Jon M. Chu Explains How Seeing the Original Wicked Informed His Films

Before it was a Broadway sensation, Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman’s Wicked was a summertime offering in San Francisco, working out its kinks before its October 2003 opening at New York City’s Gershwin Theatre. But though that SF preview run was over 22 years ago, Wicked: For Good director Jon M. Chu remembers it well. “It changed my life,” he says.

Born in Palo Alto in 1979, the youngest child of restaurateurs Ruth and Lawrence Chu grew up experiencing “all of American culture,” Chu says. “They took us to [San Francisco 49ers] games, they took us to musicals, operas, ballets, symphonies. Going to the movies was the big thing.” Steven Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extraterrestrial made a particular impact on Chu, he says: “When that spaceship takes off at the end, and that John Williams score is blasting, I know that was a contagious wonder that made people believe in big things, and made people want to become storytellers.”

Like the E.T. director, Chu applied to the film program at the University of Southern California; unlike Spielberg, Chu got in. In 2003, he was just finishing his studies at the prestigious school when his mother called him back to the Bay Area. She’d successfully finished a course of chemotherapy and was ready to go back out into the world. “She called me and said Stephen Schwartz, the guy who did Pippin, has a new musical about The Wizard of Oz, and it’s showing at the Curran Theatre. So come back and watch it with me.”

Jon M. Chu on the set of Wicked: For Good with Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo.

Chu leapt at the chance to see the show, which at that point was still a work in progress. “I was really starting to understand craft for the first time,” he says. “Sitting there with my mother, watching this show and seeing Glinda [then portrayed by original cast member Kristin Chenoweth] come down from the rafters…taking this childhood story that has lived in our family—about the American dream, it’s the American fairy tale—then twisting and saying ‘hey, what if all the stories you were told when you were young weren’t exactly the way things are?’”

“All those things were converging at this moment in my life,” Chu says now. Sitting in his seat at the Curran, Chu realized the musical spoke to many of the questions he’d been struggling to answer, both as a young adult and as a creative. The emotion evoked by the play informed how he makes films today. “Plot, name, story?” They hardly matter in the grand scheme, says Chu. “It’s actually how you feel about this character.”

Chu he did have to consider plot when planning his two-part film adaptation of the musical—which itself is an adaptation of Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. But his laser focus on emotion led Chu to one of Wicked: For Good’s most unexpected moments. Before filming the song “For Good,” Chu says, he felt enormous pressure: “It’s one of the greatest songs put on stage ever…so there’s a tendency to get the crane out. Let’s make this hot, let’s spin around it. And you’ve got the two biggest divas in the world singing!”

Jon M. Chu on the set of Wicked: For Good with Cynthia Erivo.

When it came time to actually shoot the scene, though, Chu left the theatrics behind. “I had everything ready—and when the girls started to sing it, it wasn’t about any of that. It wasn’t about putting on a show. It’s just about two people, almost having a last hand-hold before never seeing each other again. And asking forgiveness, and getting it, and walking away.”

Chu learned that the scene called for a quieter, more focused form of emotion, not a vast spectacle. He worried that asking a film audience to sit through three minutes of “them just looking at each other” would be a challenge, especially at the end of a big, effects-laden movie. But Chu held firm. In short: “Trust your instincts.”