Director Jon M. Chu talks all things ‘Wicked’ with Deseret News

The much-anticipated film adaptation of “Wicked” is finally here.

This week, “Wicked” opened the gates to a cinematic Oz, giving audiences a closer look at the Broadway juggernaut than ever before.

Many longtime fans of the Broadway musical are bursting with questions about how director Jon M. Chu translated the stage show for the screen.

The Deseret News spoke with Chu Friday and asked him about his process, including how he cast beloved characters and why he split “Wicked” into two parts. Here is what he told us.

This discussion has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Deseret News: What is something the film adaptation of “Wicked” offers audiences that the Broadway production does not?

Jon M. Chu: I think that cinema is a very different medium than the stage, and I was lucky, I saw the stage show when it was still in San Francisco, before it ever made it to New York, and so I was sort of patient zero, and I got some close, good seats because we had season tickets. And I remember being blown away about how cinematic it felt.

We get to take the audience closer than ever before, not even just in the third row. We get to take you two inches from their faces. And I think in a movie like this which has so much nuance about relationships and good versus evil… that makes a huge difference.

So I hope you get the dynamics of what it feels like to see a cinematic experience, but you get the intimacy of being right there with two women that you’re going to fall in love with… and root for them to be together , even if their destiny may be separate.

DN: When adapting “Wicked” for the screen, what were some of the great challenges you faced, and what were your favorite Trumps?

JMC: The greatest challenge is there’s a lot of people who this means a lot of different things to — whether it’s “The Wizard of Oz,” the book from L. Frank Baum, or the (“The Wizard of Oz”) movie in 1939 or the book of “Wicked” … or the musical itself which has lasted for 20 years.

So for me, balancing those ideas, and I really had to protect my brain from getting influenced by too many people telling me what it should be. And then I really drew into my instincts of what I fell in love with the musical for in the first place.

The reason I fell in love with it is because I do have history with Wizard of Oz. It was a fairy tale that my parents, coming from China, coming here with five kids, instilled in us that America was this great place and that we could dream as big as we wanted to, so I wanted to retain that.

I’m really proud of us also trying to dig through, to scratch at these truths within this fairy tale, that hopefully generations will get to see.

DN: What prompted your decision to split “Wicked” into two parts?

JMC: It was sort of a no brainer. Once you actually start to get in there, there’s a lot of holes in the plot that a movie audience would just not buy into. There’s a lot of holes in the emotional journey of Elphaba and Glinda that on stage, you just sort of accept… so we had to clear the decks a little bit.

What we realized is you’re either changing “Wicked” completely — you’re taking songs out and you’re really condensing it, and it’s not going to be the “Wicked” that we all love, or you’re going to expand it and allow each thing to be the best version of its thing. …I’m really excited, because it allows us to find Elphaba and Glinda where they’re at and really dig into those ideas as they become best friends.

If movie one is about choices, then movie two is about the consequences of those choices, and how even more complicated it gets… and you get the time and the room to really play with that.

DN: How did you approach casting beloved characters such as Elphaba and Glinda?

JMC: That was really, really hard. In the end, we knew that if we don’t find the right Elphaba and the right Glinda, that you just don’t make the movie. No matter how much work we did before, they were the centerpiece. You had to have someone who could drive this ship, who could imbue them with such humanity and yet still be the characters that we know, but in a new way that we have never experienced before.

Cynthia Erivo came in (wearing) jeans and a T-shirt, and she sang “Wizard and I” — it blew us out of the water, words that we’ve heard millions of times meant something totally different coming out of her mouth. And she could be really small and really young, and then she could be extraordinary and iconic.

Same thing with Ariana Grande. We were like, “There’s no way (Grande) can strip herself of this character she plays, because that’s probably her.” And what we realized is, no that’s actually not her. That is a role that she plays, and that she’s a person who’s actually also finding her own life at the same time that she would be shooting this movie, and Glinda gave her a vehicle in which to express those things of what it means to live in a bubble.

DN: What did it take to get Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel on board for their cameos?

JMC: We knew we wanted to include them in some way. We had all different ideas, and we didn’t want to present to them until we had a very great idea for them.

Then Stephen Schwartz (the executive producer) and I were talking and we had this section in Wizomania where we needed some backstory on The Grimmerie and Oz… and (Schwartz said), “What if we made it with them?” and it was just a brilliant thing.

So we wrote it as… they played the wise women in this fake play in the middle of Emerald City. And it was just too delicious to have them play the most famous actors in Emerald City. And as soon as we presented that to them, they were in.