Wicked

Today, we’re talking with Myron Kerstein, ACE, about teaming up again with director Jon Chu to edit the cinematic adaptation of the Broadway hit Wicked.

Chu and Kerstein last worked together on tick, tick… BOOM. Before that, they collaborated on In the Heights. And before that, on Crazy Rich Asians, we’ve talked about ALL of those films here on Art of the Cut.

Kerstein’s previous work as an editor includes the feature films Going in Style, Garden State, and Glee: The 3D Concert Movie. He’s also directed an episode of the Apple Plus TV series Home Before Dark. To go DEEP into the editorial archives, he was once an assistant editor on the iconic series Sex and the City.

Myron, everybody has been waiting for Wicked, and it’s finally here. I’m so excited to talk to you about this.

Thank you. It’s so nice to be back with you. I think I might’ve talked to you about this maybe three years ago. It’s always an honor to talk about the film and of course you’ve talked to everybody, so I love just talking about the craft and what goes into it.

And we could be talking about this in another three years because I’m assuming you’re on to part two.

Yes sir. We have completed an assembly for the second movie, but we put it to sleep for a bit while we worked on the first movie and we cracked it open a couple weeks ago and will get back to it.

Let’s discuss that long opening “oner.” I would think that you had something to do with storyreeling that or some kind of construction and pacing of that VFX shot that starts the movie.

We had two VFX vendors: ILM and FrameStore. ILM was in charge of that one and they said it was gonna be the first shot that you deliver and the last shot you get back and that basically was the case. It took forever to develop that shot.

I had plates shot by cinematographer, Alice Brooks, then elements picked up from our second unit director and we combined those. The only practical element was the hat and that room going into the monkey’s crashing through.

Everything else is CG but it took forever to develop. Jon worked literally with an iPhone and a stick trying to figure out which direction should the camera go and which direction should the monkeys go. How do we reveal Emerald City for the first time? Then working with a vendor for over a year just trying to get the shot right.

That’s one of those things where the studio says to you, “That shot costs a lot of money.” And it takes a lot of time to open your movie. Do we need it?" The hardest part of about a shot like that is trying to make the rest of the movie feel like they’re in good hands.

Of course, they’re right. It’s very expensive. It’s a long duration, so you just have to make them feel confident in what you’re presenting everywhere else.

You and I have talked about several films before this, including your work with Lin-Manuel Miranda (“tick Tick…Boom” and “In the Heights”). You’ve edited a lot of dance in your recent career. Can you talk about the challenges of editing big dance scenes?

Screenshot of a section of Myron’s spreadsheet notes during dailies.

With big dance scenes there’s a lot of footage. They shoot multiple cameras and a lot of choices in Wicked. We had 250 hours of footage between the two movies. The dance numbers were a big part of that.

I tend to not cut anything differently than I would cut a dramatic scene or an action sequence in that I’m letting the performance - whether it’s dancers or main characters - dictate how I’m gonna cut something, ‘cause I want to make sure that we are telling the story dramatically.

I’m letting performance sort of move the audience. So my approach isn’t any different. I just sort of take in all the footage - whether I’m watching 15 minutes or six hours of footage from the day before - and just let it wash over me.

We are the first audience of any project and if I cry or I laugh or I feel moved or “that’s a really great camera move” then I make note of that. I do make notes in a spreadsheet, but I don’t usually pull selects or anything like that until later. Then I start constructing the scene from there.

They are really challenging ‘cause I have a lot of footage, I have a lot of options, but I try as best as I can to approach the scene dramatically and let that be my compass.

You mentioned that you don’t use select reels for this. How do you watch dailies? Do you watch them as they were shot? Do you watch wider to closer? I’m very interested in this spreadsheet idea.

Generally I just use a spreadsheet to kind of put thoughts as they occur while I’m watching the footage. I don’t have the assistants import those notes. Sometimes I’ll have them organize them as a big database for me, but I don’t have them import ’em in the Avid or anything.

