Breaking Baz: Jon M. Chu On How The Breathtaking ‘Wicked: For Good’ Took Flight With New Songs For Cynthia Erivo & Ariana Grande, Plus A Secret Guest Star As Cowardly Lion

EXCLUSIVE:  Jon M. Chu says he “tweaked and tweaked” Wicked: For Good, the second part of his breathtaking movie musical about Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West who fled Oz, and Glinda the Good who remained. Getting the film to gleam involved bringing back stars Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande to film new lines for the title song and persuading a major actor to voice the Cowardly Lion.

But something unexpected floored him.

“The colors were holding us back,” he reveals, laughing loudly when we met in London following a special in-conversation session during the BFI London Film Festival.

The yellow brick road wasn’t, well, yellow enough. “No joke,” he insists. The tweaking continued until two weeks ago, the acclaimed filmmaker discloses.

“We were doing, sound of the mix, the final mix. But really at the end it was color that was holding us back, because we were getting new visual effects. And then green is so sensitive. You can have so many ranges. And every time you switch… to the HDR version, to the IMAX version, to the Dolby version, those greens go everywhere…It’s her skin,” he says, referring to Elphaba’s hue.

“And then the yellows in the yellow brick road. It can’t be the honey brick road; it has to be the yellow brick road,” Chu declares.

“And those colors, when they expand in the color space, they just start to veer. And we had to really be careful. So we spent a lot of time, way more time, not to repaint them, but just tweak to make sure it was in the range that we expected on the film version, on the Dolby version, because you just get more colors in HDR or stuff like that.”

Whatever spell Chu used, it worked because Wicked: For Good works for good on so many levels. It’s gloriously, deliciously good. Universal releases the film into theaters on November 21.

Some might even argue that it’s a tighter, more thrilling, more exciting film than Wicked. 

Yes, it’s romantic, yes, it’s a musical and yes it’s a thriller. Boy, does it thrill.

Wicked 2 is certainly far superior to the second act of the stage show that’s still running on Broadway and in London’s West End. 

And, Cynthia Erivo is, in Chu’s words, “a badass,” and both she and Grande are class acts. The audience at the private screening I attended in London applauded as the final credits rolled. It’s truly one of the year’s outstanding movies. It’s a marvellous piece of cinematic art. And, by George, it’s just what we need. The joys are, to steal a line from a song, unlimited. 

Chu had choices to make when he was in pre-production and rehearsals for both Wicked and Wicked: For Good.

He remains silent when I say that nothing in the second part of the stage version eclipses Elphaba performing Defying Gravity, the hit song that closes act one before the interval. 

When Erivo’s Elphaba soars towards the western skies performing Defying Gravity in the closing moments of Wicked, I wondered how on earth Chu would top that in Wicked: For Good?

Chu had some ideas. The director says that he knew where it did work and that he knew how to enhance it to make Wicked: For Good excel.

The reveals in the existing songs For Good and No Good Deed worked, he says. “I felt like I wanted it to work even more. And I knew we had the opportunity. Also, I knew the girls better. Once I understood how we were going to feel about these characters, then I knew what was missing emotionally for me. I want to see what Elphaba, now that she’s made her choice to leave the wizard and Oz, how is her life when she’s made this choice? How lonely can that be? What are the questions she asked herself when she thinks maybe she made a mistake, what would drive her back to the wizard? That’s never made sense to me, actually. Try to make sense of that. Oh, it would be Glinda. We should add Glinda into that scene because Glinda would be the only one who can speak to her, convince her,” he explains without pause.

“And then what’s Glinda’s journey through this? At the end of act one, Glinda doesn’t make the choice. She actually hasn’t changed that much. She maybe has opened her brain, she’s starting to wake up, but she goes right back. So this movie had to be about the courage of someone popping their own bubble, a bubble of privilege or their bubble of safety. ..So those things we really focus on. How do we, even when the girls aren’t together, how are the decisions each of them made affecting the other in their journey?” Chu wondered.

Chu describes parts of Wicked: For Good as “part monster movie,” like the Universal monster movies about the creation of a Beast That comes from Within. It’s Elphaba swooping through the sky on her broomstick, and Glinda in a bubble.

