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“Musicals Are the Hardest Thing I Could Ever Cut”: Editor Myron Kerstein on Wicked
Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande in Wicked For Myron Kerstein, whose work on Lin-Manuel Miranda’s feature debut Tick, Tick… Boom! earned him a 2022 Oscar nomination for best editing, cutting a musical number is no different than any other scene in a movie. With Wicked, the editor’s third collaboration with director Jon M. Chu (following Crazy Rich Asians and In the Heights), Kerstein had roughly 250 hours of footage to assemble into the two-part adaptation of the long-running and beloved Broadway musical that serves as a prequel to The Wizard of Oz—and honoring both the stage show and the classic 1939 film brought extra challenges to the already difficult task of putting a movie musical together.
Set before a tornado drops Dorothy Gale into Oz, Wicked charts the budding friendship between Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) and Galinda (Ariana Grande) as college students long before they become known, respectively, as the iconic characters of the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda, the Good Witch of the North. The two begin as social rivals at Shiz University, ultimately growing closer as a dark political movement threatens the welfare of the talking animals who once thrived in Oz.
I spoke with Kerstein over Zoom to discuss his approach to editing musicals, the extensive experimentation to expand the musical’s first act into a standalone film and the joys of collaborating with Chu.
Filmmaker: What are the particular challenges with a musical that you wouldn’t face on a non-musical film?
Kerstein: I thought [editing a musical] was going to be something really different, like cutting a music video or something. But once I started making them, I really had to understand how I was connecting emotionally. Even though there may be a musical number, it was still a scene, still characters expressing themselves. Slowly I started to evolve this idea that I shouldn’t treat musical numbers any differently. Since I worked on In the Heights, I was able to develop this philosophy a little bit more about how I would cut a musical number. It was a little bit different because I had so much footage, and I was truly trying to focus on the community a lot, and the celebration of that community.
On Tick, Tick… Boom!, it was all about Jonathan Larson’s process of making music that drove how we were constructing this biopic. On Wicked, I felt that the fantasy elements, comedic elements, dramatic elements and melodramatic moments all should feel like one same unit. My philosophy was [to focus on] what moved me as the first audience member who watched those dailies, and what made me laugh, and how I could build up suspense the way like Steven Spielberg or George Lucas might do with Close Encounters or The Empire Strikes Back—just trying to wrap my head around, like, what am I doing here as a dramatic storyteller? Once I understood that, I began constructing these things again, again and again.
That being said, musicals are the hardest thing I could ever cut, because there’s just so many balls in the air. Just technically, there are many layers of things that can go wrong as far as the instrumentals, ensembles or different takes of live vocals. On top of all that, I have all these CG animals singing and monkeys flying. There’s a lot to manage, and at the same time there’s the ultimate goal of making it feel like one cohesive musical in itself. If you pull the yarn, the whole ball unravels. I’m so lucky to have this amazing team of incredible music editors, Jack Bill, Catherine Wilson and Robin Hayden. I can have a back-and-forth with this department to keep me in check, and I’m doing the same thing with the effects team over and over again. I’ve been doing this for two years, going back and forth between these different departments to make sure I don’t pull the wrong string.
Filmmaker: Wicked is both a musical comedy and a dramatic fantasy film with action sequences. How did you work with Jon M. Chu to maintain a certain standard, tonally, throughout the film?
Kerstein: The first thing Jon said to me was: “We’re making The Wizard of Oz meets Lord of the Rings.” Then we started talking about these great love stories. Then we said, “No, we’re making the greatest love story that’s ever been told.” Once I started seeing footage like Ariana Grande performing “Popular,” I started to think of films like Pillow Talk or Breakfast at Tiffany’s. At the end of the day, this is a big saga. We’re going on a journey with these characters, and it’s going to have a lot of different tones to it: It’s going to have comedic tones, drama, melodrama, which I’m a real fan of—“OK, we’re making a Douglas Sirk movie all of a sudden.” There’s a betrayal. Frankly, I love movies that have a lot of different tones in them. It’s not that I get bored, but I feel like films take themselves too seriously. When you have an opportunity as an editor to explore a lot of different colors, different vibes, different tones, I get really excited about it. My job is to make sure that it just doesn’t feel so schizophrenic, that if we’ve just had a scene like “Something Bad,” I have the ability to then turn the audience enough that then they can experience something like “Dancing Through Life.”
For a while we didn’t have the meet-cute scene between Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey) and Elphaba because we were worried about the run time. But then we realized that the audience needed a little tonal shift before they met Glinda and Fiyero together. That took a lot of experimentation. Certainly I was worried about whether or not a movie like this could contain it. If I make a scene super short, I lose the nuance in the character building and the emotional connection to this material. I leaned into the idea of the epic films that I loved as a kid, these big Hollywood sagas that took you on this long journey.
Filmmaker: The stage show is roughly three hours, and you’re expanding it into two films running roughly five to six hours. Were there any guardrails at the beginning with part one, in that you knew things had to happen by a certain minute-marker, to keep the length manageable?
Kerstein: There was always a concern about the running time, and if it should be two movies. Even though I had read two scripts, was there a way of having one big, long, The Brutalist-style film with an intermission in between the two acts? And can we condense both of these parts in it? But really, Jon and [producer] Marc Platt were really convinced it should be two movies. And frankly, I had so much material that I did feel like it was worthy of one movie, as long as we can make the audience feel satisfied.
