Craig Zadan

I don't understand how other producers who have no experience making a musical jump in and produce one.

Some filmmakers set out to re-create the theater experience they got on Broadway. They kept everything the same. They shot the original casts. We reinvent the whole thing, look at it solely as a movie. We pretend that nobody saw 'Chicago' or 'Hairspray.'

When we went to Judy Davis and said, 'We want you to play Judy Garland in the mini-series 'Life With Judy Garland,' she was shocked, but we just had an instinct about her.

If anything's going to go wrong, it'd go wrong during 'Peter Pan,' not 'The Sound of Music.'

Neil and I are most thrilled that we were able to bring musical theatre to the enormous audience that 'The Sound of Music' reached.

Carrie Underwood clearly drove 'The Sound of Music.' For 'Peter Pan,' we had terrific actors but not stars, and we did not do nearly as well.

We'd never do 'The Sound of Music' because the movie was perfect.

When we did 'Chicago' and we announced Renee Zellweger, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Richard Gere, and Queen Latifah, everybody went crazy and said, 'What are they doing? What are they thinking?' And, now, you look at the movie, and you see that we chose the people that we wanted for that movie, and we were so proud of all of them.

We're finding that the casting of 'A Few Good Men' is different from the musicals because the kind of actors that you need to do it are movie actors, basically.

We wanted to take on social and political and LGBTQ stories which no one at the upper level of the entertainment industry ever really wants to do. So you have to fight, and you have to persuade, and you have to manipulate the studios and the networks. And you have to go back - over and over again - until they say yes.

The truth of the matter is - when we look at things - every movie we do - no matter what the subject matter is - we go to the universal theme of family. We always go to that because if the movie is about family, then any audience can relate to it.

We zero in on family as a theme because it makes the movies emotionally available to a universal audience.