After making his name with 80s 'bratpack' drama St. Elmo's Fire and vampire flick The Lost Boys, director Joel Schumacher hit the Hollywood big-time. Among his successes are two Batman movies, Michael Douglas drama Falling Down, and John Grisham potboiler The Client. More recently he went low-key with Colin Farrell thriller Phone Booth and Cate Blanchett vehicle Veronica Guerin. For his next trick he adapts Andrew Lloyd Webber's popular stage musical The Phantom Of The Opera.

This project has been gestating for a long while. What took so long for you to make it?

Andrew [Lloyd Webber] first asked me to do this in 1988 after I'd just done The Lost Boys. He saw it and that's when he asked me to do The Phantom, but it was so early in my career and I was surprised that Andrew would think of me or even know of me and of my work. So we prepared the film to shoot in 1990 and for a lot of reasons - for Andrew personally and professionally - we didn't make the movie then but we stayed friends and it kept coming up again. I was always too busy though because my career was taking off and when I was doing post-production on Veronica Guerin in 2002, here in England, we were having a Christmas holiday dinner and it came up again.

Why did it still appeal to you after so many years?

I think even as far back as the Lon Chaney silent movie [1925] you can see it's always been very cinematic. It's part gothic horror part romance, part musical - there's so much going on. But when it came up again, almost exactly two years ago now, I just approached it as if it were brand new. It was scarier and more exciting and more challenging than any of the other movies I could have done last year. I thought at the heart of it was this very young, tragic love story. I thought once you take away the glitz and the glamour and the sets and the costumes it was that which interested me. So I said to Andrew, "I'll do it, but Christine must be very young to make the story work." If I could do it with a very young, beautiful, sexy and interesting cast - and if they're famous fine, but if they're unknown, I want the leeway. And he said, "Fine. But they all have to do the singing." And I said, "Okay, that's a deal."

Did you think there might be a few dangers in tackling this operatic style of musical?

You don't think that way. All movies have risks involved. Listen, 12 days in a phone booth, I don't recommend that! It's like, "I'm a film director, get me out of here!" And I'm sure Colin [Farrell] was saying, "I'm an aspiring actor, get me out of here!" You just can't think about it. The only thing I can compare it to is, if you're someone who leads an expedition up Mount Everest you know you can die, but somehow you believe you can get everyone up and down safely or you just don't do it. You don't think, 'let's go do this and die'. Fools rush in, I suppose.

Did people advise you not to do this?

Well there's always someone who says go home and lock the door and you'll be safe, but then the next person will say someone could break into your house and kill you. I think taking risks is the way to live life and I've also learned that if you're not afraid of the project then it's the wrong project. If you're scared of it then it means you're going to have to step up. People are always going to warn you against things however big or small the project is. When I wrote Car Wash all those years ago, a very important billionaire producer in Hollywood said to me, "Surely you're not making a movie about some black people washing cars, Joel?" And I said, "Indeed we are!" Well I'm happy to say that we were right and he was wrong.

You're next film, The Crowded Room, is another bold choice - the true story of a schizophrenic killer...

Yeah, but I might even slip another strange movie in before that, because if I do The Crowded Room with Colin [Farrell] then he has to do Miami Vice first so I have a waiting period. We may do it together if we can work out our schedules.

What's the other project about?

I don't think I can talk about it yet but it would be really odd - as far away from Phantom as Billy Milligan [in The Crowded Room] is. I try to take on things I haven't done before because I hope it will make me better at what I do.