You don’t have to be a fan of musicals to know about the Wicked film franchise—it’s been everywhere since the first film launched last year, and that’s exactly how director Jon. M Chu wanted it.
At WIRED’s Big Interview event last week, senior culture editor Manisha Krishnan sat down with Chu to discuss what it takes to make a blockbuster during a moment of deep changes in the film industry. In today’s episode, we are taking a break from the week’s headlines and bringing you their conversation.
Articles mentioned in this episode:
- Jon M. Chu Says AI Couldn’t Have Made One of the Best Moments in ‘Wicked’
- For the Director of Wicked, There’s No Place Like Silicon Valley
You can follow Zoë Schiffer on Bluesky at @zoeschiffer and Manisha Krishnan on Bluesky at @manishakrishnan. Write to us at [email protected].
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Transcript
Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
Zoë Schiffer: Welcome to WIRED’s Uncanny Valley. I’m Zoë Schiffer, WIRED’s Director of Business and Industry. Today on the show, we want to share with you one of the best conversations that happened during our big interview event in San Francisco last week. Our senior culture editor, Manisha Krishnan sat down with Jon Chu, the director of Wicked, to discuss what made the film franchise such a success. Even if you’re not a fan of musicals, it’s a fascinating conversation about the power of viral marketing and how forward-looking filmmakers like Chu are trying to navigate the AI era without compromising their creative vision and their execution. Here’s that conversation.
Manisha Krishnan: Hi, everyone.
Jon Chu: Hey, everybody.
Manisha Krishnan: Jon, thank you so much for being here.
Jon Chu: Of course. Great to be.
Manisha Krishnan: Unless you’re a Luddite, which I doubt anyone here would be here if they were, you’ve probably heard of Jon and of course the wonderful world of Wicked. Wicked was the highest grossing adaptation of a Broadway musical in box office history. It was also nominated for an Oscar for Best Picture. Wicked: For Good, which is in theaters right now, opened number one at the global box office. Jon also directed the wildly successful phenomenon, Crazy Rich Asians, which I love. And you are slated to direct the upcoming Britney Spears biopic based on her memoir, The Woman in Me. So we have tons to talk about. Let’s dive in.
OK, you worked on Wicked for five years, and this moment right now is kind of the culmination of that. Are you relishing this? Are you feeling like you want to be done with Wicked? How is this moment going for you?
Jon Chu: Yeah. Well, one, it’s really great to be in the Bay. I’m a Bay Area kid. That’s right. I grew up in Los Altos. My parents have a Chinese restaurant there for 56 years, Chef Chu’s. So this is my home. This is good to be home. And I was built by the generosity of this place. The customers who would come into the restaurant would give my parents computers, video cards, this is in the mid ’90s, and software. Adobe would give me software with Russell Brown, all this stuff for this kid who was getting into movies. And so I feel great responsibility when I’m out in—went to LA to escape this place and now we’re all crashing together.
So when I started Wicked five plus years ago, I actually saw Wicked for the first time in the Curran Theatre here before it went on Broadway. And so The Wizard of Oz is the great American dream. It’s what my parents who immigrated to this country into the Bay dreamed of. And they started their business and they built this world for us. I’m one of five kids and I believed in this dream and I got to pursue it. So tackling Wicked, which is taking the great American fairy tale and then deconstructing it in a new way and picking up its pieces and trying to tell a new story through a new perspective, that has always been really important to me because that’s me, that’s how I grew up. And yes, I am exhausted after these five plus years. I’ve had three children since working on this movie. But how privileged are we to be exhausted by the dream that we begged from the universe for so many times? So I feel honored to honest.
Manisha Krishnan: Wicked is hugely successful, both critically and commercially. The press tours seem larger than life, the outfits, the brand collabs, the viral moments. It seems like it takes a lot more these days to sort of make a true box office hit. I mean, even Leo DiCaprio was working the podcast circuit to promote One Battle After Another.
Jon Chu: I know, it’s crazy.
Manisha Krishnan: So how key are sort of influencers, podcasters, platforms to getting butts into movie theaters?
Jon Chu: I mean, I don’t know what the data is, but obviously it’s a huge piece of the puzzle now. And I’ve watched that change even from Crazy Rich Asians to now. It’s such a different landscape. Do you go on late night talk shows, daytime talk shows, or you get on these podcasts and everything’s in 15 second, 20 second clips? And that seems to be what people want. Because I grew up in the Silicon Valley, technology has always been … It allowed me to do what I do. It gave me access before someone my age should have had access to it. And I learned a lot during that.
