Every first time filmmaker will say, like,
"If you didn't film it, you don't get to edit with it later."
If it's not in the can, it's not in the movie.
And that's a hard lesson to learn
'cause sometimes you'll have a really strong opinion
on how you want to shoot something on the day
and you go, "no, no, this is what it's gonna be.
I know my brain, I'm shooting it like this."
And then you get into the edit and go like,
"I wish I'd just shot it in another way."
Cut!
Three...
Hi, I'm Lin-Manuel Miranda,
today we're gonna talk about the creative process
in directing my first feature, Tick, Tick...Boom!
This is First Film.
Film is my first love.
I have wanted to be a director since I was three years old.
I spent my summers in Puerto Rico
knocking around my grandfather's video store.
He owned a VHS video store called Miranda Video.
I watched all kinds of age-inappropriate entertainment
as an unsupervised youth and always loved movies.
Then I kind of fell in love with theater along the way
and I went to college intending to study both.
I sort of majored in theater instead of film
out of practicality.
You have to pay for your own senior film.
When you're a theater major,
the school gives you the 200 bucks
for the lights and the costumes.
It was a very simple transaction of
you write it, you put it up on stage,
you write it, you put it up on stage.
It's harder with film.
I think that for your first film,
I think it's important to go personal
because you're going to have to make more decisions
than you're prepared to make at any given time,
and so if it's coming from an authentic place,
you'll know the answers.
Even if you don't know why they're the answers,
you'll know the answers 'cause you know the world
and you know the story you're trying to tell.
You guys ready there at the start,
can we move them back to where they were at the top?
You're gonna get questions about
the color of the tablecloth and the light
and if you know all the answers
because it's from somewhere deep within you,
I don't mean necessarily literally, you know,
I never worked at a diner,
but I knew the answers because I'd watched that footage
of Jonathan on his last day at the diner
and I know what it's like to work to do what you have to do
so you can do what you want to do.
That part of it is authentic.
And I've been that struggling songwriter,
and so those answers will be clearer
if you were very clear on what you need.
I saw the off-Broadway production of Tick, Tick...Boom!
And I go see this musical by the guy who got me started
writing musicals, because Rent changed my life,
and it was somehow even more concentrated
and personal an attack than Rent was.
Hey Lin, here's a sneak preview of your twenties.
That pretty girl sitting next to you with the amazing voice?
She's gonna get a real job.
You guys aren't gonna be together anymore.
All your friends? They're gonna get real jobs.
It's just gonna be you banging your head against the wall
of your childhood dream,
and the world is gonna tell you "no" every day of your life.
- I have rejection letters
from every major and minor producer, theater company,
record label, and film studio in existence.
And in just over a week...
I will be 30 years old.
- Let's go ahead to scenes 47 to 52 and get the dress.
So I prepared the show as if I were
workshopping an original musical.
I think we did three or four readings
where I would just get a bunch of actors
around Andrew Garfield
and we would read through the material,
we'd take a week to learn all the songs.
I've taken out some bass drum, so don't be alarmed.
- [Andrew] Oh my God, thank you for warning me.
- [Lin] And then Steven and I would go back and retool
and then we would do another reading.
Like a year and a half of just readings
before cameras were anywhere near the place.
Andrew's taking piano lessons and he's taking voice lessons.
So at each one of those he sings a little more.
I think the first one he only sang "Boho Days"
'cause it was acapella, there's no way to be off-key,
there's, you're just singing.
And he sang on "Sunday" because it was a group number
and he felt comfortable singing in a large group,
but he was really scared, and rightfully so,
he'd never done this on this scale.
By the last workshop,
Andrew is blowing the doors off the place with his voice,
but that evolution was really gradual
and amazing to witness. (crowd applauding)
I mean my biggest thing in directing actors
was sort of do unto others
as you would have them do unto you.
I tried to treat them like grownups
and I cast them because they
were the best people for these roles.
I tried to develop a private language with each of them
and let them know what they needed.
Some actors are more technical,
they just want to hear, like, "we're closer in on you,"
and like literally dial knobs in terms of
what you're already doing,
sort of giving them the guardrails
of how to modulate their performance,
and some are really instinctual.
I, you know, I remember going to one actor
during like kind of an argument scene being like,
"You're right!"
"Like, you have to remember that you are right.
That person is yelling in your face,
but you're actually right,
and you're allowed to say you're right."
And it worked wonders.
I think the biggest challenge
with adapting musicals to the screen
is the suspension of disbelief is tougher,
it's just tougher.
When you walk into a theater and there's a big proscenium
around everything that's happening
you're like, "they better break into song." (laughs)
"I didn't pay for a play."
It's easier to just sort of figure out that transition
between speech and song.
When a camera is right here and it looks like real life
and it looks like the life you and I live in,
the threshold is higher
to establish a world in which people can break into song
and express themselves that way.
It's always amazing to see how different filmmakers
approach it, whether it's On the Town
and that one sailor who starts to walk in and it goes-
♪ I feel like I'm not out of bed yet ♪
And you're like, "boom, I'm with him," like let's go.
For this, I immediately thought, well,
this was a rock monologue first.
Jonathan, with a rock band,
and as soon as his hands touch the piano,
we can go anywhere we want.
