Jon M. Chu on “In the Heights”

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

News, Storytelling, New, Society & Culture, Yorker, Wnyc, Books, Remnick, Politics, Arts, David

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 11 June 2021

⏱️ 16 minutes

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Summary

It’s easy to see why the director Jon M. Chu was adamant that the release of “In the Heights” wait until this summer, when more people could see it in theatres: it’s big, it’s colorful, the dance sequences are complex—it’s a spectacle in the best sense of the term. “In the Heights,” based on Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hit stage musical, is a love letter to the largely Latino community in Washington Heights, in upper Manhattan. The characters are dreaming big and wrestling with what happens when those dreams start to pull them away from the neighborhood. For Chu, who directed the enormous hit “Crazy Rich Asians,” directing the film was a risk—it’s said that Miranda teased him by writing “Don’t fuck this up” on his copy of the script. As an Asian-American from California, Chu “was already one step removed from this neighborhood,” he tells David Remnick. “How do you make sure you don’t miss a detail? The director is probably the only person on set who can stop everything and say, ‘Let’s discuss this.’ . . . That’s what made me nervous, making sure I was always present to hear those things.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:09.8	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:13.0	Summer is the season of blockbusters normally, and nothing beats the heat like a dark, icy, cold movie theater.
0:23.7	Blasts of air conditioning. A great movie.
0:28.5	But last summer, the studios delayed most of the big releases and we had to sweat it out,
0:35.0	watching TV from our increasingly dusty couches. But now the movies are back.
0:37.5	Hey, y'all, good morning. Ice cold, pira, palt, pia, paltz, china, cherry, strawberry, and just for today, I got my mates.
0:43.2	Oh, yeah, pita, good, uh, in The Heights is based on Lynn Manuel Miranda's 2008 Tony winning musical.
0:48.9	I am Usnavia, and you probably never heard my name.
0:51.9	Reports of my fame are greatly exaggerated
0:54.4	And it's easy to see
0:56.7	why the director, John M. Chu,
0:59.6	was absolutely adamant
1:01.4	that this movie wait until we could see it in theaters.
1:05.1	It's big, it's colorful, it's noisy, it's joyful.
1:09.2	The dance sequences are complex, a spectacle in the very
1:13.2	best sense.
1:17.9	In the Heights is a love letter to the largely Latino community in Washington Heights in northern
1:26.2	Manhattan, and the characters are dreaming big and wrestling with what happens when those dreams
1:32.2	start to pull them farther and farther away from the old neighborhood.
1:40.1	John Chu was also the director of 2018's Crazy Rich Asians,
1:48.0	the highest grossing romantic comedy of the past decade.
	...

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