What's new

"The challenge I laid out to all my actors when I cast them — to Russell [Crowe], to Eddie Redmayne, Samantha Barks, to Hugh [Jackman] — was, 'You are all performing these globally iconic songs, and yet you need to make it appear that your characters have invented these songs in these times of crisis — have ripped them from their soul. You are not doing a rendition of a song, you are offering a song as a character does a soliloquy.' And I want to give them all the weapons at their disposal to do this."

On how Les Miserables has affected his directing style

"The thing I've really been trying to grapple with in the last few days is why the film has the emotional effect it has. I mean, there are people who say that they start crying at 'I Dreamed a Dream' and basically don't stop crying — or people cry four, five times, and they make jokes like, 'You made a grown man cry,' or you know, 'It was ugly tears, Tom. It was ugly tears.'

"And I was very affected the other day when a friend of mine told me, you know, a friend of mine lost his father in October and saw the film, and I said, ... 'I'm sorry that you had to, you know, go through watching the movie given the themes of the movie. It must have been very hard.' And he said, 'No, an extraordinary thing happened.' He felt better about the loss of his father, and he felt closer to his father. And that was when I thought, god, there's something fascinating ... going on here.

"And it — I think it also happens in the musical — which is, as you watch these songs, you, in your mind you make connections to suffering in your own life story, or suffering of those nearest and dearest to you, or even suffering that you know may happen, may be coming down the line. You know, we all face the challenge of our mortality ultimately, and the musical has ... this extraordinary ability to process part of that suffering and to make you feel better about it. And it offers a catharsis. I think that's what I'll take forward, is a new understanding of what catharsis means."