PAUL WILLIAMS TALKS TO EDMONTON JOURNAL AHEAD OF CLOSING NIGHT SCREENING
"I want to talk about the Canadian fans," Paul Williams tells Edmonton Journal's Fish Griwkowsky during a Zoom call ahead of this Tuesday night's screening of Phantom Of The Paradise at NorthwestFEARFest. "When Brian De Palma and Bill Finley went to see the movie in New York, I heard there were six people there, including Brian and Bill. Nobody raved about it, except a few fans in two cities: Winnipeg and Paris. I’m not sure why, but there would always be a couple people who were just fanatics and made everyone they knew watch it. And this year I introduced it as the closing film to the Cannes Film Festival! And the film stayed alive just because, I can’t even call them fans at this point, because of family and what they did. And amongst those fans, Guillermo del Toro wants me to write the words for a musical based on Pan’s Labyrinth. And among those fans emerges Daft Punk, and I end up writing two songs and singing one on Random Access Memories, and the next thing you know I’m accepting the Grammy for Album of the Year. So when you start talking about Phantom of the Paradise, I can’t even muster the language to show you how grateful I am, and it begins in Winnipeg and Paris."
Here's Griwkowsky's intro to the Edmonton Journal article:
Living a life of unparalleled collaboration, Paul Williams is surely the only person on Earth able to claim a direct creative pipeline to David Bowie, Barbra Streisand/Kris Kristofferson and Kermit the Frog, all of whom sang his lyrics to the world — including Hunky Dory’s Fill Your Heart, A Star Is Born’s Grammy-winning Evergreen, and the immortal Muppet Movie opening theme, Rainbow Connection.Remarkably, it’s just the tip of Williams’ creative iceberg.
His staggeringly diverse accolades stretch back to a different Grammy win with Daft Punk in 2014, singing with a lit cigarette in full Battle for the Planet of the Apes makeup on Johnny Carson in ’73, co-writing We’ve Only Just Begun and Rainy Days and Mondays for The Carpenters — never mind penning the words to The Love Boat theme!
Insanely, the list goes on, including voicing the beloved Batman Animated Series’ Penguin amid countless guest spots on everything from Babylon 5 to The Hardy Boys, occupying a Hollywood Square in the midst of it all.
To try and zoom in like that helicopter shot into Kermit’s swamp, the 84-year-old legend is here Tuesday at Metro Cinema for NorthwestFEARFest’s closing–night, 50th-anniversary screening of Brian De Palma’s beautifully weird and musically wondrous cult classic Phantom of the Paradise, scored by and indeed starring Williams.
In a long and magnificent conversation I can just barely sample here, the Oscar/Grammy/Golden Globe-winner talks about it all, laughing as he asks to flip from the phone over to Zoom, “I’m so f—ing old, I listened to everything at 11 for 40 years!”