“Elphaba’s a superhero in this one. I mean that opening, cold open, she comes down,” Chu says, as he describes Erivo’s dramatic entrance. 

“We wanted to show how powerful she really was. I think this is how you show a superhero, especially these women as superheroes, and not have to fit into what a guy’s superhero is, the stereotype of it all. Elphaba’s her own person and Glinda could be too. It’s also the origin story of Glinda the Good,“ he says.

And Glinda’s so conflicted, and it’s fascinating to watch how she navigates those emotions of feeling. 

“Totally, I think that’s us,” is Chu’s immediate response. “I think we wish we could be Elphaba and have that kind of moment of clarity, but I think most of the time we’re not that clear. And we go back and forth and we hide in our bubble. More times than not, no matter how much we say we’re an ally of this or that, or how much we’re against this or that, most of the time we just stay in our own world. And I think to watch someone, and especially Ariana, navigate this character and break her for us, maybe gives us a little bit of a guideline that we can do it at any time.”

Elphaba has the courage of a lion, in abundance, I say. 

“Well, she has to muster more courage at a certain point because when you question your home, the place that you are fighting for, that you believe in, and you realize that it doesn’t even want you. I mean, I think that we ask, we all ask ourselves that question at some point in our lives. And so her courage to surrender to that too and go off into an unknown path that has nothing to do with this place,” Chu says.

The heart of the film is about Elphaba and Glinda.

But there’s heat between Elphaba and Jonathan Bailey’s Fiyero — a splendid performance, by the way.

Their relationship seems to develop in a deeper, perhaps more intimate, way than it does in the stage show. Seeing their courtship pan out on stage is one thing, but it’s a gobsmacking, beautifully unexpected moment on screen.

Chu says he structured it in such a way because “what I didn’t want this to do, was just make it about love. This is not about them getting together,” he says emphatically. 

“This was about her figuring out who she is and declaring what she wants in her life. And each of the breaks in their brain are not about each other. They’re actually about looking at the world in a different way. And they’re finding each other in the truth. And so for me, it actually goes deeper. The song As Long As You’re Mine, I think it feels sensual. Not because they’re like, physical, because actually in the [stage] show, they’re much more physical. They’re together already. From the very beginning. She goes, ‘kiss me fiercely.’ In this movie they’re actually apart. There’s hesitation. They don’t even know what the other’s going to say. So we really wanted that to have, instead of just a song about them together, it’s a song about will they, won’t they, how are they going to find each other?”

And then, through the course of the song,  Fiyero looks at the propaganda proclaiming Elphaba as an evil person, who wants to destroy all of Oz’s citizens. “He looks at her and it’s like, ‘Wow, you survived all of this and you’re still kind and you are beautiful.’ And he says, ‘You’re beautiful’…And I think that intimacy, getting them closer in the song actually makes it feel more sensual. Even though they’re not actually physically doing anything.”

Decisions about new songs were made very early on. Chu says that he had several discussions with about new numbers with composer and lyricist Steven Schwartz.

“Well, we knew the pick points of where we needed something, whether it was a scene or a song. And Steven was like, ‘I know what that song can be.’ And it was No Place Like Home.”

 And then Schwartz would text Chu voice messages featuring music played on the piano. 

“I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s interesting. Where are you going with that? Okay, what about this? And what about that?’ But I mean, that’s Steven’s genius of knowing what was needed. But we had always identified through the script the areas that I think we needed help on,” Chu shares.

And creating Girl in the Bubble, a new number for Grande’s Glinda was a similar process. 

“I want to see her make this decision. I don’t just want to jump to it. I want to see her struggle. I want to be there with her when she wrestles with it. And so he came up with this song Girl in the Bubble, and then when he came up with the song, it was like, ‘How do we visualize this?’ If every word is so important, I’m not going to want to look here. And then we were thinking about, okay, well this movie has a lot of reflections and distortions. We have a lot of that kind of symbolism and oh, what if she’s trapped in the image of herself? We never know what’s the reality, what’s not. It was very highly technical and we’re removing walls and putting walls back in real time of going into all these reflections. But it all sort of connected for us there.”

