Sondheim on what inspired him to write the original music and the dynamics of his life at the time:

"I don’t really know. This, the music of this, this movie is an homage to Bernard Herrmann, and when I was 15 years old I saw a movie called Hanover Square, for which he wrote the music. It was a melodrama, took place in Edwardian England and it was about a composer and featured a piano concerto - that the composer supposedly had written. And I’ve always wanted to write a - I don’t want to say a horror musical, I don’t really mean that - but a musical melodrama in which the music would maintain the tension. And it just happened - I don’t think this was this period in my life at all - it just happened that I was in London and saw at Stratford East a production of this new version of Sweeney Todd, written by a young playwright named Christopher Bond and was so taken with it - actually, it was mostly charming, it was not creepy. It was a little creepy, but it was mostly charming but it had these creepy elements in it; the story itself being the creepiest. And I thought, 'Gee,' that I’d love to do that as a musical with a kind of Bernard Herrmann score which - just to scare an audience, just to keep an audience on the edge of their seats, because it’s hard to scare people in the theatre. It’s easier to scare them in movies. It’s harder to scare them in the theatre because, first of all, you see the whole stage, you see the audience with you. There are so many distractions and it’s hard to grab them like that. You can do that with a close-up, you know. You have a close-up of a hand on a banister and that can be very scary, but on the stage, the hand’s on the banister but there are people there and there are things going on. So I thought, 'Let’s see if we can scare an audience by... that’s the function of the music. I don’t think it was the time of my life, it just happened that that’s when I saw Sweeney. I think if I saw Sweeney Todd today, the same thing, I think I’d want to write it again."

Sondheim on the layers of Sweeney Todd (the film) that wouldn't translate to the stage:

"I’m trying to think what they would be. You know, the thing about the stage is you can do, you can virtually do everything on the stage that you can do in the movies; it just depends on the audience’s imagination. You can transform. You can go from the Tokyo airport to a hospital interior on the stage just as quickly as you can with a cut in the movie. It all has to - you don’t bring in tons of scenery, but you do it through suggestion. So, off-hand, I can’t think of anything that couldn’t have been done on a stage the way that it’s done in the movie, except for things like the blood, the amount of blood. Although the blood on the stage shocked the audience. It was, compared to what’s on the screen, it’s not much but the way it was used and the fact that it was there."

On how the backdrop of London plays a central role:

"Well, the usefulness of the city of London, that really comes from Chris Bond’s play. Chris Bond’s play is a study in - actually, it’s partly about the class system. And the interesting thing about Bond’s play is that all the upper class characters speak in a kind of blank verse. It’s almost iambic pentameter. And all the lower class people speak in demotic English. The city of London therefore in the play is a character split between those above and those below as the lyric says."

On whether he had to make alterations to the score for the film:

"Yes, adaptations in terms of cutting certain sections of songs out where there wasn’t anything active to film. The trouble with most musicals that have been done for the screen - in fact all the musicals that have been made from stage musicals - is that they are essentially films of the stage musicals and the songs are used as songs. What Tim wanted, and and Logan and I also, was that if a song does not lend itself - on stage you can sit and listen to a song being sung for three, four, five minutes because that’s the convention and you can enjoy it because it’s taking a moment and expanding it or... savouring the moment. But on the screen - at least I as a movie fan - I want the story to be told and I want it to go swiftly. So that meant that we had to excise certain parts of the songs and excise certain songs. So I would... if Tim or Logan said to me, 'Could we get from this point to that point more quickly?' I’d find a way of compressing or omitting or aligning, so that it would still maintain the shape of a song - of the song - without having to... I could give you numerous examples. There’s a whole middle section of Green Finch and lin, Linnet Bird which is cut. There’s a whole middle section of Little Priest which is cut. But unless you know the score, you wouldn’t know it. I like to think you wouldn’t know that anything was cut. I might be wrong, but I think you wouldn’t know. And I’ll bet a lot of people who only know the score superficially will not notice those elisions. But those are the things I worked out so the movie could be told swiftly."

Sondheim on what he did to make the actors more comfortable to sing:

"I’ve spent my entire life relaxing actors and think I’m by nature, generous. I hate the idea that people feel that they’re auditioning and all I’m there to do is to help them be confident. The whole thing about dealing with people who have not sung professionally before is giving them the confidence to sing. It’s as simple as that. And as hard as that [is] to give somebody confidence - they have confidence in acting, but they have very little confidence or no confidence in singing and the only way they can is to support them and just rehearse them and... gentle them."

On how his style has evolved over the years:

"Well, I change my style for each show. You know, there are foxes and hedgehogs, and I’m a fox. I don’t dig one place deep, I scour the field. The style for Sweeney Todd is entirely different than the style for any other show I’ve written. But I would claim that that was true of each show I’ve written, that I’m a firm believer in content dictating form and style. And, you know, if you’re going to write Company then you write that kind of score. If you’re going to write Pacific Overtures, you’re going to write that kind of score. And if you’re going to write Sweeney Todd, you write that kind of score. So, there are other composers who would use the same style for each. It’s neither good nor bad, it’s who you are as a composer. I’m an eclectic and I always have been."

For more on Sweeney Todd, check out our recent press conference interview with Tim Burton and Johnny Depp