Thishas been public knowledgesince April of 2022 but it wasnt a big selling point, for obvious reasons.
Audiences dont like to know theyre only getting half a movie.Just ask Tom Cruise.
Read about that, as well as how the second film impacted shooting, below.
Jon M. Chu directing Wicked.Image: Universal
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Well have more from Chu later this week.
Germain Lussier, io9: Were you part of the decision to makeWickedinto two films?
Chu and his cast – Image: Universal
Jon M. Chu:Yes for sure.
They kept going Oh its one movie, no its two movies.
I had to come and be like, We need to make a choice with this.
You cannot make a good one movie or two movies by dancing back and forth.
Commit to two movies right now, otherwise, were never making those two movies good.
I promise you that.
We can always change our minds, but we cannot think about it right now.
Thats what we committed to.
So that was a big choice.
Chu:It was really about moving backward from Defying Gravity.
What we discovered was the perspective of the movie had to be different than the show.
In the show, Galinda comes down on her bubble and shes basically the host of the night.
Its sort of vaudevillian.
Shes going to bring you into the story.
Shes going to take you out of the story.
We dont have the other side of that to go with.
Eventually we will, but not this one.
Thats the weird one.
So theyre singing and dancing, which is still an oddity in a movie.
That joke is different.
That one-liner joke is very different in this.
And when that changes, now were with that girl.
Now we get to see her in her youth and be teased.
We get to root for her in this musical world.
Shes like Why is everyone singing?
Now youre like, What do we want for that girl?
And if we follow that path, thats what we did.
Okay, then how does she move into a dorm room and meet Galinda?
You cant just have another song just to have them at each others throats.
What is that awkward thing?
What are they discovering about each other?
Why do they need each other ultimately?
So were discovering a lot of things in that scene.
Complete your emotional journey, satisfy choices made, then the second movie is the consequences.
Chu:I mean, marketing has its own strategy for all those things.
I think we were pretty clear that there are two parts from the very beginning.
I had a statement, did the whole thing, everyone reacted.
I knew that there was going to be a certain reaction.
There was no question.
But I understood what those choices were.
And I felt like everybody knew it was a musical anyway.
We had musical trailers and things like that.
Its actually, technically, very difficult.
And they were dancing at different rhythms and things.
It becomes a mess very quickly.
So even the ones we did release, I thought it was impossible to cut all those songs together.
But its technically very challenging.
Its not just a choice that, Oh, we cant.
How do you go from The Wizard and I to Defying Gravity without changing the key?
io9: Tell me a little bit about the filming process for both films and why you decided that.
We had to do that for the strike.
[Erivo] had trained a year to do those stunts and to know where to put her voice.
And suddenly for six months shes not doing it.
Then she has to come back.
For us, it actually really helped in the end because we got to gather our energy again.
We had been shooting for 160 days at that point.
And I think she dropped in so quickly and easily.
And Ari also dropped in really easily.
They were these characters and it was not as difficult as I thought it would be.
Thats just a taste of our full interview with Chu.
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