Then sometimes I never even refer to them again until I think, “Where was that shot? Where did I cry? Where did I feel something?” It is really helpful for me to make some kind of imprint whether I’m writing it down or putting it in a big spreadsheet.

Ultimately I may not even refer to it if I’m pulling selects later on. But if I’m thinking about it and I’ve written something down to remember it - just by typing something like that, that tactileness helps sometimes.

The dailies notes folder. Scenes from both movies are sometimes shot the same day.

One of the things I was interested in - because of the length of the movie, because it’s broken up into two parts and the Broadway show was two and a half hours or something like that - is did any parts of the music have to be shortened?

Ultimately we ended up not cutting any of the music shorter. If anything we ended up expanding the musical numbers again and again. Jon likes to start and stop his musical numbers for scenes and stretch them and build suspense and mess with the audience dramatically. We did that about six times in “Defying Gravity.”

We tried cutting out verses and cutting out songs altogether. We try to break the film any way we can because of length, because of whether our audience is bored or restless. But we found the more that we cut things down, the more the impact was reduced. We wanted it to really sing emotionally, no pun intended. So we ended up keeping everything that was written.

That’s one of the reasons why we broke Wicked into two parts, because what we found with “In the Heights” is a sort of similar thing. If we try to cut down the numbers or cut down too much of the material in between numbers, then we were sort of short-shifting the movie.

Because this is two parts, we’re able to expand things and let things breathe and not be so worried even though it’s a long movie. We’re not worried about making a five-hour movie. It’s really challenging. Musicals are the hardest genre I think to cut.

On top of that - having the VFX element, the fantasy element, the world-building, the CG characters, the action sequences - having all those balls in the air is pretty tough to always have a handle on. 

I first met with Wyatt Smith (editor of “The Little Mermaid” and “Into the Woods”) who was really helpful when I was beginning In the Heights as well. I went to his editor room. He was working on “The Little Mermaid.” I asked, “How do you cut these things with big spectacle and VFX?” He said, “You don’t cut it any differently.” Then he said to me recently, “It’s twice the pain because of both the music and the VFX side of things.”

Editor Myron Kerstein, ACE, in front of his Avid

You mentioned that editors are the first audience. But we’re NOT the first audience that applauds en masse. I was struck in the screening that I went to - with a ton of very rabid Wicked fans - that they wanted to burst into extended applause at the end of every song! Talk to me about trying to decide how long you’re gonna leave for the audience to enjoy a moment.

Yeah, it’s really tricky ‘cause you don’t always have that audience to guide you. We did preview this film three times, so we did have some passes at having the film in front of 300-400 people. We also had friends-and-family screenings.

Having audiences is really helpful to understand where they need a release, and how to balance that. Ultimately it’s like any other scene where you’re sort of experimenting with the audience’s perception of things.

The same with comedy actually: How to pace things out because people are laughing over jokes. I remember with “The Wizard and I,” we were having a really tough time ending that number because of that big incredible ending musically - wanting to hold on Cynthia - playing it the right way to give the audience a moment to breathe and celebrate and then move on to the next scene.

So it took a few cracks at it to be able to give the audience that proper release -  that moment of: “What did I just experience?” And taking in the emotion and being able to move on from there.

Using your audiences like a lab experiment is always really helpful and that’s why I’m a strong believer in putting it up in front of people to understand where people are shifting, where they’re bored, where do they need that release?

The musical numbers definitely need moments where people need that release and take it all in and sometimes you need to reboot. You need time to shift - whether you’re gonna shift to something funny or dramatic, you need to create a moment of breath for the audience.

Myron and his team on set

In the song “What is this Feeling” (with the main lyric about “loathing”) you used some split screens and you intercut locations. Can you talk about the choice of when to intercut locations or when to cut back and forth in that song?

When Jon was shooting that scene, he didn’t tell me that he had the idea for split-screens. Sometimes Jon will ask me, “Do you want to know my plan for this?” And I always say, “no.” The reason being is that I try to be fresh when I’m approaching any footage.

