Lin-Manuel Miranda says Hamilton movie would need “a real director with vision”

Photo credit: Warner Bros.

Lin-Manuel Miranda has turned his eye from the stage to the silver screen, but In the Heights isn’t his first foray into musical movies, having already starred as the lamplighter in Disney’s Mary Poppins Returns.

Likewise, his most famous work Hamilton was filmed and edited into a movie adaptation that was released early on Disney+ – a boon to many during the pandemic. But that’s a filmed version of a stage play, not a movie itself.

Having now seen In the Heights, we had to ask Miranda if this true Hollywood treatment is something he’d consider giving Hamilton.

Photo credit: Disney

“We were able to make this adaptation with a good deal of distance from the original thing,” he said.

“I have no distance from Hamilton. It’s still happening to me in ways large and small. So it would take a real director with vision to do something that would set it apart from the stage production.

“I guess that’s throwing down a gauntlet, but I haven’t heard the pitch yet!”

Having a cinematic vision is key to adapting, as In the Heights’ book writer and screenplay writer Quiara Alegría Hudes knows, and it’s not always easy.

“I knew the goal was always to film on location, so there’s going to be something that does have a real sense of reality to it,” she said. “The scene in the car dispatch where Benny sings ‘Benny’s Dispatch’ – that’s an actual dispatch.

Photo credit: Macall Polay – Warner Bros.

“So how do you go from there – from this very grounded and kind of material reality to singing in the streets, right? How do you make those pivots? That was one of those ones that I thought of early on as my biggest conceptual question.

“And the way I came up to solve that was to add the new framing device – telling a story. [Usnavi] was saying, ‘This was my block from my point of view and the way I saw it, the way I lived it, the streets were made of music.’ And so we know he’s embellishing in a way that’s still really truthful to his experience.”

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Miranda played Usnavi in the stage version, and it isn’t uncommon for musical stars to play their roles for film, but it doesn’t always go over well. Ben Platt recently caught flak for playing the high school protagonist of his musical Dear Evan Hansen despite being a decade too old.

Photo credit: Macall Polay – Warner Bros.

Luckily, Miranda knew better. “Obviously, I knew I had aged out of the role by 2014, 2015, and what was thrilling was to see that the answer to who should play Usnavi was so close to home – it was someone who’d played my best friend and my son and died in my arms nightly for a year [in Hamilton].

“I saw a production of In the Heights at the Kennedy Centre, and again this is where luck comes into it – Anthony [Ramos] ended up playing Usnavi ’cause another actor got injured. He was a last-minute fill-in because he already knew the role. And watching him play Usnavi, I had this weird double vision of, ‘Oh, that’s what we wrote Usnavi for. It was for this guy.”

Miranda recalls: “There’s one number in the movie called ‘Carnaval’ where I’m playing the Piragua Guy and I’m up on a fire escape, while Anthony is dancing his ass off and rapping his ass off, and I just felt nothing but relief getting to watch it from my perch. He’s working a lot harder than I am!”

In the Heights is out now in cinemas and on HBO Max in the US, and opens in UK cinemas on June 18.

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