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Daily Inspiration Quote by Andrew Lloyd Webber

"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"

About this Quote

What’s striking here isn’t eloquence, it’s the accidental honesty of a powerhouse creator talking like a normal person caught mid-thought. Andrew Lloyd Webber isn’t selling you myth; he’s letting you hear the backstage machinery: projects collapse, plans quietly die, and the relationships you build in the wreckage sometimes outlast the art.

The line’s charm is its procedural messiness. “I guess” and “the thing is” are verbal hedges, the kind people use when they’re trying to be tactful about a disappointment without naming blame. He never says why the “original Phantom movie” didn’t happen, who walked away, or what went wrong. That omission is the subtext: in entertainment, diplomacy is part of the craft. If you’re Andrew Lloyd Webber, you don’t publicly litigate dead deals; you keep the door open for the next one.

Then there’s the quiet reframe. By pivoting from a failed film to “we remained huge friends,” he converts an abandoned adaptation into a success story of another kind. It’s reputation management, but also a worldview: the real continuity in long careers isn’t the product pipeline, it’s the social network. “We just saw each other socially over the years” lands like a soft flex - not celebrity gossip, but a reminder that the arts run on dinner tables and long-memory alliances as much as on contracts.

Context matters: “Phantom” has had a famously sprawling afterlife across mediums. This quote sits in that ecosystem of perpetual adaptation attempts, where what survives isn’t a single definitive version, but the relationships that keep the property circulating.

Quote Details

TopicFriendship
SourceHelp us find the source
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Webber, Andrew Lloyd. (2026, February 16). 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. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-guess-the-thing-is-that-we-remained-huge-169161/

Chicago Style
Webber, Andrew Lloyd. "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." FixQuotes. February 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-guess-the-thing-is-that-we-remained-huge-169161/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"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." FixQuotes, 16 Feb. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-guess-the-thing-is-that-we-remained-huge-169161/. Accessed 21 Feb. 2026.

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Andrew Lloyd Webber (born March 22, 1948) is a Composer from United Kingdom.

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