So we kind of came to the same conclusion about using split-screens. Maybe I just felt it from how he was framing things to some degree. I was inspired by what we did on Crazy Rich Asians with the big text montage sequence where we had crazy amounts of split-screens and overlapping graphics and I wanted to know whether or not we could do something that felt modern and something that felt had a fantasy component to it and felt a little like an old Hollywood throwback.

Ari’s performance reminded me of Audrey Hepburn. I started thinking about Breakfast of Tiffany’s and Pillow Talk. They used to do this back in the day and I think we could try it too. So it was a big experiment. My first pass of the movie, I split-screened the entire number and I also had moving boxes. It was just like this crazy over-the-top version of what ended up in the movie.

Also he overlapped all these different locations. So I really sort of just went crazy with this idea of “How far can we push it?” When Jon saw the cut he said, “Let’s just pull it back a little bit more, but I like what you’re doing as far as intercutting these sequences and having that feeling of the back-and-forth of who’s winning between the two and where is Shiz?”

They support Glinda most of the time and Elphaba’s fighting back and where’s that balance shift of playing different points of where one character is winning over another.

It’s this ultimate like Spy Versus Spy moment. Remember those Mad magazine cartoons? It was a lot of experimentation. It’s one of my favorite songs. “Dancing Through Life” and “What is this Feeling” are my two of my favorite songs.

I remember going to the mix stage when they first did a pass on that song and I just busted out in tears ‘cause I just loved how it made me feel and just wanting to erupt into applause once it’s done and feeling them being enemies at this point of the film and capturing the essence of what it’s like in so many different versions of a Mean Girls-type tropey film where characters aren’t getting along or fighting each other and doing that in a way that feels sort of fresh and different.

A Wicked timeline (Avid screenshot)

I’m always interested in these pre-laps. Going into the Levitation song, you pre-lapped the audio. What is the value of a pre-lap to you?

I always really struggle with transitions with almost any film I work on. This is my fifth project working with Jon and Alice. They don’t care about transitions. They don’t build them, so I am constantly trying to figure out different ways to make something feel elegant.

Also with pre-laps, you have an opportunity to tell two different stories at once. There’s value and power in that. Also you could be seeing one image and thinking about the words that are happening. It helps with the pacing as far as getting into the next scene. You have an opportunity to have double meanings to things.

The film is based on a bunch of different previous IP. There’s the original book, there’s the original movie, there’s the Broadway play. How much of that did you feel like you needed to take in before you edited this film?

I felt like I had to take in as much as I could. Of course the Wizard of Oz and the Broadway production were sort of my main references. The book? Not so much ‘cause that had a a little bit of a different tone to it. I’ve seen Wicked three times now - the Broadway production.

The first time with my son when he was six. He’s 18 now. Then the second time was the first week on Broadway after the pandemic had shut down Broadway. I remember being in the audience and it felt like Beatlemania. I felt like we had to honor the feeling and the importance of everyone who had seen the show before, and deliver on that.

The same for the Wizard of Oz movie. So many of us grew up with the Wizard of Oz film and how that sort of epitomizes cinematic history, so I felt the pressure of those two things quite a bit.

But then I had to forget all that and just make the movie that we’re going to make and try to do it as well crafted as possible, It was a very similar experience to Crazy Rich Asians and In The Heights, and tick, tick, boom.

There’s a certain amount of people that were predisposed to these IPs, then we just had to make our version of it. There’s a little bit more pressure with Wicked because it’s millions of fans who just love this so much.

We just wanted to make the right choices and try to be bold with our choices and try to make something that feels really emotional and makes you feel like you are watching a good old-fashioned “Sound of Music/ Wizard of Oz sort of Hollywood saga and hopefully people will go on the ride with us.

Myron in Munchkinland

One of the interesting editing things that I thought of as I was watching the film was the tension of Elphaba arriving at the Ozdust Ball. She’s got this hat on. She’s been set up for ridicule. The audience knows all this information and the tension is just delicious. Talk about pacing that out because you need to have it long enough so that the tension is stretched to its utmost, but you can’t break it. Talk about making those decisions in timing and pace.

