Hey you guys!
thank you so much for your time today.
I know how precious it is
these days with everything that's going on in your life with.
I can tell you Tick, Tick, Boom and everything else going on in between.
So we're very, very grateful for your time.
first off, congrats on Encanto.
Thank you.
It's a it's a wonderful film, and I had the pleasure of talking
to the cast and the filmmakers and everyone else in between,
and they are an absolute hoot. So it was lovely to talk to them.
They talked to me that this idea kind of semi came from from you
and you were involved very early on. So.
So what was the initial kind of pitch that
that you put in or the idea and how it how it kind of came about?
Yeah, I kind of
Moana was kind of my audition for this.
Honestly, I was I was hired for Moana pre-Hamilton.
I was one of many musical theater writers they interviewed, and I got the gig
and had an amazing time and also saw how seriously
they took the responsibility of representing a culture on screen.
They understand Disney understands that like if we're setting a movie somewhere
like that, region has to be proud of what we've made
and we've got to go and do our homework and hire accordingly.
And so after the very successful experience
of working on Moana with Opetaia [Foa'i] and Mark Mancina
I sort of turned to my boss, Tom MacDougall ,
and said, If you're doing a Latin themed animated musical
like I was made for this, like, put me in coach.
And so
because I've wanted to to write for animated movies
since The Little Mermaid broke my brain in 1989.
And so, so yeah.
So I got to being on the ground floor of this.
So really working with Byron [Howard, director] and Jared [Bush, director] and later Charise [Castro Smith, director]
when she came aboard to sort of, you know, first of all, decide
to set in Colombia as sort of home to magical realism, literature.
And really, all I knew about Colombia's music going in was how diverse it was.
I knew the salsa music of Joe Arroyo, who was like a salsa legend.
I knew Carlos Rivas, who was like a global figure.
And I knew, like the nineties rock music of Shakira
and her subsequent global domination.
So like, that's three totally different genres, all coming from one country.
So I knew it was like an exciting palate
to kind of write music for.
It's surprising how many people say it's the Little Mermaid that broke them,
because that was the period for Disney where, you know, in the eighties,
they'd made a lot of films, but then Little Mermaid,
The Lion King and Aladdin came out, we all started going crazy again.
It's surprising how many people I've spoke to over the years.
The Little Mermaid is the one that they really responded to.
Yeah, but the three movies you just listed
had had one thing in common, and that's Alan Menken and Howard Ashman.
And, you know, they were serious theater writers
who brought the discipline and rigor of musical theater
storytelling to animated work and realized, Oh, like we can.
We are limited only by our imaginations in this medium.
And so I really take that seriously what I work on in any project,
I really try to raise my it's very easy to be intimidated because everyone's
the best at what they do.
But you raise your hand and you go, This is what music can do.
This is like, this is literally what music can do.
That animation can can amplify.
So, you know, there are songs in this that are my pitch.
Like I wrote, the opening number really inspired by the opening
number of Beauty and the Beast because I knew we had a lot of characters.
We wanted to tell a story about family, and I was like,
If we don't understand how everyone's related
and I like what their gifts are like, we're going to be very confused
this whole movie.
So, you know, I wrote that song and understanding that elements of
it would change before we had a second act or a third act to the movie.
It was just like, OK, if Mirabel is the only one without powers,
she's got to introduce us to everyone and she's got to literally introduce
this family tree style like start with Abuela and work your way down.
And and that was fun, too.
And then any time sort of a new story
element came in, we'd go back and revise the opening number like the last.
I think big swing we added to that was if you notice up well
as melody in it when she sings is actually no surrogate guitars.
So that couldn't exist until we wrote our way.
All the way through the movie,
I wrote the surrogate bass and go, Oh, that's as well as heart song.
So let me grab that melody and use it
when it introduces herself for the first time.
Yeah, that might be the
the fastest song the kids will sing these days.
The family magic. It's it's kind of relentless.
I like the fact that you put the coffee joke at night because I think
I kind of kind of need coffee for that, that number to really perform.
I am sipping coffee now and I am very proud.
Most of the great jokes in this are either brilliance from Jared and Charise
or like Amazing improvizations from Wilmer Valderrama.
But I did write the coffee jokes.
So when you when you start with some something,
how quickly did that the lyrics and the music kind of come for you ?
Because I can imagine you have to.
You start with the idea, as you say,
how quickly did this kind of come together in terms of the music and the lyrics?
Because I know we're going to make films,
lots of things take a long time to talk to kind of come together.
Yeah. Well, I mean, I knew I couldn't start
until we had done our due diligence on Colombian music and research.
And so I didn't write anything
until we went down there and did an amazing trip in 2018.
And then like,
you know, Jared and I would send each other mixes of Colombian artists.
