Wicked: For Good cast a spell on the box office on opening weekend, conjuring up $226 million around the world ahead of this week’s long Thanksgiving holiday, with widespread audience and critical acclaim. I spoke with editor Myron Kerstein about bringing the hit Broadway musical’s energy, emotion, and messaging to the big screen.
Cynthia Erivo stars in “Wicked: For Good.”
Source: Universal
You can read my review of Wicked: For Good here, and my box office analysis here.
Audiences love the story of Wicked, and the films tap into the emotional heart that resonates so powerfully with people. It’s never the spectacle around it, it’s always the people and their conflicts, and the resolutions and their redemptions.
Wicked and Wicked: For Good have captured that approach in a way that many musical adaptation haven’t achieved, and the films represent a kind of test-case example of where the bar is set now.
Wicked: For Good – The Interview
So without further ado, here is my extended interview with editor Myron Kerstein…
MARK HUGHES: You worked on both of these films simultaneously with block shooting. First and foremost, on a personal cognitive level, that load and switching gears daily, I would just like some insight into your focus on that and on that process, because it seems overwhelming. Either one of these films would have been overwhelming, it would seem.
MYRON KERSTEIN: Yeah, it was very overwhelming because of the scale of the two movies. And to be honest with you, the eight-month shoot was going to be a marathon, so I had to really pace myself.
The good news is, I had some experience with episodic television where we had done block shooting. So I had had experience, you know, but what was a little different about these two movies is that they were so different tonally.
So one day I would get the dailies for Popular, and then the next day, I would get the Dailies for No Good Deed. And I’m like, what happened to these characters?
Even though I did know the whole story from the Broadway show, and of course reading the scripts, it still did mess with my head a little bit, as far as like getting and trying to understand what [director] Jon [M. Chu] was doing as far as tonal shifts between the two movies, and not getting confused.
There’s a few times that I challenged him on it and said, are you sure that people who experience the first movie, are they going to be able to drop into the second movie like this? And he was very confident about it, but for me, it was really confusing.
But you know, the great thing about editing films or TV shows or whatnot is that you break things down in these scenes, these components, these little bite-sized nuggets and you’re like, oh, okay, I’m just going to focus on the scene and make this scene the best scene possible.
And how do I do that? How I start constructing a scene is based on how I feel and whether things make me cry or laugh, or I get goosebumps. I just start to mine the gold, and build. If it’s What Is This Feeling? one day, and then For Good the next day, I have to treat those scenes appropriately and just make the best version of those scenes.
And then, of course, once you start to get a bigger picture of the two movies, then you you can really start to weigh how each of these each of these films work on their own.
But that took a long time, you know. It took a very long time.
Jon had this challenge for us, to see both movies 15 weeks after finishing the shoot. So the team just worked around the clock, trying to support myself and Jon to make that happen. That way he could see the whole arc between those two films.
And then, we put the second film away to sleep for a year, because we didn’t have the bandwidth and we didn’t have the resources. We needed to really focus on the first movie. In a lot of ways, that gave us a lot of freedom, because otherwise I think we would have been really overwhelmed, trying to make two movies at once.
Then we reopened the movie of January this year and said, okay, what do we have here? And I’m like, well, we have, there’s something here and it’s great, but we have a lot of work to do.
MH: I imagine it’s helpful to be able to come into it having seen the first one finished… [Even so,] I can’t even imagine the number of visual effects shots and how much previs you are working with, in a sequence like Defying Gravity or No Good Deed. There’s so much happening in those scenes, yet the emotion is still coming through, and also the performances around the songs, because they’re very performance-driven and you maintained that across the edit with all of was going on. And I mean, that alone seems like a Herculean effort to overcome.
MK: Yeah, you’re trying to manage just cutting the scene. You want to cut it the way you want to cut it. And, you know, the VFX department are tapping their watch saying these shots are going to take six months to get to even look good, let alone amazing.
And we’re just trying to cut the scene, because we feel like we’re so performance and character driven as filmmakers, if we don’t feel anything when we cut a scene together, we don’t want to turn it over to a bunch of VFX vendors to start making flying monkeys and stuff during No Good Deed if we don’t get that performance right.
So it’s a real challenge just having so many balls in the air, and wanting to keep working and reworking a cut. But it has to all be based on how we feel.