Jon and I talked about the Ozdust Ball. Ozdust had to work or the rest of the movie didn’t work because at the end of the day it has to be about this friendship building in this moment. The Broadway show rushes through this scene quite a bit.

Jon and I knew that we couldn’t rush through it. We had to be bold. So my first exposure to the dailies was watching uninterrupted 10 minute takes from beginning of end of Cynthia entering the Ozdust ball and leaving at the end with Glinda and I cried watching every single take.

I felt emotionally just devastated every time I watched them go through this experience. It was also very intimidating because I thought, “Where do I start? If every take makes me feel the same way?” Usually I find five or six moments that make me want to cry, and I say, “That’s going in the movie.” Right? But here EVERY moment just felt like the best I’d ever seen in dailies!

Beautifully lit. Beautifully shot. Beautifully performed. There was something about watching those long takes that made me feel like I had to go through the experience of watching Cynthia feel uncomfortable. I had to go through the experience of Ari feeling guilty and I had to go through this experience of the bullies making fun of her.

So I thought, “I need to find the essence of what was in those raw, uninterrupted takes.” Not necessarily the timing of it, but just the feeling of it. At the end of the day I knew that I couldn’t rush through any of that. I needed to stretch it until it broke. Jon kept saying, “We have to be really bold in this scene.”

We can’t rush this feeling of feeling uncomfortable or rush this feeling of being bullied or Glinda feeling uncomfortable or this weird deconstructed dance that Elphaba comes up with that then Glinda uses to show a gesture of love and understanding.

At the end of the day, there was a lot of experimentation with the length of that, but it’s very close to what my original assembly was, which is this sort of language building up the tension - switching point of view - this moment with the sound going out in the middle of it.

That was something I came up with in the assembly because I wanted this feeling of another layer of it to just feel like everything is lost and she’ll never recover. All these things sort of helped culminate this emotion that I felt originally when I just watched the raw dailies.

Then once we started testing it and hearing everybody in the audience cry every time they’d see the number, then we thought, “Okay, it’s starting to work.”

But what’s really great is after that number is a scene right before “Popular” and you could hear the audience laugh even more than they’d ever laughed before because they’re now rooting for these two characters.

They are so invested after the Ozdust Ballroom. Sometimes, during the screenings, Jon would reach over to me and fist-bump me, saying, “We’ve got them!” Meaning: we have them in the palm of our hands. Not like in a mad scientist way, but just to feel that we had done our job, which is to have them care and connect to these characters. We couldn’t have done that by rushing through that scene.

When you are cutting a scene, do you give any consideration or do you think about why the scene is in the movie? Not that it shouldn’t be, but literally: What is the purpose of this scene is in the movie? Then how do you edit it BECAUSE of why it’s in the movie?

All the time, every time.

Do you try to break that down? Is it a conversation you have with Jon where he says, “This scene is all about this.” Or is it something you decide?

Sometimes we’ll have those conversations. On Wicked, he did walk me through both the movies to understand the power dynamics of the two characters and how it’s shifting back and forth and who we rooting for when. I do tend to read the pages of the script and try to understand what’s going on there, then, when I see the dailies, I think, “Okay, do I think this scene should belong in the movie or is there something missing from the way they shot it or the way it was written?”

Then I kind of forget that for a while. I still have to cut the scene and hopefully whatever the scene’s about does help me decide on how I’m gonna cut it. Oftentimes, even after I’ve worked on it, I think, “I still don’t understand why this scene is in the movie.”

There were a couple scenes scripted that came outta the movie because I couldn’t find my way through it. They were perfectly good scenes and really well performed, but I didn’t understand why they’re in it. If anything, I felt like they were hurting the scenes before and after.

