Cameron Mackintosh Reveals Details on Miss Saigon and My Fair Lady Movies

What’s mega-producer Cameron Mackintosh up to these days? A hell of a lot, says the four-time Tony winner in a new interview with Hollywood.com.

Mackintosh delivered the details about some of his upcoming passion projects, including previously reported film versions of Miss Saigon and My Fair Lady. He also revealed fun facts about two notable movie adaptations of his classic shows—the 2004 version of The Phantom of the Opera and the box office-busting Les Miserables. Read on for Mackintosh’s unfiltered take on five mega-sized musicals and their silver screen counterparts.

MISS SAIGON
The financial success of Les Miz “is going to encourage someone to do Miss Saigon,” said Mackintosh, praising the show’s “inherently cinematic” device of using dreams as an effective technique for a film version. “It allows you to do anything in your head, which is the thing that made Chicago work. [Unlike Les Miz] you only need to record some of Miss Saigon live, because it would be a visceral drama. The storytelling part of it.”

MY FAIR LADY
“If I found the right cast, would I do My Fair Lady now? Yes I would,” said Mackintosh, adding that his heart is “very close” to the 1964 film. “As much as I thought the original film had some amazing performances in it, I remember thinking as an arrogant producer that it was a rather stage-y film. I felt it was like huge, theatrical sets. I think you could do a much more modern, fluid film.”

OLIVER!
A relatively new addition to the rumor mill, Mackintosh revealed that the Dickens story was also up for consideration for the film treatment again. When asked about a possible remake of Little Shop of Horrors, Mackintosh countered: “I’ve got things like Saigon, possibly Oliver! or My Fair Lady [which] are more obvious for me to get involved with as movies.”

LES MISERABLES
Mackintosh revealed the reasoning behind the scrapping of one number from the blockbuster 2012 adaptation. “The only number that went was a number we always thought we wouldn’t need for the movie. We wouldn’t need ‘Dog Eats Dog’ because you get to know Thenardier much more from other shots in the film.”

THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
“I had nothing to do with the [2004] film adaptation, but to be honest, I would have wanted to do the film differently,” he admitted. “This new version which we’ve done is dangerous and gritty. It combines the world of upstage and the lair below. You see two different worlds. That would have been my approach to the film.”