The song For Good, written for the second act of the stage show, was enhanced for the movie, Chu confirms. 

“We added a couple of pieces of dialogue at it’s beginning. So she says, ‘Look at me, not through your eyes, through theirs.’ That’s new. She used to say, ‘Look at me. I’m limited,’” he tells us, his voice delivering the song’s lilting harmony.

“Now she says, ‘Look at me,’ and she pauses. We really wanted to refine the song. 

“That was written 20 years ago. Now you have Cynthia Erivo playing this part, and we really have to understand why she’s leaving and what would compel her to leave for this sacrifice. And I think them connecting on this, ‘Hey, it’s not that you, it’s not your fault. It’s this system that’s in place …’ And Cynthia as Elphaba saying, ‘Good, can’t just be a word, it has to mean something.’”

And that last line is one of the most powerful in the movie, when I heard it, it struck me as something right out of a classic like Casablanca. It goes without saying that these Wicked pictures will stand the test of time and, well, they’re classics almost from the moment they’re released.

Chu repeats the phrase for me. “‘Good can’t just be a word. It has to mean something. It has to change things.’ And I think that Elphaba needed to give Glinda a gift of something that when Glinda makes her final speech, that we hear the echo of Elphaba coming through there. And that phrase helped us connect that.”

Chu and his collaborators couldn’t know what state the world would be in when they embarked on these movies five and a half years ago because the film does, quite uncannily, reflect a sense of what’s going on in the world around us. People, in this case animals, being ill-treated, having their voices taken away, shunned and driven out of Oz.

“I know it’s crazy,” says Chu, shaking his head. “When we were making it, there was a vibe in the air. We were coming out of COVID lockdown, and there’s a lot of questions about what we’ve been living in,” he reasons. 

“And the movie was always about our adult selves looking at our children’s stories and wondering, do we still believe in those things, happily ever after or any of that. And so that’s the power of a timeless story. That’s why The Wizard of Oz has lasted for so long. That’s why Wicked has lasted for so long. They tap into something that can feel timely at any time. And hopefully, it’s about humanity, the cycles of humanity. And unfortunately, we are in a cycle that mirrors this. And so it’s more important than ever in a weird way, that that’s the power of movies that we can see ourselves…who are we going to be? Who are we going to choose to be and what do we stand for?”

Watching Wicked: For Good with an audience, I could feel the movie binding us, as all great films can- and should.

“I don’t know how the audience feels yet, but I know for us, who made it, it bound us together. Not because of the characters or the songs, but because of what it stood for. Because of the moment that we were in, we needed this movie. We needed to make this movie. We needed each other to make this movie and to process it together. It changed all of our lives even before anyone saw one frame of it. So the fact that then the audience did bring it into their lives, it did affect people. It only feels closer to us and now they are a part of our lives. So yeah, I think there’s something about movies and stories that are really important to how we see our own world, and we are inundated with news and bad news and good news, and sometimes a story can take us away and relieve us of this. And the only time we can get clarity of the world is when we tell a fictional story. But it always brings us back home and allows us to process the information more deeply. Come back home and maybe be changed …”

I’m fascinated by how Chu and his team were able to shoot both at the same time. “One day we’d be shooting in their dorm room at Shiz and the next day we’d be shooting in the Kiamo Ko [castle], which is set years later.

“One day we’d be shooting, What Is This Feeling? And then the next day we’d be shooting, As Long as You’re Mine. It was weird. We were jumping. It was all about, what set was built first and what schedule? It was all about the logistics. It was just a huge long shoot and we had to have everything prepped before we even went in. 

“We rehearsed everything. So we kind of knew the feeling. We had our giant board where I mapped out emotionally where we were. So we all sort of knew. And every day before I’d have to check my map where, and I think it shows the technique of these women. These are not just two women who just did a fun musical. They had to be so precise and technical at the highest levels. It’s not just acting, it is singing, it’s moving. And it had to all tie together. So people think they know what these girls are they’re capable of.But in movie two, you really see it.”

But, I ask, how were Erivo and Grande able to switch and go so much deeper, as they do in Wicked: For Good, how did they manage to give such deeply moving performances ?