There’s a couple moments right before they go to Emerald City. At that point in the movie we really wanna get to Emerald City. We’ve had a lot of setup, so I felt like there were definitely some beats that were redundant or were confusing or hurting the scene before or after.

I saw an interview with Jon saying that the “Defying Gravity” scene was his biggest challenge. It was the thing that he was most scared to take on. Can you talk about your feelings of that or how you were able to make that editing room a safe space for that difficult challenge?

There’s no safe space for Jon Chu in the edit room. I was really excited about it because it’s arguably the most famous song in Broadway musical history. Everybody who has a love for Wicked or for musical theater loves that song and is very protective.

But I was really excited about the prospect of what we were doing there. But it was extremely challenging because of the multiple set pieces, the multiple things happening, whether it was the broom flying up to Elphaba or whether it’s her becoming the wicked witch finally with the cape.

Whether she’s jumping outta the building and seeing her younger self, whether it’s her flying in the air and being chased by flying monkeys while singing this song, whether it’s trying to nail the war cry moment. All those balls in the air really were something we had never done before.

I had never worked on a VFX movie with that many elements. 

I didn’t know previs from postvis. I certainly hadn’t worked with talking goats and flying monkeys and transformation scenes. In the last 40 minutes there are so many things that go on. It’s three different musical numbers, a transformation scene, a Universal-monster-moment, flying monkeys, then starting and stopping songs, live vocals… 

We had so many balls in the air at the same time. Trying to construct this thing with the big war cry moment. Jon had shot Cynthia on wires and I said, “We gotta make this the most powerful moment ever! Wouldn’t it be great if we could pay homage to the Broadway show where her cape grows?…if we could pull back and see the cape has already grown?

And if we could treat that shot - which was not designed originally for that - as a sort of like a religious Michelangelo painting in the Louvre and give it the power that it deserves visually, that is being met with Cynthia’s vocals? Maybe the audience would’ve really take that and feel the power of that and just want release after that.” It’s just this incredible shot! 

We were playing with a lot of different things to construct it. Right before the war cry we stopped down for her exploding all the lights in Emerald City and that was another break in the song that we constructed in the edit. Playing around with tension and expectation for the audience.

When she says it’s me, that’s a moment where you always sort of climb musically and again, we stop down in the music. Instead she says, “It’s me,” she jumps out the window and we have this free fall. Then she sees her younger self and that gives her the power to finish the song. We’re trying to manipulate the audience and create something really special.

You mentioned how there are breaks in the music that were not intended originally. Can you talk about the evolution of that? You watched the scene as it was originally intended and then decided something has to open up here? What is going through yours and Jon’s minds to break from what is scripted and what is shot?

Sometimes it is scripted - there’s dialogue there, so that’s just a natural stop in the song. So there’ll be some dialogue there that naturally breaks the music up.

Then sometimes Jon and I just feel like the music is just rolling over a scene and we’ve lost something dramatically and we could do something by opening it up or adding an extra bar or stopping the music completely to have the broom come up or this free fall where we need time in order to like tell a story beat.

I think it’s just a conversation with Jon and I over the course of the edit: “Where do we need to stop the music?” We end up having score to help have the connective tissue. Challenging each other to break any rules I think is really fun.

It’s terrifying because: are the fan’s gonna kill us? Are we just being gratuitous by doing that? Most of the time Jon and I are ask ourselves, “Where can we be bold? Where can we manipulate the audience? Where can we break with expectations?

How can we redefine a musical moment that feels fresh without being too clever? How can we still stay classy?” It’s all to serve the story most of all. How do we best serve the story if she is singing the first phrases in “Defying Gravity” then we break with Morrible interrupting her.

There’s a moment where she is starting to find power and the Morrible is saying, “She’s the Wicked Witch of the West so everyone get her now!” Then Elphaba knows everyone’s against her. Now what does she do?

Then we start to feel her grow that power again. We don’t wanna rush through this moment, which is her ultimate origin story. We want to build and make it feel climactic and if we just rush through these moments, we’re just gonna undermine it. It’s not gonna feel powerful.