So my first movie, Step Up to the Streets was a sequel to a dance movie. But what I learned when I started that, this is in 2008, the first Step Up movie had this huge following on MySpace. And yes, I was on Friendster and all that stuff, but MySpace was the first time I entered a movie and they’re like, “Hey, you have to actually get onto MySpace and understand this audience because it’s more about International Box Office.” So the music was shared, the album was huge because it was a dance movie. And so I got to go on that space and as I was directing the movie, got to meet those people. I got to have auditions on MySpace and share our new music on MySpace and understand why they love it. So to me, it really influenced the making of the movie. And when we released it, we even took people that auditioned and put them in the movie, got them premier tickets. So it was this great relationship.
My movie after that was Justin Bieber: Never Say Never, which I got to be when Justin was 14 years old and he was just bursting onto the scene. I was on Twitter. Of course, he was dominating Twitter at that moment, but he was still just on the rise. And so I got to witness that. I got to witness him when he was like, “Hey, you’re going to direct this movie, but we have to introduce you to my audience.” I realized, “Oh, the story’s being told before the movie even begins, before you even start shooting.” And then after you’re done with the movie, you got to continue that story.
So for that, he brought me into his trailer and he’s like, “Let’s record something.” He’s like, “Hey everybody, this guy keeps following around. Who are you?” And it turns to me, I’m like, “Hey, I’m Jon. I’m going to be directing your movie and here we go.” And so I watched in real time my followers go up. I mean, it was like 10,000 every five minutes. I’ve never seen it like that. I recorded on my iPhone. It was insane. So I saw his power in that. And he kept me in so I became a character in his world for a moment in time as he was traveling.
And I just saw the power of that, getting to know, talking to his fans on TinyChat, telling them when we’re flying a helicopter over Madison Square Garden say, “Hey, if you’re going, everybody wear purple to the concert. Tell me your cross streets. I’m going to do fly-bys.” And then we get up there and we’re doing fly-bys from fans who’ve tweeted, and this is 2012, where their location is. Or saying, “Hey, you’re going to the movie this weekend, bring glow sticks. Oh, and tell the guy in the sound side of whatever theater you’re at, turn it to a seven because they always turn it to a four.” And theaters complained to us because all these kids were going to the projectionist demanding, “Turn it to a seven.” And that was enormously powerful.
And I think now it’s matured in different ways. It’s now just a part of the business. But Wicked is no different than that. Wicked, you have the Wizard of Oz fans, which is of a different generation. You have the Wicked book fans, which are of a different group, sort of, than the Wicked musical fans. And those are hardcore theater kid fans, which I’m a part of. And then you have movie people, and then you have musical people just in general, and then they’re all giving you input of who you hire, how you’re doing this movie. And so I tried to keep them in the loop of how we were doing. And then by now, it’s, “OK, we’re coming out. Let me present you to what we’ve done and hear these girls and what they’ve done.” And that’s been actually really fun and hard all at once, I guess.
Manisha Krishnan: Well, I mean, I am curious about the viral moments from the Wicked press tour because obviously Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo’s friendship has sparked a lot of conversation. They’ve been emotional in certain interviews together. This has even spawned parodies on TikTok. One thing I’m wondering is, what the hell did you do to them in this movie? No, I’m kidding. But is there something about this movie that really bonded you all? Where do you think that emotion’s coming from? And what do you make of the fixation on that and the virality of those moments, that scrutiny?
Jon Chu: Yeah. Imagine little me getting the call, “Hey, you get to do Wicked.” “Oh my gosh, OK.” And they announced me and everyone’s like, “That guy who did Step Up to the Streets? Fuck you.” That’s the energy coming at you. My mom’s like, “Don’t listen to them, honey.” I’m like, “I can’t stop listening to them.” So imagine that. Then you’re like, “Hey, we’re going to …” I’m looking at the material, I’m like, “You can’t do one movie. You have to do two movies because if you do one movie, you strip out all the things that’s not Wicked anymore. And I’m a Wicked fan. I want this to be the definitive Wicked, otherwise it’s not Wicked.” So you split the movie in two and studio’s like, “Jon, you announce it to the world.” So then I tweeted like, “Fuck you, Jon. Two movies? You money grabber.” So you’re getting that kind of energy on you.
And then everyone wants to be Elphaba and Galinda. Everyone’s sending you their videos of why they should be Elphaba and Galinda. Everyone’s sending you their favorite celebrities why they should be Elphaba and Galinda. And you’re just trying to make a great movie and that takes focus and clarity. And then you start doing auditions and then you start choosing who it’s going to be. And then you choose Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, which seems obvious now, but at the time everyone’s like, “Cynthia Erivo? What? I mean, she could sing the song, but how could she be this?” “Oh, Ariana Grande, that’s a money grab, the blah, blah, blah.”