“Because that’s the arc of the characters. And so they were already in the arc. They were living these characters. So I don’t know if there was an intentional like, ‘Hey, this is movie one. So remember movie one…’ We didn’t think of it as two movies. We thought of it as, ‘Where are we in the story? Has her brain broke yet? Has she made her first? We always looked at when did they ask their first question of this world? When does it go unanswered? When do they break and when do they make their decision to enter this new phase or whatever? So we knew when her bubble popped, when she thought it popped, she pretended it popped and when it would be there. So we would just track that. And then they did a lot of the in-between work to get there. And then every day when we’re shooting it, we would just nudge at it, nudge it, nudge at it.”

Chu shakes his head when I ask where their reserves of energy came from. 

“That I don’t know,” he exclaims. “We didn’t know if they could do it, they didn’t know if I could do it. I think we all didn’t know. There was no choice. That’s why I think when people see these girls, it is masterful.”

They are great performances. “They will forever be Elphaba and Glinda for many, many people,” Chu declares.

Was there more time to craft and finesse Wicked: For Good, I ask?

“Yes and no. I mean, yes, we did have more time because we cut both together at the same time. My first 12 weeks after shooting, instead of just showing the studio one movie, I showed both,” he says, startling me.

“It was really rough. But we got our whole team to just go really hard because I needed to know the bigger arc. I needed to know where we were headed. And then once we showed the studio, which is very scary, I didn’t have to, but I was like, ‘I’m just going to force myself to do it.’”

Ahead of the special double screening, he warned studio executives: “You guys can’t give any notes. I don’t want to hear any notes.”

They saw both versions three months after Chu and his collaborators returned to Los Angeles. ”Then we were confident enough because it was still on its legs enough. Then I put movie two away and we didn’t look at it for a year,” he reveals.

That allowed Chu and the team at Universal to focus on the first part of Wicked so it could be released through the late fall and winter of 2024. 

“And then,” the filmmaker tells us, “I didn’t look back at it until January of this year. We did not open it up. And so having that room to focus on movie one and then open it up in January was very revealing because some choices stuck. And some choices we just had changed. The movie had changed or I had changed.”

“Also, with Wicked out in the world, there was a sense that audiences understood the characters and the narrative better than anticipated, so we could not maybe do so much setup. And so then we re-edited, and then in March we were like, ‘I need some lines put in.’ Some of those lines in [the song] For Good. I really wanted to nail it.”

Chu gathered up his crew and returned to the UK last March and “we went back and shot with the girls…Just to shoot some of those new lines For Good.”

They also filmed some more of a speech that Glinda delivers at the end of the film “because I just needed to refine it,” Chu explains.

Also, they filmed scenes involving the young Glinda. “We had that scene in the script and I knew we should have kept it, but we didn’t shoot it at the time because we had a lot of other pressures.”

Chu notes that he and producer Marc Platt “always said’ if we need it, we’ll go get it.’”

Around that time, Chu approached a celebrated actor to voice the Cowardly Lion’s lines. He sent the star in question a direct message on Instagram. “I was like, ‘It’s not a ton of lines, but maybe you have a little time. I know you’re busy. I’ll come to you.’ He was like, ‘Why the fuck not, let’s go!’ And then we went ahead and recorded the lines.”

Laughing, Chu says, “Man, wait until the red carpet when the actor who gave us the Cowardly Lion’s voice steps foot on it. It’ll be wild.”

Wicked collected ten Oscar nominations and won two – Best Costume for Paul Tazewell and Best Production Design for Nathan Crowley and Lee Sandales.

It’s no secret that I loved Wicked the movie, unexpectedly so because I was never the world’s greatest fan of the stage show. But Erivo and Grande opened it up for me and allowed me to hear it for the first time. I reckon that the work by sound wizard Simon Hayes, and his colleagues, Andy Nelson, Jack Dolman, John Marquis and Nancy Nugent Title, helped enormously.

Chu and his artists have breathed life into it. Even more so for Wicked: For Good. It’s how I felt when I saw The Godfather: Part Two. That was a masterpiece too.