Sunday Sitdown with Willie Geist - Lin-Manuel Miranda

Episode Date: November 21, 2021

In 2008, Lin-Manuel Miranda read Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton while on vacation and began envisioning something no one else could have seen – a hip-hop musical about America’s Founding Fathers. In this week’s Sunday Sitdown, Willie Geist gets together with the Tony, Emmy and Pulitzer-winning star to talk about creating the Broadway phenomenon Hamilton and his latest act as a film director.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hey guys, Willie Geist here with another episode of the Sunday Sit Down podcast. My thanks as always for clicking and listening along. I am very especially excited to bring you this interview today. My conversation with the great Lynn Manuel Miranda. He is, of course, the creator and star of the Broadway phenomenon Hamilton. It's something he dreamed up while he was on vacation in 2008 reading a biography of Alexander Hamilton when he saw something. Perhaps no one else on Earth could have seen, which is a hip-hop musical about the founding fathers, and the rest is history. Lynn is the director of a new film called Tick-Tick Boom. It tells the story of Jonathan Larson, another guy kind of like Lin-Manuel Miranda, who was a grinder, who loved Broadway and was writing

his own shows, and eventually composed and wrote Rent, another big Broadway phenomenon. Now, Jonathan Larson did not live to see the success of Rent, and that's partly what this movie is about Andrew Garfield stars as Jonathan Larson. A lot of people talking about awards for this film, and this is the first time that Lynn has ever directed a feature movie. So it could be some good things coming for him here. He's won Tonys. He's won Emmys.

He's won the Pulitzer Prize for Hamilton. Could he add an Oscar? We will see. The New York City native, his first big hit was In the Heights. Perhaps you saw the movie that was out this year. Before that, it was a musical that also won four Tony Awards, including Best Musical well before Hamilton. So Lynn Manuel Miranda has been at it for a long time.

He's been successful for a long time, even before most of us knew about him in the way we do now when Hamilton came along. So sit back, relax, enjoy a great conversation with one of the sharpest minds out there right now. The great Lin-Manuel Miranda right now on the Sunday Sit Down podcast. Lynn, great to see. Good to see you. Thanks for doing this. It's my pleasure.

I told you I just finished tick, tick, boom. and I have days worth of questions. I'll try to condense it for you a little bit. I think we should first just start talking about Jonathan Larson and this story, the basis for it. People know Rent. They may not know the story of Jonathan Larson. So where do we pick up his story with Tick-Tick-Bomb

and why did you view it as something that you wanted to dive into? Yeah. Well, just the existence of Tick-Tick-Bomb is really curious thing. Not a lot of people write their own autobiographies at age 29. But Jonathan Larson was an aspiring. composer lyricist, he spent his 20s, the 80s, trying to get this musical, this dystopian sci-fi musical called Superbia off the ground. He had applied for the rights to 1984. He couldn't get him for the Orwell estate. He made his own dystopia. And despite grants and despite the mentorship

of Stephen Sondheim and folks really in the know in the theater, no one wanted to make this thing. And his way of processing that loss and the time he'd spent writing this thing no one would ever see was to write a musical about it. He was, it's 89, 90. It's the time of Eric Bogosian and John Leguizum was starting to do off-Broadway, one-man shows. And he goes, you can't tell me a one-man show is too expensive to produce. So he writes a show called Tick-Tick-Bomb about a young singer,

songwriter, composer, turning 30 and questioning everything. And it's a snapshot of him as a young man and a young artist. It's a snapshot of the AIDS crisis unfolding at that time and the beginning of losing a generation of talent. And it's also about doubling down on your passion, even when the world is telling you know, as it was very clearly telling him no. And after his death, and the success, you know, he died tragically of an aortic dissection, which was an undiagnosed Marfan syndrome. and he died just before the first preview of Rent off-Broadway.

And Rent is so much about life, and it is so much about appreciating life while it's here that that thing took off like a rocket. And there was a posthumous off-Broadway production of the show. David Auburn turned it from a rock monologue into a three-person show. The great Scott Schwartz directed it at the Jane Street Theater. And I saw it at age 12.

in October of 2001. It was probably my third time into the city after September 11th. And I was questioning everything as everyone was in those really scary early days of being back in New York. And here's a note from Jonathan Larson being like, it's gonna be harder than you think.

And if you love it, it's worth it. It was like a sneak preview of what my 20s were gonna be. It felt like a personal messenger model to me. I read a quote from you that really struck me where you said, if they let me direct one movie, let it be this one. You could do anything you want at this point.