I know the truth because I was there in the audition room. I saw how amazing that when you see Ariana Grande to do this role, you would be shocked because she’s opening up a new chapter to her life. I knew that. And I’m seeing Cynthia Erivo doing things, even though she’s known around the world, we were going to make her a global superstar because we were going to expose her to more people. And the way she sings Elphaba songs, even though we’ve heard it a hundred times, when she says, “Something has changed within me, something’s not the same,” that felt so resonant to me. This was during Covid lockdown when we were doing auditions, I was like, “That’s where we are in culture right now.” And so I had to choose that. And now everyone’s attacking me, attacking me. And all the Wizard of Oz, people are like, “You can’t do Wicked. What are you going to do with Dorothy? Blah, blah, blah.”
And then you’re in London and you’re together and you’re like, “People aren’t going to see this movie for three, maybe plus years.” So we have to make the best movie we can and all our careers on the line and knives are out and theater kids are tough and fans are tough. And by the way, everyone says cinema is dead. And by the way, they think movie musicals are dead. “Let’s start.” “Oh, and let’s spend so much money on two movies that if the first one doesn’t work, you’re literally screwed.” And then so we look at each other and we’re like, “We only have each other. We only have each other. I think I have some solutions, but we’re going to have to find this together.” You become very, very bonded. They’re my sisters. And if people think that’s cringey, then they’ve never made something with love and they’ve never made …
You know. You know how hard late nights, all night long, drawing pictures, trying to figure it out, having that fear just outside your door and continuing through that, that is hard stuff. And when you have a group that you’re like, “OK, block it all out. Let’s walk this yellow brick road together,” and you’re creating, you’re doing things and you’re taking risks and you’re playing, and I’m going to protect them because if I mess, I could kill their career too in the edit, in the mix. And so we’re doing this with so much passion. And then people haven’t even seen, and we do two movies at the same time. We shoot both. So we’ve seen the fun part of the story and the dark side of the story. We’ve seen them bond together, be together, and then we’ve seen their death and their rebirth as they leave each other.
So we’ve lived a lifetime with these people before anyone even knows when this movie is coming out. And then we drop the movie and we’re doing press tours. And we are so close together because we’ve been in this huddle. And they’re only seeing the first movie, which is fun and it’s heroic and it’s all these things, but we lived their death already. So we’re expressing those things. And it’s hard, I think, for people to fully understand that, the intensity of that. But I think because you know how intense it is to create anything of substantial effort, that is what it requires.
And we’re living in a time of so much cynicism and everyone having a microphone to cut and blame. And so it’s an interesting role as a director, as a storyteller. What does the audience want from me? Do they just want the project out there? Or are they begging and itching at all the behind the scenes stuff? And it’s an interesting balance I’m still trying to find. Chris Nolan just does his movie and does his thing, and whether that can sustain itself, or James Cameron’s getting out there and doing podcasts now too. Quentin Tarantino’s getting on that microphone. So how much do we want to hear from the filmmaker or do I love the work speaking for itself? But there is a piece of me that also needs to speak about the work itself so people understand what’s been going into this. And so I think that that’s the dance that we’re doing and-
Manisha Krishnan: That was a good answer.
Jon Chu: Sorry, that’s a long thing. Sorry.
Manisha Krishnan: That was better than what I thought you were going to tell me.
Jon Chu: But that’s what I struggle with every day. I am a person of the internet. I get information. I feed off of it. I love knowing that it’s my meta universe over here. And now I have kids and I have my also real universe here. And so that separation when you have kids, at least that I’m finding, I have five kids now … Yeah, yeah. It’s the best though, it’s the best. I have an eight-year-old, six-year-old, four-year-old, two-year-old, and one-year-old. And some say, “wow, that’s so exhausting.” But it actually spurs creativity. If you have kids, especially young kids, you know, it makes you alive. So I struggle with how much to engage. I want to engage with that world because I feel like it exists and you have to engage with it if you want to help guide it in some way and you want to be the defender of good and kindness.
Manisha Krishnan: One thing I’m wondering about, because you grew up in Silicon Valley, so obviously like not scared of tech. There’s a lot of sort of contention over using AI in the creative process. Guillermo del Toro said he would rather die before he uses it. To what extent do you think it could be useful for your filmmaking process?
Jon Chu: Well, I mean, I think that AI is such a general term. It’s hard to have arguments about AI because you’re like, what are you talking about AI? Are you talking about generative AI? Are you talking about AI, the technology of … Is auto correct a type of AI?
