Doom is a classic supervillain, akin to the Phantom of the Opera. It’s not about revenge so much as, like, ‘I’m back – now watch this!’ It all boils down to the music. The mask is a slight theme for people to enjoy, and it adds mystery.
I received a grant from The Ford Foundation to write a book for kids about urban perception, or how people experience cities, but I kept putting off writing it. Instead I started to write what became The Phantom Tollbooth.
‘Phantom Menace’ was a huge project. It was the biggest visual effects production ever done at that point, and it was a little scary how big it was and how many unknown technologies had to be developed to do that work.
‘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.
I started singing for The Phantom in January, and we started filming in October and I sang all the way through to the next June. In fact, I was singing for about two months before I even knew I had the role.
We can feel in Poland a kind of phantom pain for lost multi-ethnic territories.
If you look at the great frauds of all time, Enron had that phantom trading floor. What Herbalife has is it has phantom or fictitious customers.
Futurism eventually got marred by its link to Fascism, but early on, it was totally avant-garde, and I wanted to dream a phantom link from the early futurists to the politically radical Italy of the 1970s, a time of fun, play, subversion – if also violence and mayhem.
Because of its phantom nature, and despite elaborate defense mechanisms, the ego is very vulnerable and insecure, and it sees itself as constantly under threat. This, by the way, is the case even if the ego is outwardly very confident.
I went to see ‘Phantom of the Opera’ with my grandma and my mom when I was very little. The stage, the voice, the music… Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber has been a massive inspiration to me for some time – the storytelling, that deliciously somber undertone in his music.
Scare answers to scare, and force begets force, until at length it comes to be seen that we are racing one against another after a phantom security which continually vanishes as we approach.
‘Phantom’ was for me an interesting technique of telling the story. You have one voice that it is in the present telling what is happening, and then there’s one voice from the past that’s also driving the story forward. And you know that the two story lines will meet eventually.
I haven’t seen Clones, which has been during this period when I haven’t seen much of anything, but I did see Phantom Menace, and see my feelings about it – see, first of all, I think that when you make a lot of movies, your attitude about the movies changes.
When I was a vocalist, a lead singer in a rock band, I was a law student at the time. It wasn’t a professional rock band, it was for fun. I was already way out of that by the time Phantom came along. Having to learn to sing, it was such duress, having to really try and get to such a quality.
Given the volume of PC sales and the way McAfee runs its operation, I imagine there must be thousands of phantom subscribers – folks who signed up once upon a time and left the software behind two or three computers ago.
It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.
I was very young, and I was on vacation with my family, and there was a retrospective of old films, and one of them was ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ with Claude Rains that was in color. It was something very important for my career because I began to follow these stories that were morbid.
I haven’t seen Clones, which has been during this period when I haven’t seen much of anything, but I did see Phantom Menace, and see my feelings about it – see, first of all, I think that when you make a lot of movies, your attitude about the movies changes.
My poor sister was forced to be in the plays that I would write. We would go to my grandma’s retirement building and perform ‘Phantom of the Opera.’
I think they got caught up in how much money they could get from each of the city governments as far as tax rebates. But that stuff works when you make money. It’s a little bit phantom money.
I originally wanted to go into sports, but my first concert was KISS at the shooting of ‘KISS Meets The Phantom Of The Park.’ The minute I saw Gene and Paul… it was all over. I knew that’s what I wanted to do.
I’m an obsessive musical theatre person, so some of the most formative albums for me were, you know, the ‘Phantom Of The Opera’ soundtrack or ‘Into The Woods.’
Lesley Manville comes at ‘funny’ from a totally different direction in ‘Phantom Thread,’ using snootiness and froideur. The effect of her performance – as the difficult manager of her difficult brother’s couture dress business – stems in part from the chill she puts into her line readings.
We need, in effect, to make the phantom ‘lock-boxes’ around the trust fund real.
I originally wanted to go into sports, but my first concert was KISS at the shooting of ‘KISS Meets The Phantom Of The Park.’ The minute I saw Gene and Paul… it was all over. I knew that’s what I wanted to do.
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