It was really good to have the first movie in the can, and to see how people react to the first film and understand why they love these characters. But it was also really frustrating, because we also knew that some of the things we had in the first film, we didn’t have in the second film. So we kind of had to treat it– we had to compartmentalize that as well, [because] they really love these characters together, but they’re not going to be together for half of the movie.
We’re going to have to treat this like the shark in Jaws, where when you finally see them together, you’re going to love it. It’s going to be great. And then, it’s going to feel frustrating for a while. We’re going to long for them to be together again. So we are using what we learned from the first movie as a tool in our toolbox in the opposite way, in some ways.
I also say one of the benefits of making two movies is, you have this amazing team with your VFX editors and the VFX vendors in my music department. We had spent so much of the first movie learning process, and we were such a well-oiled machine by the time we got to the second movie, people were almost reading each other’s minds. Like okay, this is what they’re doing, and the door is closed and the “mad scientist machines” are at work in there, and then when the door opens we’ll all come in– and Myron, what are you guys doing today? [Laughs]
And so, you know, that’s just really beneficial to have a team that goes from one film to the other.
MH: Well, speaking of going from one film to another, I’m intrigued by your back-to-back work in In the Heights and Tick, Tick… Boom! and then Wicked and Wicked: For Good.
You had the two films very much grounded in realism, but the musical elements are fantastical fantasy moments that come out of it; whereas Wicked is a fantasy story, but the music is part of the reality of that story. So the music has to seem grounded and natural happening in the fantasy and has to seem fantasy in the grounded tale. And editing-wise, I’m just fascinated by that, because it’s a microcosm within each film and then reversed as well. I hadn’t thought of it until looking at your filmography and realizing like, look what he did And I love all those movies.
MK: Oh, thank you. Well, look, you know, we learned a lot from working on In the Heights in Tick, Tick… Boom! as far as, first of all, how do you make a musical?
And one of the things we loved about making In the heights was it feeling very grounded. Like you said, the fantasy coming out of these grounded characters, there was something about Lin [-Manuel Miranda], the way he wrote his music, where you’re talking and speaking and singing all at once.
But there was something about the nature of that, that really made Jon and I understand the different tools in our toolbox, as far as how to extend outward so a scene that doesn’t feel like the scene stops and the music starts, and that it all feels organic and it feels very grounded.
And then we can, you know, we can go into fantasy if you want to, or if they’re just singing about having another bottle of champagne in an apartment, we can do that too.
Then with Tick, Tick… Boom! I get to just expand what I learned from In the heights as far as just, like, I can do anything. I could, you know, I could be nonlinear. I could be fantastical, but it’s all performance and character driven.
So when you get into Wicked, I feel like the scenes and the music are just extensions of one another. And so that there is no difference, and that when I watch the dailies, if somebody is singing something, or somebody is speaking lines of dialogue, that there’s no difference in that. I’m building the scene outward, and it’s again about how am I feeling, and how do I communicate feeling through performance and through rhythm, and through one shot next to another.
And you just keeps pushing. Then you have the epic nature of building Oz, and the animals, and cyclones dropping houses on characters. But the grounded nature of Jon’s work is that it’s all built on character and how they feel each other, and how they’re trying to communicate love for each other.
I think that’s the difference of the films we’re trying to make.
MH: That’s what stands out, is the way that those other films, like Tick, Tick.. Boom! is a very intimate film and it’s very, you know, it’s right there on him, and then with those fantasy moments and bigger moments you expand and you see that world, but it still has that focus on centering the character, and it’s intimate.
And that exists in Wicked: For Good, too. You bring that element of adapting the story, stage performances and musical elements, but then it’s like the difference between an opera versus Death of a Salesman, maybe, like a Wagnerian kind of scale, but it’s still at all moments centering the people and their emotions and connections.
Because of so much of it being pre-vis, and what you’re getting daily is so much the real thing in the performance and characters and music, so you’re always still working with that, whichever situation it is, there’s the performance and everything else is secondary to it.
MK: Yeah, 100%. I mean, you just cannot lose the plot. The singular compass is character, and what are your characters going through, what is their journey, and staying focused on that and not being swayed by– We have this thing Jon and I would say just because we can do it, doesn’t mean we should.
Because we can do anything. We like that the studio is like, if you want to make a shot, if you want to do this, if you want to see her flying on the broom and singing, whatever, or just be on someone’s face singing straight to us. So there’s a lot of restraint in these movies. And it’s built on trying to to be intimate with these characters.