Manisha Krishnan: Yeah, that’s fair.
Jon Chu: Is the algorithm AI? Yeah, I mean, to me, the marketing term of AI is just so confusing when I have a conversation about it. If we’re talking about AI as a technology of information and organization and even visual organization or understanding, to me, that’s so fascinating. And I love that. And Wicked was sort of pre AI because we were already way down the road, but I like to play with AI because I want to understand it. I’m not scared of technology, like you said. I think humans choose what we value and we’re going to choose the thing that is not the easiest thing ultimately. It may be great to see at first. When DSLRs came out and you’re like, “Wow, that looks like a real camera.” And suddenly everyone’s a photographer. And then you see all these pictures and they all look the same and you’re like, “Oh, what it looks like isn’t actually what a real photographer is. What does it mean? What are you trying to say?” And so our values shift.
So when it comes to generative AI, I think there was an original sin that it’s hard for people to get over, this mining of images and stories that we never agreed on and the rights holders never stepped that legal game up to defend it. And so it feels like everyone’s like, “Hey, we’re past that point, guys. We’re sorry about that. We know you had those terms that everybody clicked on and we mined those and sorry, but this technology’s more important than that. ” So I think that as an artist, that’s a hard thing to get over. But I think … I can’t say we have to get over it, but I will say that things are moving forward. So I think that’s one part of an argument.
Then the other part of the argument is this, that generative AI can be helpful too, can be a tool in the same way that a pencil, anything from our head to become physicalized, that process as we know technology, anything that can bridge that process is beautiful. So I think we’re trying to figure out how to work this pencil, how to ride this beast a little bit, and we’re in that zone. I don’t know. I find it fascinating. I think that the audience, however, when it’s human made, we built these sets, we have improv moments… I know what it’s like, I know you know what it’s like when you’re in a committee coming up with the plan, you’re writing the script, even doing the storyboards and you’re making the thing, if it turns out like that, it’s not good enough.
The movie comes alive when we’ve done all that work and then we get on that set and you have 100 people and it’s suddenly raining and you’re like, “All right, we got to make this work. How does this work?” And then you’re using your human instincts to say, “OK, it is raining and she’s getting wet and she’s crying. And so the camera has to be closer because we don’t have big enough umbrellas. So we’re going to get closer to her.” And suddenly it feels like you’re there and it’s unexplainable. And if I wrote that down in the script, everyone would say, “You can’t do it, you can’t afford it. And it’s crazy.” But it’s happening now and then it becomes iconic.
And I’ve had that plenty of times in making a movie, even when Elphaba is getting her cape on in movie one and she winks. If I wrote that in the script, people would have laughed at it. She would have said, “Hell no, I’m not winking.” But she did that in the moment and now it becomes an image that lasts forever. And I think that’s what makes cinema beautiful. I think that that’s what makes art beautiful. And I think we value that.
Manisha Krishnan: OK. So it sounds like you’re potentially open. You’re not closing the door on working with AI basically?
Jon Chu: I don’t know.
Manisha Krishnan: OK. That’s fair. I do want to talk a little bit about Crazy Rich Asians because I love that movie, but also I sort of wonder, did you have concerns about being typecast for doing Asian projects? That movie meant so much for representation. Did you also feel a lot of responsibility when you undertook that project?
Jon Chu: Yeah. I mean, there’s a reason why I did it because I was so scared of talking about being an Asian American. Because one, as soon as you sort of label yourself, “Oh, you’re the Asian American director,” and I feel like, “Oh, they’re just going to just, ‘Send him all the Asian scripts.'” And I was scared of that. I just wanted to be seen as a director and also I don’t have all the answers about my cultural identity crisis.
And so at that moment, in whatever year it was, I was doing Now You See Me 2. I’d had a decade of making movies and I was working with these big actors, Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, Mark Ruffalo, Woody Harrelson. And I realized I was like, “Oh, I can hang with these people. Oh, I think I deserve to be here now after a decade of doing it.” And then I looked around and I was like, “Oh, anyone can make this movie.” And I had to go back to my student self of like, “Well, what do I want to say with this thing that I now know how to utilize?”
And it was about my cultural identity crisis, something that being in the Chef Chu’s, at the restaurant, I thought about a lot. My parents, when I would see people come in and they treat servers however you want to treat them, but they would treat my parents poorly, sometimes, not all the customers, but just sometimes I’d see it. And I get really angry at my dad like, “Kick them out, dude. What are you doing?” And my parents sat me down and they said, “Listen, we are ambassadors here. We are the first Chinese family maybe this family has ever seen. And so they think we’re a certain way and they treat us a certain way. But one, we’re taking their money …”
Manisha Krishnan: That’s so Asian. As a fellow Asian, I can say that.
