"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"
About this Quote
Andrew Lloyd Webber is doing the celebrity equivalent of shrugging into a tux: presentable, careful, and engineered to keep the spotlight from landing anywhere risky. Talking about Evita, he downshifts his role with a chain of softeners - "wasn't really hugely involved", "a little bit of help" - then pivots to something safer and harder to dispute: technical assistance. It's a neat rhetorical trade. Authorship is messy, political, and ego-scorching; "technical help" sounds like cables, orchestration fixes, postproduction triage. Nobody sues you over cables.
The subtext is control without ownership. Webber was already a brand by the time the film landed in the mid-90s, and Evita was high-stakes: Madonna casting, Alan Parker directing, a musical whose stage legacy could be either embalmed or electrified on screen. If the movie works, his name is already baked into the title card and the cultural memory. If it doesn't, this quote preemptively limits culpability. He positions himself as a benevolent supplier of expertise rather than a creative co-author who signed off on choices.
There's also an industry tell in "some of my music people". It signals hierarchy and infrastructure: Webber as a small institution, capable of dispatching specialists to rescue a production late in the process. The intent isn't confession; it's brand management. He protects the prestige of the original work while acknowledging the realities of adaptation, where the last-minute fixes often decide what audiences remember as "the music."
The subtext is control without ownership. Webber was already a brand by the time the film landed in the mid-90s, and Evita was high-stakes: Madonna casting, Alan Parker directing, a musical whose stage legacy could be either embalmed or electrified on screen. If the movie works, his name is already baked into the title card and the cultural memory. If it doesn't, this quote preemptively limits culpability. He positions himself as a benevolent supplier of expertise rather than a creative co-author who signed off on choices.
There's also an industry tell in "some of my music people". It signals hierarchy and infrastructure: Webber as a small institution, capable of dispatching specialists to rescue a production late in the process. The intent isn't confession; it's brand management. He protects the prestige of the original work while acknowledging the realities of adaptation, where the last-minute fixes often decide what audiences remember as "the music."
Quote Details
| Topic | Movie |
|---|
More Quotes by Andrew
Add to List
