9 Million Tulips and an Extra-Grande Ariana: ‘Wicked’ Director Jon M. Chu on Creating Oz

Jon M. Chu understood the pressure that he’d be facing when he took on directing Universal’s Wicked, an adaptation of one of the most successful stage musicals of all time. A Wicked fan himself — he’s seen the show 12 times, seven before being hired to helm the film — he knew the stakes were high for casting Elphaba and Galinda and bringing the vibrant world of Oz to the big screen. “If there’s anything I’ve learned through the business, it’s how to deal with pressure. For Wicked specifically, that is a whole other thing,” Chu says, adding that the show’s roof-raising anthem was a particular challenge. “ ‘Defying Gravity’ is one of the most complicated things I’ve ever shot in my entire life. I felt more pressure with ‘Defying Gravity’ than the whole movie itself.”

Wicked reunites Chu with Michelle Yeoh, who starred in his groundbreaking 2018 blockbuster Crazy Rich Asians and now plays Madame Morrible. “Jon’s ability to find the humanity in larger-than-life stories was something I knew would translate beautifully,” she tells THR. “He brings a unique sense of inclusivity and creativity to any project and has this way of making everyone feel connected, which is important for a story as beloved as Wicked. His ability to balance the fantastical with the personal is exactly what this adaptation needs.” 

Chu’s disparate, crowd-pleasing career prepared him for this movie (or two movies, spaced one year apart, the first one costing $145 million). The filmmaker, who grew up in Silicon Valley, got his big break when his USC student short When the Kids Are Away was noticed by the likes of Steven Spielberg. Since then, he’s dabbled in concert films, dance movies and toy adaptations like Justin Bieber: Never Say Never, Step Up 2: The Streets and G.I. Joe: Retaliation, which have amounted to more than $1.4 billion at the global box office. He’s been revered for bringing inclusive movies to the multiplex and smashing records in the process and has no plans of stopping there: Beyond Wicked parts one and two, Chu is gearing up to bring Britney Spears’ memoir, The Woman in Me, to the big screen, as well as the film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Chu — who lives in L.A. with his wife; they welcomed their fifth child, coincidentally, during the U.S. premiere of Wicked on Nov. 9 — takes THR through his work leading up to Wicked, the criticisms he’s faced and the tough decisions that forced him to leave projects.

When did you decide to become a director?

I fell in love with making films when I was a kid, when I got a camcorder in my hands. I’m the youngest of five kids growing up in Silicon Valley; looking through that lens, people looked at me differently. I remember feeling like I could go anywhere and any place. I started cutting things together on this little mixer with my VCR stacked together that I bought off of Sharper Image. I showed my parents the video that I made of our vacation, and they started to cry. And for the first time, I felt heard. Looking back now, I think [it was about] them seeing this American dream come true of their family on a TV [screen] — I was named after a TV show called Hart to Hart, [the characters] Jennifer and Jonathan, that’s my and my sister’s names. From then on, I was all-in doing wedding videos, bar mitzvah videos, you name it.

You went to USC for film school. Did your parents have a different dream for you?

They have a restaurant that’s still there — 54, 55 years now — and they wanted all of us to have restaurants, of course. But no. When I was in high school, I was editing at 2 in the morning and my mom unplugged the computer. I had convinced the school to let me make video shorts instead of write papers. And she said, “You conned the school, I’m calling them tomorrow!” I went to bed devastated. I went back to her crying, “This is what I love. You’ve always told me to pursue things that I love and this is it.” The next day, she picked me up from school and she had a pile of filmmaking books and said, “If you’re going to do this, you’ve got to study it like a craft.” From then on, they never questioned it.

WME signed you shortly after your student short film, and then you were hired to make several studio films that didn’t pan out, until Step Up 2: The Streets. 

My short film got a lot of attention in the town before there was YouTube or any of that. I was pay-or-play on Bye Bye Birdie at Sony [the film was never greenlit due to budget concerns], and so I got involved in the business very early. I was 23 years old, but I didn’t make my first movie until five years after that. During that period, it was really hard because you’re on the precipice of making a movie and you’re actually working every day. You’re just not making anything every day. 

My managers, who are still my managers today, said, “Hey, this is a sequel to a dance movie, but it’s direct-to-DVD.” And I was like, “I don’t do direct-to-DVD.” I called my mom, and she said, “When did you become a snob? If you’re a true storyteller, you can tell it in any medium.” That advice changed the rest of my life because that’s how I see myself today. It could be live onstage, a commercial, a movie, bedtime stories to my children. And I said, “I’m going to make the best damn direct-to-DVD dance movie sequel of all time.” 