There's a truism in musical theater
that the opening number establishes
the world of your musical and it establishes
music's relationship to the audience
and how the characters feel about each other, all of it.
With Hamilton, I really pushed that.
The opening number, everyone is just a person,
they're all wearing the same color clothes,
and it's a very Sweeney Todd-ish intro,
attend this tale, it's important,
and then at the end they start putting on their characters.
It's very Brechtian.
Then in "Helpless/Satisfied" we say,
oh, we reserve the right to stop time,
freeze it and rewind it if we need to.
I also believed in that in this,
like opening, we're establishing that we're gonna go
into the world in Jonathan's mind,
that these musical numbers
are the world according to Jonathan Larson,
and then using every number to push on that.
The opening number of In the Heights
is nothing if not a guide
to how to experience this neighborhood.
We learned a lot from Fiddler on the Roof,
which is like the greatest opening number ever written.
It's like here's what the show is about, tradition.
- Tradition!
- [Lin] Here's our village.
I'm going to introduce you to them
in concentric circles, expanding outward.
"I am Tevye, I have five daughters,"
"here are the other special folks in our village."
And we learned a lot from that with Heights
in terms of like, here's our main storyteller,
Usnavi, here's the people most important to him,
Abuela, Sonny, then expand out, local businesses.
Here's Kevin from next door,
here's the ladies from the salon next door, expand out,
here's his best friend Benny, here's Vanessa,
and here's the neighborhood, let's go.
And so letting people in
and letting an opening number be an onion,
it looks like this but we're gonna open it up
and open it up and reveal all the layers.
You know, and the opening number "30/90" does that, right?
Like, very simply, like he's playing piano,
he's playing with a rock band,
we cut to a scene in the diner,
it seems like a semi realistic scene.
Next time we see those characters
they are singing and dancing in his apartment.
So it's like just each time just like
inching the audience along,
like, we reserve the right to do this.
We see him and Susan in the Strand,
super realistic dialogue, you quit your job, what?
- You just quit?
- Well no I didn't just quit, quit.
I gave my notice.
- [Lin] And now everyone in the Strand can sing.
So like just bringing out the fact that,
in Jonathan's world, this can happen.
We went to the Library of Congress with Jen Tepper,
who's a Jonathan Larson historian,
and we just grabbed everything
and we threw it all in the pile.
The songs he performed in the monologue,
songs from Superbia, his unproduced musical,
songs from the off-Broadway version
and said, what's our movie?
And we threw everything up on this board.
Now we were creating an original musical
with Jonathan Larson's songs,
and I think we cut three songs from the off-Broadway version,
we put back in two from his rock monologue
along with two no one had heard from Superbia.
That gets into the skillset I know how to do,
which is craft an evening.
What do the songs in this order do to your heart?
And then how does the storytelling
sort of lead us into those things?
I think that's also one of the most important things
about our movie, this is not one of those biopics
where you see the Mozart writing his masterpiece.
This is a movie about failure and getting back up
and his masterpiece is ahead of him
and it's hopeful because maybe so is yours.
We did storyboards for the more elaborate numbers.
Chief among them, "Sunday."
I learned to take big swings from Jon M. Chu.
He envisioned such an epic scope
for this little movie about Washington Heights,
I always pictured it as this tiny little indie movie,
and he was like, "No, Lin, your characters have big dreams,
you're allowed to take up space and have big dreams."
And if anything, in this, is a love letter to Jon M. Chu
it's the "Sunday" sequence in our movie.
And I don't think I would've had the courage
to swing as big as I did on that sequence
without Jon as a guide and a friend.
A lot of this begins with the conception of the number,
and then we figure out sort of the best way to stage it
and pre-visualize it.
With "Sunday" it's an homage
to Sunday in the Park with George.
That is a big choral number
in Sunday in the Park with George,
Jon only ever sang it as a one man band,
and so I, as the filmmaker,
have an opportunity to give Jonathan Larson
the chorus he never heard on this song,
and so I want to build Jonathan Larson's dream chorus.
So I want to put in the people
that were special to the shows he loved,
but I also want to give him this kind of galaxy brain moment
that exists outside of time.
I knew I wanted to turn the Moondance Diner
into a proscenium, and then as we were brainstorming,
I also thought we can also turn the Moondance into a marquee
and we could do music and lyrics by Jonathan Larson,
which is something he never saw in his lifetime.
Collaboration is so important,
and it's so important to listen to
the very smart people you hired
and let the best idea in the room win.
I can tell you so many shots
I would never have thought of on my own
that are in this movie because I had
this incredible underwater photographer in the pool,
and I shot the things that were on my mind
and then I said, "What cool things don't I know you can do?"
And he went, "oh, great."
And then we really had some fun
because he does this on every movie
and this is just my only movie,
and again I have three
incredible underwater shots in that movie
that never would have occurred to me
because I asked the expert, "How far can you push me,
and what crazy thing can you show me
that I haven't seen before?"
I want the vibe of, "this is so fun,
can you believe we get to do this?"
That's the vibe I want on set.
We're in the school play
and we are not doing this for money,
we're not doing this for extra credit,
and we're doing this because we love it.
Pressure is gonna be there regardless,
but we can have fun and remember why we're doing it
while we're here.
This was a little of my experience
directing Tick, Tick...Boom!
And you can check out my first film on Netflix right now.