Jon Chu: “And two, we’re not just filling their bellies, we’re filling their hearts. So that next time they go see another Asian family, maybe they’ll double think what that initial instinct is.” And he’s like, “That’s what you represent when you go out into that world.” So I think that has carried with me. And Crazy Rich Asians, even though it’s a romantic comedy, it’s an Asian American woman going to Asia for the first time. And for me, I was like, “I know what that feels like,” going to Taiwan for the first time to Hong Kong for the first time and feeling like, “Oh, this feels different than where I was from. But is this what going to a homeland feels like?” And then they call you gweilo, which is like “foreign devil” essentially. And you’re like, “Oh, I’m not a part of this either.” So if I’m not a part of this and I’m not a part of that, I know that’s like a tired argument, but it’s true, in the identity that I don’t know where I fit.
So this movie helped me find how I fit and to find Asian actors from all around the world, not just Asian American, that were funny, that were beautiful, that were elegant, that were dramatic, that were messy, that were raw and rude, all the things. And for us to make fun of our own families in our own way and make it aspirational, that the studios had to spend 100 million … Or it wasn’t $100 million, but tens of millions of dollars to say, “Go see this movie, go pay money and sit in the dark and just listen to them because they’re beautiful and aspirational and funny,” the way they treat any movie star. To me, that was very empowering. But I thought no one would go see the movie. But I was like, “That’s what we have to do.” And when we did it and then people showed up and it wasn’t just Asian people, it was people bringing their cousin and their grandparents and their neighbor, to me, I saw the power of cinema. That to me was like, “Oh, this is a very sacred space we need to protect.”
Manisha Krishnan: You just signed a three-year deal with Paramount Skydance. Their CEO, David Ellison, has sort of committed to doing away with DEI initiatives, and that’s been a trend in Hollywood that we’ve seen over the year. Does that worry you at all in terms of the type of films that you’ll be able to make? And where do you think we’re at with representation in light of this DEI crackdown?
Jon Chu: Yeah, I mean, of course. I feel like my job as a storyteller is to get in there and make things facts. And maybe that’s not my job to go debate the thing and go tweet the thing. I’m on the ground and I have to get a project made and I have to get it into theater so people can pay money, sit in the dark and see the world through a new person’s perspective. I have to be so laser focused on that. I can read all this stuff, I can feel all the things, but I have to be really laser—because that’s where I’m most effective.
So if I’m making Wicked, I’m going to cast Cynthia Erivo, a woman of color playing Elphaba, for the first time playing a green girl, which is crazy. And when she says those words, it means things different and she’s bringing her own wounds to it. I’m going to prove that. I don’t have to debate anybody about that. I’m going to put Michelle Yeoh as Madame Morrible. I don’t have to prove that. I’m going to put the first wheelchair user as Nessarose, the first one. I’m not going to debate that, tweet it. I’m just going to do it.
I’m going to put a whole cast of Latino, amazing actors, singers, dancers in the streets of Washington Heights. And I’m going to show that that bodega, just like my Chinese restaurant, has bigger dreams and is as wonderful and beautiful and delightful as any Hollywood classic musical has ever shown. They can walk on the walls when you’re dreaming in your apartment. That’s to me, we’re just going to do it. And in Crazy Rich Asians, we’re going to show that it’s not about a list of like checking off people of what you have to have on a list. Those arguments are for other people, but my job is to just do it and say, “Hey, look how much money you guys made. Should you make more of these?” Great, let’s do that.
I think I can get caught up in those arguments all day long. I know David, this is our hometown. We went to film school together. My job is to just show and prove. And the thing about the box office, which I love about movie theaters, is that reviewers can say whatever they want, people in a conference room can say whatever they want, business affairs can say whatever the fuck they want. But when you put it in a movie theater, if it makes money, if it creates a cultural phenomenon, it becomes a fact, then there’s nothing you can say about it. There’s no more argument. And I just think that that’s my role. And wherever that is, whatever resource I get to make things facts that I know are true, let’s go.
Manisha Krishnan: That is the perfect way to end this conversation. Jon, thank you so much. You killed it.
Zoë Schiffer: That’s our show for today. Make sure to check out Thursday’s episode of Uncanny Valley, which features a live conversation with Lisa Su, the CEO of the famed chip maker, AMD. Adriana Tapia and Mark Leyda produced this episode. Amar Lal at Macro Sound mixed this episode. Kate Osborn is our executive producer and Katie Drummond is WIRED’s global editorial director.