Then you directed the Justin Bieber concert movie and G.I. Joe: Retaliation, a sequel based on the famous toy IP with a huge fan base. You were supposed to direct a threequel, but you departed the project. A G.I. Joe spinoff, Snake Eyes, came out eight years later.

I was finishing up Step Up 3D, which was the sequel to the Step Up 2, and I got a call from Adam Goodman — I’d met Adam Goodman as he was the head of Paramount on my first round of meetings with my short film coming out of film school, and he’s like, “Jon, I know how talented you are. I have some movies for you, but there’s this one that I don’t know what to do with. We just got the rights to Justin Bieber’s life to make a doc or a concert film on him, and we have 3D and you just did 3D, could you do this for me? And we have to do it in nine months.” I was like, okay, I’ve done this before. … Adam said, “you have to talk to one person to get the job. Scooter Braun.” I had my conversation with Scooter and we’ve become very close since then, and I was like, “this is a Rocky story. I think this is the first time that these teenagers got to choose their idols from being online. This is not just a concert film. This is a story about generation of people choosing their idol and the person at the middle of this.” 

I played with G.I. Joes my whole life and with The Rock, that was a dream come true, but it was overwhelming. This was the first time I had to work with a toy company in Hasbro, and a huge producer, Lorenzo di Bonaventura. Paramount, of course, had their own needs with this movie: another sequel, big stars, and so I had to learn that at that scale, you cannot control everything the way you would in a little movie. You have to actually be a vision, a compass for the team. 

Creatively, it was difficult. We never got the script for G.I. Joe 3, and I always feel like I can’t jump in unless I know what the movie is. At the same time, I’d been talking to Jason Blum of doing something [with a tight production budget] in the model of Blumhouse, but doing it for a family film, and Jem and the Holograms [the live-action version of an animated series based on the Hasbro doll] was one that I had always loved. They were like, “Why are you going away from G.I. Joe to do a teenage girl movie? This is career suicide.” [The movie went on to perform poorly at the box office.]

Fast-forward to Crazy Rich Asians, which was the first major studio film to feature a cast of actors of Chinese descent in a modern setting since The Joy Luck Club in 1993. It broke box office records. 

I also did Now You See Me 2 and got to work with some of the biggest names out there. But it was in the middle of that movie that I felt like I hit my 10,000 hours. I felt like, “I think I know what I’m doing.” And it started to itch at me: When am I going to do my own thing? What is the thing that only I can get made? At the same time, there’s #OscarsSoWhite happening, and William Yu on Twitter was doing this thing, #StarringJohnCho, with posters of John Cho in different movies like Mission: Impossible and Top Gun. And it hit me that I was in a position of privilege, and I could make casting choices. What scared me the most was my own cultural identity crisis, exploring what it means to be Asian American. So I told my team, “I’m not going to make money for you guys for five years, so clear my slate. I’m going to go find something that studios would most likely not make without me.” And I had gotten this book, Crazy Rich Asians, and every character in it was someone I could pinpoint in the world. I thought, “We can make the Asian Avengers of movies with this. We could define what’s beautiful in our culture, what it means to be split between cultures.” It’s about self-worth, and I was going through my own self-worth evolution of what I deserve and what I think I can do in the movie business. I didn’t think anyone was ever going to see this movie. And luckily, people did.

There was criticism at the time for casting biracial actors over fully Chinese ones for certain roles. What goes through your mind when you get that kind of criticism?

If I can’t handle it, then this is not the job for me. Making a movie with an all-Asian cast for a studio movie, to have tens of millions of dollars to market these people [and prove they are] worth your dollars and your time, to me, that is something that was unimaginable at that moment. Every movie gets criticism; as a director, you have to be used to the hits. When it’s something about intention, that’s where it starts to hurt a bit, because they didn’t know my intention. At the same time, I’m like, “Jon, toughen up. It doesn’t matter about your intention, it’s what you put out there.”

What’s the update on Crazy Rich Asians 2?

There are a lot of questions about Crazy Rich Asians 2. I always promised the cast, I will not bring them back unless we get a script that’s better and has as much urgency as the first movie. And I think we just haven’t gotten there yet. The first movie, even though people think, “It’s like the book, so the second book should fit in,” it’s actually not. There’s a lot of shifting, architecturally, and so it’s not a straight translation. And then there are characters that you want to see in a movie that are part of the book. We’ve done some versions and it’s never quite hit. The bar is high for all of us to come back to do that, so I’m not going to put the audience through that until we’re ready to do it. 

In the Heights, with its incredible cast of Latino performers, received critical claim but had an underwhelming box office. At the time, you said that it achieves something much greater: putting new Hollywood leading men and women out there. In the three years since the film’s debut, what changes have you seen in representation?