We knew that the movie didn’t start until Elphaba and Glinda met each other. So how do we treat the opening scene in Munchkinland? Can we treat the first five to 10 minutes like a prologue? Took a lot of experimentation. There’s an hour-and-a-half version of this movie, but it is like a rocket ship that has no emotion to it. There were always questions [about the length of scenes]. Does the Ozdust Ballroom need to be as long as it is? We let the silence play out because we were emptying out the emotion the more we cut it down. The last act is about 40 minutes long, [when Elphaba and Glinda] go to Emerald City, and that is so different from the rest of the movie. A lot happens there. That last 20 minutes is all “Defying Gravity.” We didn’t have to break up the song that way, but we felt that the more we messed with the audience’s expectations and reworked it dramatically, the more emotional and the more exciting it seemed to become.
Filmmaker: Stage musicals really move at a fast pace, especially when there are so many characters and plot points. How did the stage show’s structure guide the pacing of the film?
Kerstein: We tried to honor the feelings the stage show gave to us, but not necessarily the pacing or construction. It was just such a different kettle of fish. I remember going to see Wicked the week Broadway reopened after the pandemic; I had been hired for the film by then. The moment [in the opening number] of Glinda’s bubble descending—it was like Beatlemania. When she said, “It’s good to see me, isn’t it?,” there was this roar from the audience, and I remember feeling that I needed to capture that feeling. Originally, Ari was supposed to sing from the pedestal her first lines of “No One Mourns the Wicked,” and we had a temp score as the bubble descended. One day I said to Jon, “Why don’t we have her sing from the sky, from the clouds?” We hear her before we see her, and that anticipation when she lands and says, “It’s good to see me, isn’t it?”—it evokes how I felt on Broadway that day. You’re not capturing exactly what was happening in the Broadway show, but it inspires you to find solutions in ways that you wouldn’t otherwise have found.
In the stage show, they rush right through [the Ozdust Ballroom sequence], so I couldn’t necessarily use that as a model of what I was doing in the film. I knew that Elphaba and Glinda had to become friends after that moment, then you’re going to move on to “Popular.” In the show, they rush through these beats: being enemies, being friends, being separated. We have more real estate to play with. I wanted to capture what these characters mean to people who have seen the Broadway show, and these iconic moments on the stage, but then make them cinematic.
Filmmaker: The relationship at the center of the film is so vital. Obviously Erivo and Grande are building that chemistry and tension on set, but how do you build on that, and maybe perfect it, in post?
Kerstein: I love having an arc to play with, any characters, but especially with a friendship. When they first meet each other in the quad, it’s so awkward; they’re staring each other down. Then there’s “What Is This Feeling?,” a tit-for-tat musical number that shows them at the lowest two characters could be with each other. Later, in the Ozdust Ballroom [after Glinda has embarrassed Elphaba in front of her classmates], there’s some guilt there. Glinda actually sees Elphaba as a person, sees what she’s going through. It takes so much work to carve those performances, to make sure you’re hitting all those beats, because, again, you don’t have too much time before going into something like “Popular,” which is like, “Makeover montage! Now we’re best friends!” I love cutting performances, especially when you have somebody like Cynthia and Ari giving me a lot of choices.
Filmmaker: I can imagine that The Wizard of Oz particularly inspired the production design, costumes, hair and makeup—but did the original film influence your process at all?
Kerstein: I was just trying to meet the legacy of The Wizard of Oz. With every rewatch, I tried to understand how it worked, trying to remind myself how I felt as a child when I was watching it for the first time. I was really involved with the development of the visual effects; there were 2,200 VFX shots in the movie, and half the time I was cutting the movie and the other half of the time I was sitting in VFX review rooms talking about how they did it on The Wizard of Oz. Should we honor that, or should we just do our own thing? Should we honor the Technicolor, or go our own naturalistic way about it? I feel like I’m a gatekeeper and co-parent, nurturing this baby into the world and working really closely with Jon to honor not just The Wizard of Oz but also the stage show. At the end of the day, we were not making The Wizard of Oz. We’re making something different.
Filmmaker: Looking ahead to part two: I imagine the second half of a stage musical is going to be a tougher standalone adaptation to pull off. How is that process going? Is there anything that was intended for part one that is making its way into part two, or vice versa?
Kerstein: There’s some tiny Easter eggs from part one that’ll hopefully be satisfying when you see them in part two. We’re still experimenting about how much to refer to part one in part two. We like to say that the release of part one is like a big preview audience for part two, where we get to collect all the data and have clear ideas about how to make the film. There’s always surprises of what people connect to certain characters or certain moments, so how can we have fun with those? Jon and I love to experiment in the edit, love to keep challenging ourselves. And we have that rare opportunity where we can steal from another movie if we want to.
The first movie is the origin story for the Wicked Witch of the West; these characters are making certain choices, then the second movie is filled with a lot of conflict because of the consequences [of those choices]. There’s more melodrama, more meaty plotty stuff in the second movie that I think that fans will enjoy. It’s daunting when they shoot for eight months and you have 155 days of material. But what I love about working with Jon is that he brings back the feeling I had when I first started making things in art school. The joy of making films with Jon is that it shouldn’t feel any different than us making things in our dorm room—that joy of making things, experimenting and having fun with it.
