the wrong person.' But Andrew loved 'The Lost Boys' and loved the way I used the music with the visuals."

But Schumacher was indeed the right person and the collaborative process was almost immediately set into motion.

"We were going to do it then with (the original stage stars) Michael Crawford and Sarah Brightman, and we prepared the film while I did 'Flatliners,'" Schumacher recalled. "We were going to shoot it in Munich and Prague in 1990, and for a lot of personal and professional reasons, Andrew had to cancel."

Just because the film was out of sight for Schumacher and Webber, it wasn't out of mind. The two remained friends, and the idea of the making the film again came up two years ago when Schumacher was in London having dinner with the composer and his wife, Madeleine Gurdon.

"His wife came to the dinner with an agenda -- to be very persuasive to get me to think about doing it again," Schumacher said, laughing. "She's a great person."

Crowds expecting a note-for-note adaptation of Webber's version shouldn't be expecting the same for the film version. That's because Schumacher's collaborative partnership not only included directing, but co-writing the screenplay with Webber. With that, came Schumacher's right to visualize the story without the monstrous success of the stage version hanging over his head like a giant chandelier, well, waiting to crash down.

"I spent a sleepless night in London thinking about it and really analyzed it," Schumacher recalled of Webber's proposal to do the film again two years ago. "I needed to take the legend of it and the music and the expectation level and put that all aside because that isn't my job. I thought to myself, 'What if this idea was brand new and he gave it to me -- and this was a little off-off-off Broadway show? What is my job as a storyteller here?'"

Schumacher said he saw the show again before he went back to Webber with his ideas.

"I said, 'Andrew, in the core of this is a very young, tragic love story -- Christine must be young, probably a teenager, and the Phantom and Raoul (Patrick Wilson) have to be young also because it has to be age appropriate,'" Schumacher recalled. "

And being young compounds a tragedy Christine is suffering throughout the story: the loss of her father.

"Because she's still in the spell of her father's death, I wanted her to be innocent and naive about certain things and that she would have to grow very rapidly in the piece and become a young woman, which Emmy does beautifully," Schumacher explained. "The relationship she has to Raoul would be the awakening of romantic love for the first time, and her relationship to the Phantom would be the awakening of a much darker, more sexual and more passionate obsessive, destructive love. I thought it would work better for an audience if that was new for her."

The next big step was the casting. And, like the script, it was a collaborative effort between Schumacher and Webber.

"I said to Andrew, 'If there are movie stars that are the right age, let's do it. But if they are unknowns, let's do it, too. Let's get the right person for the roles,' Schumacher recalled. "He said, 'Joel, if you'll do this, you can have anyone you want -- but they have to do their own singing.' That was the handshake. It was my job to cast the actors when I was happy. When I found who I felt was the right person for each role, then I'd send them to Andrew and he'd hear them sing."

The Building Of A Musical

There's no question that Schumacher's films run the gamut of motion picture genres. "The Lost Boys" touched upon horror, "St. Elmo's Fire" was a coming-of-age dramedy, "Flatliners" examined the supernatural and "Batman Forever" and "Batman and Robin" were his introduction into superhero action-adventures.

If that didn't stretch his creative boundaries far enough, the director has also helmed such films as courtroom dramas "A Time to Kill" and "The Client," the war drama "Tigerland" and the crime thrillers "8MM," "Falling Down" and "Phone Booth."

Yet, for everything he's done, Schumacher has never directed a movie musical. But in a sense, he wrote the screenplay for one before collaborating with Webber on "Phantom" -- and it's a classic at that.

"'Car Wash,' which Norman Whitfield wrote all the great music for, is kind of a musical -- I'd actually call it a street operetta," Schumacher observed. "All of the songs in 'Car Wash' are based on the scene you're watching at that time. Norman really wrote all these original songs about the scene you are watching. I love music, obviously, but I was never running around burning to do a musical. But when Andrew offered me 'Phantom' and I went to see it in New York with Sarah and Michael, the first thing I thought to myself, 'This is so cinematic. This would be great to do.'"

Perhaps one of the most indelible images from the stage production of "Phantom" or any screen adaptations of Leroux's novel, for that matter, is the crashing chandelier at the opera house. For Schumacher, it meant the beginning of the end of the Opera Populaire, the extravagant opera house that was built from scratch for the film.

"First, we have to crash the chandelier and burn it up to make it into a hulking shell -- then we have to do same thing with the staircase set," Schumacher lamented. "You finish shooting all the beautiful, sparkly stuff and then you go away to shoot something else. When you come back, it's a moldy, dusty, burnt-out shell and there's nothing that of what was once there."

If there's any consolation, those were only props. Schumacher said the true heartbreak came at the end of the production, where the true foundation of the film -- its cast and crew -- had to break up to move on to their next projects.

"You have to say goodbye to all of the ballet girls, all of the opera chorus and all of the hundreds of background artists," he said. Not only has your opera house been destroyed, your whole opera company has been destroyed. All the wonderful people that you have been working with are gone. The day they left, everybody was sobbing and crying. It's almost as if the Phantom has burned down your opera company."