Hollywood is slow. It knows what it wants, but not necessarily what it needs. And each movie is a piece of data that moves it one way or the other. It’s also a business that’s going through transformation. Data has become the center of what they call content now, not stories. That’s scary because the great thing about Hollywood in the past has been that it’s run by mavericks, artists who are rebels and troublemakers, and they’re willing to say and release things that are controversial and cause dialogue, and through that comes new perspective on something that we didn’t know we needed to hear or maybe even wanted to hear. I miss those days. In the Heights is no different. That was the first movie in a long time with an all-Latino cast that had no violence, no drugs. It’s all about love and beauty and joy on the streets of Washington Heights, where dreaming is the most epic thing in the movie. I’m so proud that we got that out there. Have the changes that I hoped would happen after that movie happened? No. My job is to put out the thing that I think that the world should see, even if they don’t know they should see it yet. 

The film was also criticized for its lack of Afro-Latino actors.

Again, the thing that hurt the most was the [accusation of] intention. When people are like, “Oh, you purposely did this,” I’m like, “No, but if it came across that way, that’s a problem, for sure.” It’s my favorite movie that I’ve made. Rather than try to say, “You’re wrong,” let’s just shut up and let the conversation happen, even at the sacrifice of the movie that we spent years making and we poured our talents into. That is a painful process, to watch the dialogue happen. But we did believe that the dialogue was important, even if it was unintentional. And I am really proud that we could do that and not tear down the people who brought it up, because it’s important. 

You left Willow due to production delays and personal reasons, and that must have not been an easy choice for you because I know the story is very important to you. Your daughter was named after the 1988 film.

To get the call to do Willow was like a dream come true. It was hard because it was at the end of lockdown. We started designing the set pieces, doing casting. We were pretty deep and at the same time, that’s the first time Wicked called. I was already committed to Willow, and I had to pass on Wicked the first time. I asked, “Will you guys wait for me?” And they were like, “We won’t wait for you.” It was the hardest thing I had to do, but I couldn’t call Kathleen Kennedy and say, “I’m leaving you for another project.” 

Months later, as we’re about to go to Wales to shoot Willow, omicron came around, and my wife was going to have another baby, and we had gone through so much during COVID. My wife turned to me and said, “Moving our whole family to Wales at this moment, during this rise of something that we don’t know, it’s too much for us.” That broke my heart. I walked away from that. I thought I lost Wicked and Willow when I was going to live my life with my family. And it was a couple months later that I got another call from Marc Platt saying, “We haven’t moved on.” He’s like, “Are you going to be back from Willow?” I’m like, “I left Willow.” So they offered me Wicked. 

Wicked is one of the most successful Broadway productions ever. How much pressure did you face taking on something like this?

I’m a huge fan of Wicked. I come from the perspective of a fan, so in my mind, I know the areas that I need to protect. The hardest part was finding those little divots that I had filled in and imagined in my head, so that I could feel something more than the compact story that they had told onstage. 

And then would [composer] Stephen Schwartz and [playwright] Winnie Holzman and [producer] Marc Platt be open to those things? We had a very specific process. We started doing daily Zooms, three or four hours a day, where we would go through every line of the Broadway script and the movie script, which wasn’t quite there yet, and they would tell me why Stephen wrote the lyric this way, or how the number ended up this way. This took months and months, of just sitting there listening to all their stories. I didn’t talk much. They also said the things they wished they had put in the production. 

After that process, we started to say, “How the hell are you going to tell all this in one movie? This is impossible.” 

The original musical is two hours and 45 minutes, and now the first part of the movie is 2 hours 40 minutes. I’m curious what your reaction was to the audience’s response.

That was one of the first things we did when we got through our process of examining all the pieces and the wrinkles and the edges of Wicked the show and how we wanted Wicked the movie. We knew we didn’t want to pull the movie away from the show so far that it wasn’t the show that I loved. We started talking about, what numbers can you cut to get it in? And the amount of numbers you have to cut to get this story in is just not plausible. You want all the songs, so you’re going to cut dancing. Which ones? Tell me which ones and we’ll do it. It just became very apparent that we had to make a choice. We went back and forth, are we making a three-and-a-half-hour movie that cuts off all these things? Are we doing one at a time? And if we’re doing one at a time, then we have to make sure that that movie is emotionally fulfilling so it doesn’t feel like we’re stopping in the middle of a story. … We all agreed that we were splitting it. And we found that that room was necessary. Because if you’re going to, I don’t know, perhaps end on a “Defying Gravity,” let’s say, then you have Elphaba that needs to be the most pivotal moment of her life. So then you need to set up Elphaba more than maybe the show does. You need to see what her childhood was like. … And how do you build that friendship? In the medium of movie, you call bullshit on things so fast, you have to have the time and the space to believe in that relationship. And you have a narrator of Galinda that wraps it all together, that sets up things for movie two. So all those things are just a lot, and I think we found a beautiful balance in it. I think when you see the movie, it’ll all make more sense.