They'd probably let you do the next Star Wars movie. If you said you wanted to do it, what was it about this story that you said, I have to do this? Well, first of all, that's optimistic about the state of Hollywood that you think I could just do anything. Because honestly, what Hollywood is best at is asking you to repeat the things that were successful before. Like when Hamilton happened, I got every history book thrown at my head. like, what about this era of history? What about this former president? And it's, I say that to give a lot of credit to Julie O, who was my producer, who went and got

the film rights to Tick, tick boom, and said, do you think you might want to direct this? And I said, it's the only, I'm the only person you can choose. Your search is over. Just because it had been living in my heart for so long. And it's the show that clarified my resolve. I remember saying to myself, I will do this. this even if the world doesn't notice. Like, I am okay with being, for many years I was, a substitute teacher who writes songs at night. And it doesn't matter if the world is looking or not. And I know

that there's another timeline where no one sees in the heights. I never write Hamilton. And I'm still teaching at my old high school and writing songs at night because that's what I'm meant to be doing. So I just, it just lived in my, I understood Jonathan's struggle. I knew a lot about it. And I also, know know a little bit about what it is to be a songwriter for theater where the gulf between what's in your head and anyone's seeing it so wide. It's not like we're novelists and we can self-publish. We need other people to realize the thing that's in our head. And it's an enormous pressure. It's like feeling pregnant and thinking maybe it will never happen. Like this baby will just be inside me forever.

And it's, yeah, it's really, it's really, I understood something about that. I can't imagine what it must be like to have this guy and Jonathan Larson, who in some ways for you was a North Star. Yeah. If he could keep going, chasing it, then I will do it too. To now be in a position to be the person to tell his story, to a wider audience. That must feel incredibly gratifying and in some ways surreal if you look back at that 21-year-old sitting in that theater in October of 2001. Yeah, and what I knew, because I was lucky enough to perform in Tick-Tick Boom the summer before Hamilton started, was that there's a community of friends and family of Jonathan who really keep his memory alive,

beginning with Julie Larson, his sister and the Larson estate, and his friends and loved ones who were all still around. And they were all at my five-performance version of Tick-Tick-Bomb, because I think that show represents something pure. You know, rent is complicated. Rent is inextricably bound up in his untimely passing, and his family had to make a lot of impossible decisions without him, and his collaborators had to make a lot of impossible decisions without him.

But Tick-Tick-Bomb is like Johnny's back for two hours whenever that show is performed. And so, you know, our research was talking to his friends and family, and no one wanted to make the St. Jonathan movie. They're like, he could be a pain in the ass, and he could be impatient, and he could have his blinders on when it came to his work. But the other thing we got that was so joyous was his best friend, Matt O'Grady, to whom he dedicated the show and is the basis for the character of Michael, Robin DeHesu's role, was like he somehow, even when he had no money and no time,

made everything a sense of occasion. You know, he would have these Christmas parties where, you know, he would sell records and books to be able to afford the food, and then he would print out a program that just said what everyone, accomplished that year. Everyone who was invited to the party accomplished that year. He had this attention to detail and love for the people that

mattered in his life. And even though he didn't always have money, he always found a way to make everyone feel sort of included. And we really tried to pepper that in as well. You caught that. There's a great moment where he's having a party and you cut to, they're leading against someone goes, you know he can't afford this, right? He doesn't care. Yeah, yeah, he's going to go sell some books

and sell some blood and then he'll have the party for his girlfriend. He'll make it happen. I think the reason this movie is going to resonate with so many people is not just because it reflects your story, but it reflects everyone's story in some way. Not that they're a playwriter that they dream of writing the great musical, but they've been in a position like he was, like you were, where you're like, I think I'm good at this. I'm working really hard at it and no one's noticing. How do I get over that wall? I think, and I think that, yeah, because to me this is, again, it's not the biopic where you see someone writing their masterpiece. This is a movie about someone who,

who spent 10 years making something no one wanted to see. And no one has seen. And I think we've all been in that position of, I've been putting everything, all of my eggs into this basket, and nothing's happening. And, like, what do I do from here? What are the other roads besides the thing I always wanted to do?

And we all have many moments like that through our lives. And so I just, I hope this movie hits people the way it hit me, the story hit me when I was 21 years old, where it was just like it clarified my resolve. And we all have that in us. We all have some version of that story. Yeah, absolutely. It's not going to happen.

Maybe I should go do this. Maybe I should go do that. And, you know, it was important for us too because, you know, Jonathan's version is very much from his perspective to, like, understand that there are great many roads to happiness in this life. Most of us aren't lucky enough to do what we love for a living. Most of us find a way to carve out the space for that so that we still have a lovely and fulfilling life. And that's, I think, important. But, you know, his girlfriend is a dancer. Like,

who hears a ticking clock louder than a dancer when your body is your instrument? And she's right. You don't have to be in New York to have made it. You know, that's a myth we tell ourselves. So it was really important to me to give greater balance to Mike, the characters of Michael and Suisse. It's not wrong to want health insurance. Right. Do you know what I mean? Like, and if you can use your creativity in in another lane and that fulfills you like there's there's a great many ways to live um and so i i think to have those as plausible roads for jonathan um i think makes the movie richer um and more textured there's the parallels to your own story are almost everywhere including this idea of writing your way out yeah you know which you obviously reflected in hamilton and you did yourself and

believing having that trust that if i keep writing if i keep writing i am going to get out what were those for you in your life, Lynn, where you were like, maybe this isn't going to happen. Maybe this in the heights that I've been working on since college isn't going to get made. Were there moments where you said, okay, I'm going to go work at the advertising firm like we see in the movie or do something else? Yeah, sure. I mean, well, it's a pretty short line from seeing Rent at 17 to starting to write in the Heights at 19, my sophomore year. Because the things that Jonathan did with Rent are all things I believed in. I believe musical theater should be in communication with pop music and popular culture.