You can only communicate that through performance, and through not trying to always dazzle the audience. Of course, I want every musical number to be like this gigantic dance field sort of musical number. That’s amazing when you get to do that as an editor, and you get to flourish your stuff. But sometimes it’s not about that. It’s about, again, for me it’s about the journey of a character, and how does it make me feel?
MH: So that’s what you meant earlier, when you were talking about the dailies, and that you’re doing both films, and you’re getting them and it’s like “what’s going on here?” and just letting the performance lead?
Is that something that most editors have that experience? Is it something you see in a lot of movies? I feel like I don’t, this is something that intrigues me and that I want to talk to you about, precisely because I don’t see it that often, personally.
MK: Well, when I do connect to a film that I watch of someone else’s work, when I’m connecting to it emotionally, I assume that the editor saw something in those dailies of that performance of that story that connected to them as well, and they had to find a way way to get it into the film.
But I’m not sure of everyone. I’m not sure of everyone else’s process. I just knew that I had to have a process. There was a good 10 years of my career that I didn’t have a process of editing. I was just kind of like, okay, this footage is coming out. I’ve got to put it together and make it into something and get it out.
And I was like, there’s something missing here. I’m trying to rush through this process and I’m getting overwhelmed, and I need to slow down and I have to remember I’m the first audience member. I’m maybe the only audience member, including Jon, that is seeing everything. And I have to make sure that something doesn’t get missed.
It’s a very precious space of me watching dailies for the first time. It’s like, it’s sacred, you know? And I take it very seriously watching dailies, but I have to connect, I have to remember that I’m feeling something.
I got 250 hours of footage between the two movies. I have to sort through that and have a process. Otherwise, I’m going to get lost in it very quickly .
MH: It’s hitting me that it was 250 hours, and what a large percentage of that is live singing, live vocal performances. I’m guessing… you didn’t just go “sing the song, okay, that’s it. Print it!” You had to splice–
MK: Yeah, no, it’s treating the vocals like dialogue. You have Simon Hayes or their incredible production mixer, you know, being able to capture these vocals like dialogue, studio grade recordings. It’s incredible.
You know, Cynthia in a harness singing Defying Gravity and being able to record , you know, live vocals and being able to use them.
But yeah, there’s a lot of there’s a lot of pressure to, you know, I’m I’m, I’m, I’m crafting Ariana Grande and Cynthia Revo’s songs and, you know, and, and making sure that my choices of performance, which is a really, it’s, it’s 98% of the foundation of what goes into the final in.
And so that’s, again, it’s a very unique position I’m in as far as like crafting all that performance, whether it’s sung or said .
MH: This could be overstating it, and it would be fair to say that, but I and I have, I like, and I love musicals and I’ve been to Broadway and I’ve I watch, but it’s of the genres I’ve watched I probably have the least experience and least knowledge about.
So were there things that you learned from the process of doing musicals that you’re now like, okay, this is going to make it so much easier doing non-musicals because musicals, and especially musicals with live singing, it seems like that’s got to be one of the most more than any other film, the focus that you have to have on those the performances of the characters and awareness of the arcs and connecting that across not just scenes, but you’re doing it across dialogue because you’re intercutting live dialogue together to splice and essentially build the songs.
Do you think it’s fair? Are these the most character driven in terms of the editing process for you of your work? Do you think there’s anything that compares to that as a watch?
MK: Yeah, no. Nothing could compare to that. Nothing can compare, for sure.
Well, first of all, you have two movie stars acting next to each other just giving the performance of a lifetime, two icons. It’s like watching Barbara Streisand and Judy Garland in the movie together.
And the stakes are really high for these two movies, so of course I’ve got this bar. Jon would often say to us, dream big. And that doesn’t mean just making Oz huge. [It means] you are potentially making something classic and timeless.
What is it when we see these highlight reels? We see two people looking at each other and confessing their love. We see all those famous kisses. We see movie stars in their close-ups, and how they yearn all along for each other. And so every nuance, every look has to be mined and crafted. You have to honor the stakes of how big it was, making these two movies.
And then remember what you’ve done in past movies, like how did I feel when I was cutting Crazy Rich Asians? It’s so much about the looks and the silence, in the wedding we took out all the sound. And what did that that do? That made us lean in. So should I do that, right before Ariana sings Girl in the Bubble?