What did you see in Ariana Grande that made you know she could play Galinda?

We searched everywhere. Big movie stars I didn’t know could sing were sending things in. She had a higher mountain to climb, to be honest, because I was like, Wicked is too big to have Ariana Grande, who’s really big, to then sit on top of it. It’s just too many competing things. This is a very difficult role. You have to be funny. You have to be a great actor. You have to be able to sing. She can handle those parts, but can she be intimate and let us in? Also, you have this amazing iconic Galinda in Kristin Chenoweth, so you can’t do an imitation; it has to be the Galinda that was built, but you have to have your own. This is skilled, high-craft stuff that takes a lot of experience to do. There was no way Ariana Grande, who had never led a movie, could do this. 

And when she came in, she didn’t win the role the first time, but we were like, “That’s interesting.” She’s committed, but she had all her Ariana Grande makeup on. Next time she came in, all makeup gone, and she was in it. I was like, “She’s so funny. She’s the most interesting person in the room.” We kept bringing her back. Every time, you’re like, the only Galinda you want to see is her, so by the end, it was very, very clear. And when she showed up on day one, she was Galinda. Her voice was different. The way she walked was different. I have never seen anyone change like that. She earned this thing like no other. At every stop, she had to pass some barrier that was in my head about what she was capable of, and I’m excited for people to see her blow all their expectations away.

You talked about the sets being some of the biggest you’ve ever seen. Talk a little about the practical effects used — I know you planted 9 million tulips. 

We told the studio, and they said, “You just need to do one row, and CG can build it in.” And we were like, “Oh, we already planted them.” They got a little mad at us, but that was the rebelliousness we were in. We’re like, “We’re making Oz! You don’t cheap Oz out!” Very few filmmaker-storytellers get to present Oz to the entire planet. We’re fighting for cinema, the big screen. We’re fighting for going back to the days where things are built and touchable. And luckily, Universal understood that. 

How long was the entire production? 

We shot both movies over 160 days and got stopped 10 days before finishing [because of the strike] our “Defying Gravity” and flying days. Cynthia had to train and gain — for a year — all the skill set, stunt-wise, to be able to fly and sing at the same time. Then, right when we’re about to shoot it, we stopped for six months. 

When we came back in January of this year, she had to retrain. Luckily, you can’t put that kind of force too much in a box. It just fucking unleashed. I’m really grateful for that time because we were all rested, and we could do it the way we wanted to do it. 

“Defying Gravity” is one of the most complicated things I’ve ever shot in my whole entire life. I felt more pressure about “Defying Gravity” than the whole movie. You have to have the right actor. Cynthia, she came in, we knew she could do it. It’s a revelation when you see her as Elphaba. It’s not just singing the songs the way she can expertly do it. It’s reinterpreting the whole character in a way that’s so connective to you and your life. She runs marathons, so she’s like, “I’m doing my stunts, and I’m doing it live.” Her in the air, spinning around us, singing live, we really wanted to bring the audience in, to feel on that stage and watch her do it. And I think we did. We had to work with our camera to know where to be right at the moment when she says, “If you care to find me, look to the western sky.”

It was recently announced that you’d be directing the film adaptation of Britney Spears’ memoir. What kind of conversations have you had with Spears to tell her story?

I cannot talk much about the Britney story other than I have been a Britney fan for many years. I saw her when she was one of 12 acts at the Shrine Auditorium. I’ve gone to many of her shows, and she’s always been someone I’ve looked up to. She represents a generation of people growing up in the 2000s and late ’90s, and she has a story that deserves to be told properly. There’s a lot about us in it. We haven’t written the script yet, we haven’t hired a writer yet. But in this initial conception, I think it’s a lot about how we treat people, young people, stars that we think we own, women, mothers. There’s a lot of things in there that I would love to explore. 

You’re also working on the movie adaptation of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Britney posted something that many fans speculated was about her involvement in it. Can you clarify? 

You’ll have to ask Britney what she meant by all of that, but she wrote my name in one of her Instagrams or tweets. That’s an honor. I love that. I think she likes to tease the audience in different ways. So I’ll let it be a mystery on her part, but I’m excited to work with her. 

This story appeared in the Nov. 13 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.