This whole journey is about building up to “Defying Gravity.” Her whole origin story is complete at the end of that song, so the more and more we milk it and make the audience earn it with us as we go along, the more it’s gonna feel satisfying to them.

To get into the nitty gritty of those breaks in the song: what did you do at those break points while you made the revision? You can use your imagination go and know: the music will kind of go on. But what did you do to make it actually stop down smoothly? Did you have stems or something or how are you stretching the music at those points?

I do have stems. I have instrumentals and I have ensemble track and I also have each solo of each character if there are multiple characters. It’s not easy, but I can literally just cut off where I think a break should be, and sometimes I’ll use DeVerb to ring out a note.

If I can make it feel sort of natural, I’ll hand it to my music editor who will create something that feels a little bit more elegant.

I lean really hard on my music editors. Jack and Catherine are on the team were basically my first hires in the movie. I knew right away I needed the best to help me get through this process because I knew Jon was gonna start and stop songs.

I knew that I needed somebody to help me with a lot of live vocals. If it started becoming a mess, I needed them to find the tone with a temp score - all those things. You need connective tissue sometimes between those musical breaks.

Sometimes it just goes silent and we have sound design that I can build, but sometimes, I’ll need some score in between to keep the song alive. Initially when I first do it, I just sort of cut it, then I create the beats based on how long we think we should have before the song starts up again.

This is the second movie that I’ve heard of other than A Star is Born - with Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper-  where there was live singing. What did that do to you or for you or what total chaos did that create?

It’s good when you have Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande to be your actors. It really helps because they do not sing a wrong note and they are two of the best singers on the planet. Honestly, I don’t treat it any differently than a dialogue scene. I just treat it as performance.

That is really helpful when I just need to cut the best version of what I think the scene is on the day. Hopefully if I’ve made an incorrect move on a word or a phrase or a line, then I’ve got experts that can tell me, “Hey, you could beat this.” Or “They had a better take” or whatever.

But it was just an abundance of riches. Because I had Simon Hayes - who is an incredible production mixer who also did live vocals on Les Mis - the quality was impeccable. It’s just beautifully recorded. I have Andy Nelson, who’s also mixed Les Mis and West Side Story and 3,000 Spielberg movies, help make sure that I am well covered.

Again, I have these amazing music editors to back me up, but at the end of the day it’s just a lot of dialogue coming at me - a lot of options. Just having a confidence about what I’m feeling, what moves me, what makes me cry, what makes me laugh: that’s what my choices end up being.

In “Gravity” - or in any specific scene that you wanna talk about - can you talk about shot size choices?

The camera can’t pull that far back when they’re shooting Cynthia on wires. We didn’t have a body double. She did all the stunt work herself. But we kept challenging ourselves: when can we have more scope? When can we back up and show she’s flying next to a giant building?

Or showing her power next to all these guards? We kept telling VFX Supervisor Pablo Helman: these are places where we want to cut out wide. At first we just put it in a card saying “wide of Elphaba and the building.”

Or, if I had a plate of her stunt work, then I could put that in there with the card. They start pitching sizes and we kept saying, “No! Even wider! More scope!” We started working over time to just try to figure out these shots together.

Peppering in these moments of seeing breadth and scope and then getting back on Cynthia’s face. We’d sort of dance between being intimate and showing that she’s really singing and feeling her joy in this moment, then showing the scope.

Any other information about building to that final climax in “Gravity’? Of how you do that so that it’s satisfying for the audience?

It’s a lot of experimentation. Even with my assembly, there’s this moment after she does a war cry where the song usually ends. During my assembly, I said to [supervising music editor] Jack Dolman, “I really want to build this moment out even more.

We have one more moment that we can build into. Can we literally try the “2001: A Space Odyssey” timpani hits? Try it to make it feel like this big climax on top of the climax.” He said, “Sure, let’s give it a shot.” Then Jon saw that “Okay, that might work!”