How do I take these little tools in our toolbox, that I’m learning from all the work that I’ve done before, and apply it here?
MH: How do you do that when you’re doing two movies at the same time, with as much balance between “I have to do today, but I can’t rush this?”
Not being rushed when you’ve got people who are saying, this is hundreds of millions of dollars so rush, rush, rush, seems a little difficult to pull off.
MK: Well, when you have a really great producer like Marc Platt, [who] optioned the book, which then turned into the musical, which now turns into the films, there’s a lot of respect there with the studio and with Marc, and he kept the pressure off.
You know, there was a lot of pressure there, always. But you have somebody like Marc protecting Jon and I, and the studio was very good with us. But there are moments where they’re like, guys, clock’s ticking and this is getting more and more expensive by the second. [Having] somebody who can protect us, and give us just a little bit more time to explore, really helps. Even if it means another week to try an idea, that time could be essential to just experiment with something, or a sequence that might be broken.
We showed both movies to the studio at an assembly stage, which is terrifying. You never do anything like that. And the reason why we wanted to was, they’re partners with us in this so we have to trust they’re not going to be like attack dogs, and say this second movie is needs a lot, a lot of work.
But you don’t get to do that unless you have somebody like Marc protecting you and assuring them that, no, no, they’ll get it. You just got to trust in them, and we’re all here together. We’re going to make the best thing possible. But there’s a lot of pressure there, for sure.
MH: Is there something in working on these two films that has changed how you think about or how you approach editing, and particularly editing musicals, that’s something you’re going to bring forward into other movies?
MK: Of course, there’s things in Wicked, by making these two movies, that I’ll carry for the rest of my career, as far as how I approach musicals and what would I like to do in the future?
I have no idea as far as, if I did another musical, what that would look like. I just know that I need to connect to it emotionally. When I read the first script for part one, I was crying at the end of Defying Gravity. And I knew that if I could make it that exciting and that emotional when I’m reading the script, and if I could do that with the movie, then I knew that we win, and the audience wins.
And the same with the second script. Like I knew if we could land the plane and connect For Good all the way to the end of the movie, and we just feel the power of the end of the saga and the end of the story between these two women, if there’s still some hopefulness there as well as it feeling bittersweet, then I think the audience is going to connect to it.
But if if I’m reading a script and that doesn’t happen, whether it’s the coolest director or the coolest dance scenes ever built, then if it doesn’t have all that on the page or in the story, then it doesn’t matter, it’s not something I’d necessarily go on and try to do.
MH: In Wicked, you know, there was a long take that you kept in the ball, it was one long take. And you’re absolutely right about that, fighting to keep and keep keeping that. But then in Tick, Tick… Boom! there’s the intercut in the therapy sequence, so there’s this little ballet going on.
Is it just kind of an instinctive thing, can you talk about that a bit?
MK: Yeah, in Tick, Tick… Boom! we felt that [with] the inter-cutting, the tension that fills those two scenes merited how to cut those two scenes together. Just because you’re getting to intercut something doesn’t mean you should. We do some intercutting in Wicked: For GOod between the wedding scene and the secret prison, that were not scripted that way.
And we ended up doing that to elevate those two scenes, and to make it more painful to get the wish fulfillment of Glinda and then feeling the darkness of the extreme nature of all these animals being caged below, and how horrible that is, and the sort of whimsical nature of the Wizard versus the darkness of the Wizard.
Then you have moments like in the Ozdust Ballroom, which are totally counter to that, where we need to make this as awkward and uncomfortable and quiet and painful as possible, not just for the audience, or Elphaba or Glinda, but even for the bullies who are laughing at Elphaba.
So to work towards the goal of a scene is, you see the scene [and ask] what is this scene about? And ultimately, it’s about bonding these two characters together, and how do we do this? Well, we have to go through a whole journey in the scene.
When I watch these eight minute takes of Cynthia arriving at the Ozdust Ballroom and at the end leaving with Ariana, I cried at the every take. So when I’m cutting that, I have to make sure that the audience feels the same way.
How am I going to do that? Well, after I panic about all the footage that’s come in, and I start to get my head together, I say okay, now these are all the little pieces of the puzzle that are going to remind the audience.
My appreciation to Wicked: For Good editor Myron Kerstein for taking time to speak with me about his work on the franchise.