On a recent morning, Jon M. Chu was in his office in the Toluca Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, describing what it was like to direct “Defying Gravity,” the thrilling finale of his forthcoming adaptation of “Wicked.” In the Broadway version of the scene, the green-hued Elphaba, a.k.a. the Wicked Witch of the West, rises above the stage atop a huge platform, its mechanical guts hidden behind an enormous black cape. Onstage, the effect is showstopping.
In Chu’s version, however, Elphaba really flies, crashing through windows and barnstorming Oz. “We’re whipping her around with C.G. monkeys and C.G. backgrounds on a physical set,” Chu said. The Wizard’s guards are rushing in, the wind is blasting, and Cynthia Erivo, who plays Elphaba, is performing the signature song live, “even though I said she didn’t have to.”
“That scene took all of us,” Chu said. “But without Cynthia, who is just a powerhouse, it would have been all for nothing.”
Directing a film adaptation of “Wicked” would be a plum assignment for any fan of American musicals. Since its debut in 2003, “Wicked” has become one of Broadway’s most beloved shows, winning three Tonys and playing to more than 63 million people worldwide, from London’s West End to Tokyo. So how did Chu, who’s done lots of movies with music, but not a whole lot of musicals, get the gig? “I really am a newbie in the musical world,” he admitted. “So I feel like I’m living the theater kid’s dream.”
Indeed, Chu, 45, has been a lover of musicals dating to his earliest days. As a boy, he regularly saw shows in San Francisco and grew up on a steady diet of film musicals, including “The Sound of Music” (“That was on all the time in our house”) and “Singin’ in the Rain.” An early viewing of “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” the 1942 George M. Cohan biopic, inspired the young fan to start signing his name “Jon M. Chu,” in tribute.
This passion has infused many of his films, like the 2008 dance drama “Step Up 2 the Streets” and the 2011 concert film “Justin Bieber: Never Say Never.” But he had not directed a true musical adaptation until Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “In the Heights” in 2021.
Now Chu has several in the works, including an animated rendition of the Dr. Seuss classic “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!”; a version of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” for Amazon; a biopic of the Filipino singer and Journey frontman Arnel Pineda; and a musical take on his 2018 breakthrough film, “Crazy Rich Asians.”
But first there’s “Wicked,” which opens Friday with Erivo and Ariana Grande as schoolmates turned adversaries in the land of Oz. (Chu missed the Los Angeles premiere on Nov. 9 for the birth of his fifth child). A prequel to “The Wizard of Oz” and something of a reimagining of the Broadway musical, “Wicked” is 2 hours and 40 minutes and ends its tale midway through; moviegoers will have to wait till November 2025 to catch the second half.
Making a big-screen version presented several challenges for Chu. How do you cast the leads for a film that just about every actress who can sing, and every singer who can act, would kill to do? Would the story fit into the length of a typical feature film, and if not, should it be one really long movie, or two also pretty long movies?
Chu’s relationship with the material began in 2003, when he was a film student at the University of Southern California. During a break, he went to see the pre-Broadway run with his family at the Curran Theater in San Francisco. “I remember thinking, this is the most cinematic show I’ve ever seen,” he said. “Someone’s going to make a great movie out of this.”
Chu always wanted it to be him. “I’ve been chasing ‘Wicked’ for 20 years,” he said. Every so often he asked his agent to check on it, and every time he got the same answer from Universal: there’s a director attached, but if anything happens, we’ll let you know. (Stephen Daldry was slated to direct for years before leaving the project in 2020.) One time, he said, Universal reached out about his availability for an unnamed project but wouldn’t tell him what it was. “I asked them, does it rhyme with Pick-ed?” he said. It did — but they didn’t tell him that right away.
Marc Platt, a producer of both the Broadway musical and the film, recalled “turning down many, many directors. But it wasn’t because they weren’t wonderfully talented. I just wasn’t ready to make a movie.”
When Platt was finally ready, he called Chu and offered him the job. The ease of it all — no meetings, no questions — was worrisome. “I thought, oh, they don’t think we’re going to make this movie!” Chu said. “But that’s what they don’t know about me. I make movies. I know how to get a movie made. It’s like a superpower of mine.”
Chu began work on “Wicked” in 2021. “The first question was: one movie or two?” he said. It was a real dilemma — one of the six early drafts he received ran about five hours long. “I told them, we can’t debate about this every meeting, so let’s make a decision and commit. If we want to change it later, that’s fine.”
Chu ultimately settled on two films. “When you come in as the director, there’s like a two-week honeymoon period,” he said. “You get to set some boundaries.”
Casting the two leads, in the shadow of Broadway stars Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth, was also a trial. At first I was like, ‘Let’s go find two unknowns and make them stars,’” he said. “But then I realized that the people who are skilled enough to do all of this, the acting and singing and moving, are people who are already working.”
“The people who can match Idina and Kristin as singers, that’s very small,” he continued. “And then, OK, who’s also funny? That gets even smaller.”
Grande came in five times. “I was worried about the big façade of Ariana Grande, the performer,” Chu said. “But when she came in with no makeup, all of that disappeared. She came in against big, big actors, and she was the most interesting person in the room.”
As for Erivo, “she woke me up to the reality of Elphaba, the person,” Chu said. Erivo upended assumptions about her character — yes, she’s a misfit, and green, but she comes from money, so her witch costume would be scary but stylish — and transformed Elphaba’s singularly awkward dance in the OzDust Ballroom sequence, often played for laughs in the stage version, into something much more intimate and moving. “We couldn’t get through the rehearsals without crying,” Chu said.
The director’s enthusiasm for the project was infectious. “Jon would come in and go, oh my gosh, today we get to do ‘Defying Gravity,’” Platt said. “Oh wow, today we get to do ‘Popular.” When you begin a long day that way, it can’t help but be joyful.”
Erivo agreed. “He’s been an avid fan of musicals his whole life, which is something quite rare in directors,” she said. “I think loving musicals can be a bit taboo, but he’s not ashamed of it, and that makes me love him even more.”
The actress felt an immediate connection to Elphaba, a character bullied for being green. “I think everyone who’s played Elphaba has an understanding of what it means to be an outsider,” she said. “But I think there’s an even more direct line when part of her outsideness is the color of her skin. I know what it feels like to walk into a room and be the only one, much like most Black women know in big spaces where they’re the only one.”
Chu, for his part, also identified with Elphaba. “I have my own experiences with being green,” he said, then added, citing Grande’s character, “But I’m also Glinda, the girl in the bubble. I’ve been very privileged, but I know what it means to decide to pop your bubble and confront those hard things.”
“And I’m also the Wizard,” he said. “How far will you go to entertain your audience? How far will you push your own moral boundaries to keep your audience entertained? So I think I’m in everything. But I think everybody, Cynthia, Ari, brought parts of themselves to each of these characters.”
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