WICKED Director Dishes on Working With Top Talent: ‘Inspires People’
Movieguide® Contributor
WICKED director Jon M. Chu told Movieguide® all about what it was like to bring the Broadway favorite to life with some of the world’s most talented stars — Ariana Grande and Teddy Bear Award®-winner Cynthia Erivo.
“I feel like Cynthia…just having her sing words that we’ve heard a million times means things differently when it comes out of her mouth,” the director explained in an exclusive interview with Movieguide®. “She’s exposing her wounds in her own life, and she was paying attention to the details, from the type of roots that make up her broomstick…They’re mangrove roots in the top and what the design was, everything was built around that character, and Ariana Grande…I was very suspicious that she could actually strip herself of the Ariana Grande mask to become Glinda, but from day one she said, ‘I was Glinda before I was Ariana Grande. Like, this character speaks to me.’”
Grande astounded Chu with her abilities. The CRAZY RICH ASIANS director hardly “recognized” her when she performed as Glinda.
“She’s funny…and she also understands what it means to be the most popular girl in the world and finding yourself when all eyes are on you and how brave it actually takes to pop your own bubble of privilege, which you can live your whole life in, but to face difficult questions and answers and that are messy, and so those two I knew when they came into the room — and they took a few tries to get there — but I knew if we cast them — even though we didn’t do chemistry reads between them — that our movie would work.”
“But if we got those two together, and it was incredible when they came together, they’re so hilarious on screen,” Chu continued. “I love seeing their chemistry back and forth…Even in rehearsals, they came to my office, the way they dress at those press conferences and things, like they dressed in pink and green for a full two years.”
Even their pens were pink and green. So even on days they didn’t shoot, it was still like being with the real characters “every day.”
“And that makes so much room when you’re shooting because now I know that I don’t have to rehearse anything new on set with them,” Chu shared. “I could literally put a chair in the middle of the floor and say, ‘How would Glinda jump over that?’ and she would, and that gave us all the freedom in the world to explore things that just happened on the day, and I always say that’s the magic in movies — that what you capture on only that day you can’t plan in your bedroom or write it on a keyboard, you know, in a conference room.”
“What happens that day, if you get that in a bottle, to me, that’s when movies really come to life,” he said.
READ MORE: WICKED IS RATED PG. DOES THAT MEAN IT’S SAFE FOR KIDS?
Chu believes all the projects he worked on in the past gave him the skills he needed to direct the movie.
“I think everything in my life led me to this moment,” Chu told Movieguide®. “I know that sounds dramatic, but it really is true.”
“I started with the STEP UP movies, which, you know, I had to learn the levers of making movies, but I also met amazing dancers and learned that the form wasn’t just, oh, that’s just a headspin, like there was purpose and there was poetry and there was storytelling in every move, and I learned how a camera could either ruin that or help enhance it, you know,” he explained. “Even following around Justin Bieber, I learned like, oh wow, the public pressures of this kid and what we ask of these young people from their lives is sometimes actually sickening and what it means for a kid to go up.”
Everything he learned from his involvement in other movies like GI JOE and CRAZY RICH ASIANS helped him prepare in different ways for WICKED.
Chu hopes WICKED expresses “a fairy tale, hopefully. A timeless fairy tale that sort of kicks the tires on a fairy tale that we’ve known our whole lives but looks at where we are now in the world and hopefully inspires people to feel powerful in their voice, and they can rise and keep walking…no matter how uncomfortable they feel, and maybe they realize that they’re actually flying at the end of it,” he said.
When Chu spoke to The Globe and Mail, the interviewer said that the movie’s colors felt “a little desaturated” compared to THE WIZARD OF OZ.
“I mean, there’s color all over it. I think what we wanted to do was immerse people into Oz, to make it a real place,” Chu explained. “Because if it was a fake place, if it was a dream in someone’s mind, then the real relationships and the stakes that these two girls are going through wouldn’t feel real.” He wanted to show Oz in “a way we have not experienced Oz before.”
“It’s been a matte painting. It’s been a video game digital world,” he said. “But for us, I want to feel the dirt. I want to feel the wear and tear of it. And that means it’s not plastic.”
Chu teased that the movie’s sequel might feature Dorothy, like in the Broadway show.
“In the show, Dorothy is around. They have to intersect, and you can only tease it so much. I won’t say whether she’s a character, necessarily, in movie two,” he told Variety.
“There’s a part of me that wants everyone’s Dorothy to be the whatever Dorothy they want. And yet, there is interaction and some crossover,” he continued. “So I’ll leave that up to Part Two.”
WICKED received a -2 rating from Movieguide® for mixed pagan and romantic worldviews with politically correct content.
READ MORE: WICKED MOVIE REVIEW
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