We were kind of going down the rabbit hole and discovering
to really just kind of soak it in, like soak
in the instrumentation, soak in the rhythms
and then you kind of have to set it and forget it
and write to your characters and find the truth of your character.
So there are songs that wrote very quickly.
You know,
I know that,
you know, you know, the opening number
was revised over many months over the development of the film
because you have to be setting up the film you're delivering.
But We don't talk about Bruno is pretty fast.
You know, it was a delight to
when they came late enough in the process that
those characters were already talking to us.
It was amazing to hear Dolores sing for the first time.
That's what she sounds like.
You know, there's there always comes a delicious point.
If you're if you're if you're doing it right where the characters you stop
writing, the characters that you start taking dictation from the characters.
That's a weird, mystical answer.
But it's true.
And that was that was a really fun, surprising song to write at every turn.
I would be like, All right, Dolores wants to talk now, OK?
Camilo wants to talk it out.
And then when Isabella shows up and everything is perfect for her,
it's sort of like another great kind of delicious turn.
So that was a song that sort of surprised me at every moment.
And I think the one that took the longest for me was, and it always does was,
you know, Mirabel is big.
I- want song - Waiting on a miracle, which again, just like how far I'll go
was the hardest song to write for Moana because it's expressing
the characters like biggest secret desire.
Not only just it's just tricky dramaturgical to like, drill down on
what is that one phrase,
but it's also like intimidating because you're working for Disney
and this is the company that brought you into the unknown
and let it go and reflection and part of your world.
So you also have to like that shadow in your head
and like just drill down on what you get.
That is always Oscar's in office offices.
I'm sure that you have to go past.
Yeah, well, that's why I write at home...
I don't go near those
that gives you everything that you want and everything the filmmakers wanted.
So I wondered how excited you were to work with all these people
because I have to say with Stephanie [Beatriz], I've seen them in Brooklyn Nine-Nine,
and I really didn't realize
that was her voice because she has such a different tone.
And I know it's my favorite.
Yeah, it's sort of the great cosmic joke of the world that the world
got introduced to Stephanie two octaves lower in like a monotone
as Detective Rosa Diaz, but I knew
I knew Stef when we were both starving artists in the city.
She starred in a lot of my friend.
Kyari's plays in New York
before she moved out West and sort of took over the world.
So I knew what a musical and expressive voice she had, and the cast
is almost an exact mix of people I was huge fans of and fresh talent.
I was meeting in real time.
Know I was a huge fan of Diane Guerrero's dramatic acting on Orange
is the New Black. I had no idea she could sing like that.
I was like, You sound like a pop star?
Why aren't you a pop star?
I met Rhenzy [Feliz]
in the casting calls for In the Heights
when he came in for Sonny, and I just knew he was incredibly talented.
So I was I was thrilled that we got him for this movie.
But but someone like Jessica Darrow, who plays Luisa was like a total delight
and has a voice and actually sounds like Detective
Rosa Diaz in real life.
This little slip of a thing,
and she has this incredibly deep, powerful instrument.
So it was.
And then, of course, [John] Leguizamo, who is a childhood hero.
So it was it was a total joy to kind of fall in love with with this family.
Even though it was like this, we didn't all meet for the first time
until our premiere in L.A..
Very strange isn't.
That's that's how it spreads, how it's been for everybody, I suppose.
But you talked earlier about about how important Disney have been
in the way that they make their animations and deal with, you know,
different cultures and all that kind of stuff.
It must be great to be part of a celebration that celebrates Columbia
and all that, all the facets there in a lot of us in this part of the world.
You know,
I don't know much about, I can say, just kind of thriving an amazing place.
Yes. Yeah, it was it's
been really thrilling, and the response
from Colombians to the film has been so
thrilling.
I remember sort of texting with Wilmer early
in the process like this is a lot of pressure.
And he wrote me back to the bar
is so low for representation when it comes to Colombia.
Like, you know, in this first draft, we're better than anything that's out
because, you know, it's no secret, you know, that like Latin representation
and you look at the numbers, like in Hollywood, it's like abysmal.
So I'm thrilled to not just represent this film, but also
be part of a year where there's been such a variety of Latin representation,
everything from In the Heights, but also my end of three on Netflix.
Jorge'sincredible show and Vivo earlier this year, so
it's exciting to be part of like sort of a variety of Latin representation,
not only just in animation, but in films at large.
Indeed.
Well, I said, apart from the cut in between,
it's been an absolute pleasure with you taking your time and talking to you.
Been amazing and I thank you as well.
Tick, tick,. Boom is one of my favorite films of the year,
so thank you very much for that.
Oh, thank you so much.
I'll just say how good it is.
Thank you so much for your time. Absolute pleasure.