whose character is essayed by Andrew Garfield.
Broadway’s In the Heights and Hamilton creator and several award-winning (Pulitzer, Tony, Grammy to name a few) actor/songwriter Lin Manuel Miranda added another feather to his cap by officially debuting as a director with the musical film Tick, Tick… Boom! And what better way to mark your debut than dedicating it to your artistic hero? The director says that his journey of falling in love with musicals began after he saw a performance of Rent, written by Jonathon Larson, whose autobiographical this film is.
However, the 41-year-old playwright took his sweet time before going behind the camera although he wanted to direct since the age of three.
In a recent media interview prior to the release of the film, he explained why his debut took so long. “I went to college to study theatre and film, and I got a pretty hard lesson that it’s much harder and expensive to be a film major than a theatre major. The theatre department pays your budget when you’re a theatre major but you have to pay for your own thesis when you are a film major. I took all the film classes, but to declare the major, I didn’t know if I could afford to make a senior film. So I leaned all the way into the theatre and into writing musicals.”
“The fact that I’ve been able to come back around to my first love has been amazing. And every decision I’ve made post-Hamilton has been again, and I say this in hindsight, I don’t think I realized at the time, it’s the film school I couldn’t afford. So what took me so long was the experience to match the desire, which was always there. I wanted to make sure that I knew what I was doing once I got there, and to do it in service of one of my artistic heroes and pay a debt I could never really pay. Because I saw Rent when I was 17, and it made me go from liking musicals to wanting to write a musical,” Lin said.
Starring in the role of Larson in this adaptation of his musical is Spiderman actor Andrew Garfield, whom the director fell in love with when he saw him performing the play Angels in America. That is when he knew Andrew was the man best suited to pay homage to his idol.
“Andrew is a world-class movie star, but before that, he’s a theatre beast. That’s actually where I fell in love with him. I first saw him on stage in Mike Nichols’ production of Death of a Salesman years ago. But then, right around the time when I was lucky enough to be asked to direct Tick, tick Boom, I went to see Angels in America and Andrew was giving an insanely heartbreaking and vulnerable performance, over six hours in two parts. The stamina required to do that is jaw-dropping, and I just left that production feeling like that guy can do anything. I was so lucky to have him because he understands what it is to live and breathe for the theatre.”
However, the fact that he couldn’t sing or doesn’t know anything about making musicals didn’t stop him from casting him as a lead in a film that was swamped with musical talents (Alexandra Shipp, Vanessa Hudgens, Joshua Henry)
Asked how was the process of training him, he answered, “It was about two years of preparation before we ever rolled a camera. He (Andrew) told me that he would need time to learn what he needed to learn, and I told him, I would give him every resource possible to get him ready. There is a brilliant vocal coach I’ve worked with, Liz Kaplan, who figures out how to unlock your ability to sing and get whatever is blocking you out of the way. She did amazing work with Andrew. And we held the workshop this I would have done for a musical I had written. We would get a draft of the script, get a bunch of actors and Andrew and sit around a table and learn the songs and sing them.”
He continued, “That’s how Andrew slowly grew more confident. At each reading, he’d sing a little more. I think in the first reading he just sang Boho Days, which is an acapella number. So there’s nowhere to go wrong. And slowly he grew more confident. And it was an incredible transformation to witness as he began to embody Jonathan and just grow confident enough that you felt like those songs actually emanated from him.”
There were challenges, though, for the first time director. “The most challenging thing I did not anticipate was the worldwide pandemic of 2020. No one could have anticipated that. And I filmed about two weeks, in March 2020, before Netflix shut down all of its productions. Even before then, we were all trying to figure out how to navigate this. We were told not to hug each other, the craft services were suddenly shrink wrapped every day, and then the world shut down. And with it came a sense of relief because everyone wants to feel safe on the film set and no one felt safe at that moment in the world. There is a weird irony in the fact that Jonathan Larson is trying to make art amidst the plague that is the AIDS crisis in 1990, where we’re losing a generation of artists. And there we were in 2020, and we were losing artists as well. Again, directing with a face mask and a face shield is not easy. But that was more than overridden by our desire to make art amidst this crisis because that’s, that’s what Jonathan had to do,” he concluded.
Tick, Tick, Boom…! based on the musical by late playwright Jonathan Larson streams on Netflix from November 19.
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