We started experimenting with this more and I said to Jack, “Can we also try to repeat the ensemble where they say “down,” because it’ll kind of be like an ‘F you” to Oz.’ Let’s try to milk this moment as much as possible.” Ultimately, how do we top this? Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. But a lot of the DNA from the assembly ended up finding its way to the final version.

Stepping Away from Wicked for a bit, you have had a chance to direct a little bit, correct?

That’s right. That’s correct.

Tell me a little bit about that and how does your editing speak to your directing and how does your directing speak to your editing?

Well, I’m much more empathetic with Jon now that I’ve directed! It is extremely difficult. I really enjoy being somebody who leads and team-builds. I have a lot of pride in building two incredible teams for Wicked from the UK to the US and I don’t think I would’ve realized that if I had not directed and felt how important that was. I’ve had little glimpses of that through different edit rooms over the years.

So I think that the team building aspect has become very important to me. I do think that being more aggressive - now that Jon knows me - about creating shots in post and being more confident in how I’m telling a story has been informed from directing and understanding what he goes through on a given day and that he may need something that he’s not thinking about.

That’s the editor’s job while they’re cutting during a shoot anyways. But all those things have been really informative as far as helping him tell his story. When you have an army of people working on two different movies over eight months - 155 days of shooting - it’s a lot for any one person to like keep track of.

So I see myself as the co-parent, the co-director. My DNA - my voice as an artist - flows into this thing, so having that directing experience - wearing that hat - just allows me to further develop that and be an asset to Jon. The reason why Wicked will hopefully be so successful is that it’s firing on every cylinder at 200% and everybody is giving it their all.

Being in the edit room for a year and a half with Jon and raising the bar for each other just gets better every time we get a crack at this. So I just feel like Wicked is sort of the end of the yellow brick road for us. It just feels like this really beautiful culmination of all our talents together. 

What makes an editor a good director? 

Patience. Understanding. I don’t think actors like somebody who talks too much. I’ve heard a lot of directors say to me, “Actors like directors who listen.” It’s good training if you’re a good editor and you can listen to your director.

I think that that just goes a long way as far as training you to do the same with actors. Knowing construction: what shots are being planned for the day and knowing in your head that those shots are gonna make it into the edit is really helpful. Sometimes you still overshoot something or sometimes you don’t get a chance to get all the coverage.

When I was directing, I made sure that the editor had tons of coverage to work with. The editor I worked it with was my friend, Philip Harrison. I knew I had to give him as many options as possible. I knew that whatever was gonna be made was gonna be made in the edit, so giving them ways to craft that would make their lives easier, make my life easier as well.

Any last comments about Wicked?

There’s a real interesting balance between comedy, drama, melodrama, fantasy, and then also it feeling very grounded. I don’t think a lot of editors get the chance to play with so many tones in any given movie. I had a lot of comedic improv from my actors. I have a lot of live vocals I’m dealing with. I have CG animals that I’m dealing with.

Then I have this tone, which is just seeping with betrayal and drama. I just love the fact that I get to play with so many different colors over the course of one film. I love how it feels like you start one way and you end up the other. That’s a really fun thing for any editor to have over the course of a movie.

So hopefully whoever’s watching will see all the craft that goes into all these different aspects of the movie and inspire them. When I watched movies like Imitation of Life, a Douglas Sirk movie, I just love that sort of melodrama. I’ve always wanted to make a deep melodrama.

Crazy Rich Asians had little elements of that or watching Pillow Talk where you’re watching these split screens. Being a horror fan and being in love with these Universal monster movies or seeing American Werewolf in London and seeing a transformation scene.

I got to do all this over the course of one movie. It really checked off all the boxes as far as the things I ever wanted to tackle over the course of one film, so I’m just really proud of how it all feels cohesive because otherwise it could be kind of a big schizophrenic mess. So I’m really proud of how it came together, considering how many different elements it had.

That is a great place to end this interview Myron. Thank you so much for talking to me again. Congratulations and good luck as you dive into part two.

Thank you, Steve. I really appreciate it.