I was born into a melting pot. Melting Ain’t Fun: Jon M. Chu on Wicked: For Good, Ariana Grande – and Living the American Dream | Evil: for good

toLet’s start with a quick recap of the first Wicked movie. Its premise: What would the legend of Oz look like, when told from the perspective of someone other than that kind but sleepy person, Dorothy? The evil witch Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) is completely green, and thus has been shunned since childhood. Glinda (Ariana Grande), the good witch, is everyone’s princess, but after a while, the two become best friends. I’ll talk about how Tin Man, Lion, and Scarecrow came to be, and suffice it to say that their backstories, in the movie at least, seem logical and perfect (except for Lion, but whatever). The Wizard (Jeff Goldblum) isn’t a good guy, but is he a bad guy? Ethics revolve in a way that is expertly handled.

The first film left us at the point of discovering that the city of Oz, far from being a magical paradise, was in fact built on foundations of discrimination, oppression, enslavement and lying – or fascism, if you want the simple stuff. The fact that the slave class is the animal kingdom and not an outside human group does not make this grandiose fantasy any less obviously objective. “Any timeless story feels timely, because it’s about the human condition,” says director Jon M. Chu. “When people become too powerful, what happens to the weak? This cycle, unfortunately, challenges us every few generations, and maybe this is our moment. We’re the adults in the room now.”

Yes, of course – adults whose hearts soar at the sight of pink and green; Who will follow Ariana Grande off the ramp in a synchronized Busby Berkeley formation; Who still break into gravity defying when they pass Erivo High School in Streatham, London. The first film was charming, but the second (Wicked: For Good) is surprisingly moving. They weigh more than five hours between them. “I knew it had enough meat in it,” says Cho nonchalantly.

I went for a swing in this conversation with Cho. It was the Corinthia Hotel in London’s Whitehall, on Remembrance Sunday, pomp and pageantry everywhere outside, and Cho exuded an air of quiet mischief inside. I’ve never seen anyone convey a more rebellious spirit wrapped in such elegant tailoring. I didn’t personally sway with him – he’s very brilliant, best known for Crazy Rich Asians, although before Wicked, the film I couldn’t recommend highly enough was his screen adaptation of In the Heights, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical about New York’s Hispanic community.

No, I was after the stage version of Wicked, which premiered in San Francisco in 2003 — that’s when Cho saw it with his mother, before it hit Broadway. His parents “came to the United States with nothing but a dream.” His mother was born in Taiwan, and his father was born in China. “They started a restaurant, and it’s still there to this day, 55 years later. And I got to do the most American thing ever, which is telling stories in movies, not just movies, musicals. I’m proof that the dream is real.” He was still a student and his professors at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts were telling him: “Don’t write a musical, the form is dead.”

The thing is, movies trump musical theater to the point that I can’t even see how I got inspired by it. It would be like going to Zippos Circus and getting inspired to make The Greatest Showman. The coordination is better, the dialogue is smarter, the pacing, the plot and the characters are smarter Everything It is just a different order of magnitude. “It’s something different,” says Cho diplomatically. “Glinda comes in winking at the audience whose point of view is, ‘Prove to me that I should believe in these things.’ It’s a completely different perspective from the movie, where the green girl falls into this crazy world, and thinks, ‘Where the hell did I just land?’ And it’s us.”

Erivo and Grande seemed like the obvious choices for the leads, perhaps because they had a general passion for each other — an undisclosed number of matching tattoos, for example — or perhaps because they both have such amazing voices. Their vocals were not pre-recorded for either film, which is especially impressive given the time they spend flying. When casting roles, “We could have had any singers we really wanted,” says Cho cheerfully. Grande and Erivo had something different, which was the “connective tissue of truth.”

He initially thought that Erivo wouldn’t be interested because she was too emotional, and that Grande wouldn’t be right because she was too cosmopolitan. “But when she came, it wasn’t pop star Ari, it was Glinda. She was from another planet. I called her four or five times, and I kept thinking, ‘Calling her bullshit, let’s see her again.’ And it was undeniable. There’s something about the way she sang it, because she’s been through so many tragedies lately, that I felt like she was singing about me.” (This is no entertainment industry exaggeration: Grande has gone through a horrific series of life events, including an accidental overdose from her ex-husband, Mac Miller, in 2018, and the Manchester Arena bombing the year before.)

“Same with Cynthia,” Cho continues. “I felt like she was singing about me, dreaming of being a director in my dorm room. We were waiting for these two women.” It was lucky how much they loved each other, wasn’t it? “I thought that even if they hated each other, the camera loved their energy.”

From the beginning of the first film, there’s this fear of the environment and everyday racism, Elphaba is sullen and oppressed, and Glinda is playful with white body superiority. It’s all very familiar Disney territory (think Zombies, Descendants); Everyone gets to know each other, and then they’re nice. But there is a line of segregation and oppression that defines the second film, which has been a continuing theme in Cho’s filmmaking. Before having children — Willow, the first (of five) born in 2017, with his wife, graphic designer Christine Hodge — “I was making movies for 10 years, and it was great. I didn’t have to answer to anyone. And then I had kids, and I wanted them to live in a world where they were proud of who they were. So I had to go chase Crazy Rich Asians and In the Heights.”

In a fun and beguiling way — Crazy Rich Asians was the highest-grossing romantic comedy of the 2000s — both films tell a complex, non-clichéd story about multiculturalism. “The melting pot is much more difficult than a single word,” says Chu. “Melting is no fun. I had to be born into a melting pot, feel the vortex and actually didn’t realize I was melting until later in life. And maybe I’m not melting at all. Maybe it’s a soup where we’re all still ourselves, in the same pot. We don’t become one thing, but at the same time, knowing that coming together is part of the dream.”

You can totally imagine Cho debuting this saga, and see exactly why it got the green light, right at the start of Covid. “Everything was changing around us. Our childhood stories, our childhood possibilities, were no longer guaranteed. Everything was starting to reset itself. We felt like strangers in our own homes.”

Wicked: For Good, on the other hand, falls at a particularly relevant moment, which is that we talk about and experience artificial intelligence so much, we can’t know what’s real. “No generative AI was used in this film,” says Chu with some pride. “If you see the camera shaking, or if you see a dancer and she doesn’t arrive on time, it’s because humans made it. The string that’s playing a little out of tune, and the wrinkles in her nose, it’s because it’s human-made. The world is part of the message.”

Chu considers himself “on the front lines, telling one of the biggest stories” in the face of “political turmoil, social unrest, and cultural identity crises all around us.” And if you’re wondering how to combine that with a musical about witches, all I can say is that you should go and see it. She has a deep sense of purpose.

“Films are one of the few protected spaces,” he says. “You have to put your phone down, sit down with friends and strangers, pay attention for two hours and see the world through someone else’s eyes. I don’t even spend a lot of time listening to my loved ones. I feel a huge responsibility – if people are giving me this time, when I get into this bubble, I have to use it to say: ‘Do you see what’s happening outside?’