I believe in bringing the kinds of music you love to musical theater as opposed to it being considered a genre unto itself. It's incorporated jazz. It's incorporated rock. It's incorporated hip-hop. Good storytelling is good storytelling. And Rent advanced that thesis. And my early attempts at writing musicals were all Larson knockoffs.

I was trying to sound like him. And then in the Heights was the first time I tried to start it to sound like myself. Because I did what Jonathan did. I brought in the Latin music I grew up with, the hip-hop music I grew up with into my work. And so, you know, within the heights, it was a six-year, it was my 20s. And the advantage I had, or I guess the head start I had,

was that I found amazing collaborators that made my work better sooner. Like I just, I think Tommy Kale is the only difference between me and Jonathan Larson because I found someone, who was actually like, it doesn't matter if it gets to a stage if it's not right. And Tommy, at every stage of our journey, and I had the good fortune to meet him the week after I graduated college, was like, that producer has a terrible idea.

Like, he was the one who taught me to say no. I was willing to say yes to anyone who would put my show on. And Tommy was like, all we have to do is meet every Friday and make the best show we can. And there was a moment in that journey where a very smart producer who I respect a lot was just sort of musing about me and was like, I think maybe you're a book and lyrics guy. I don't think you're the composer ultimately. Again, he's just musing because it's very rare for someone to do all three things. And I didn't write for six months. Because of that.

Because of that comment. Because this is someone I really respected. And he's just spitballing, but I took it to heart. and it wasn't until I got the names of some other composers and had my hand at the phone to maybe call one of them when I, like, my gut just started screaming like, nope, I'm the composer of the, if I don't know how to write this,

I don't know how to write anything. But it also clarified for me, I would love to work with another playwright on this. And that's when we started, and that's when I met Kiara. Like, that's when we started the search for who is going to work with me on in the Heights. And again, that clarifying question,

I lost six months of writing. through pure self-doubt. But I also realized, I'm happy to work with this with someone else. And then, you know, one of my closest friends and collaborators, Kiara came as a result of that sort of gut check. The difference, obviously, between your story and Jonathan's,

is you've got to see the success of this thing you'd given your life to in the Heights. And he didn't get to see what Rent became. Can you explain for people why Rent was so revolutionary? I mean, he died on the eve of the, Right, the first preview on off-Broadway. Yeah. Can you explain why you touched on a little bit?

Sure. That it reflects pop culture and that it was just different from the shows. You and I grew up going to see Phantom and Les Mis, which we loved and live where they live as legendary shows. But this was different. Yeah, yeah. I saw it for my 17th birthday. My high school girlfriend, Meredith Somerville, took me to the last row of the mezzanine

of the Niederlander Theater, and I'll always be in her debt for that. And it was the most contemporary feeling show I'd ever seen. It took place in New York right now. You know, by the time we're teenagers, a chorus line is a period piece. West Side Story is a period piece. Those were contemporary New York stories, but not by the time I'm a teenager. It incorporated pop music and rock music and techno and it just sounded like today. And it was the most diverse cast I'd ever seen on Broadway.

that beautiful, like, mosaic of humanity that comes downstage for seasons of love at the top of Act 2. It made me feel like I could have it. I mean, it's echoed exactly in the opening line of Hamilton, right? When they're all singing time. And it just made me feel like I could have a place up here one day. And all I wanted to do when I was a kid was make movies and write songs. And the main characters of that show are a filmmaker and a songwriter. And I really was a kid who, in high school,

I would carry around a camcorder, and I would film my friends, because that was easier for me than, like, socializing. That part was harder for me. If I was doing a play or we were making something, I was good.

But, like, I don't know how to just hang out on a weekend. I didn't, then, I don't now. And so there's that incredible moment in Act 2 where Mark and Roger are having a fight, and Roger sings, you pretend to create and observe,

but you really detach from feeling alive. and he's calling him out for always having a camera in his hand. And I was like, whoa. I didn't ask to be so personally attacked by this show. But it just, it felt like he was writing about his community. And it was a community trying to stay alive during the AIDS epidemic and trying to hang on to the village they knew in the face of gentrification.

And it was the show that gave me permission to write a musical because it felt like he was writing about his friends. And I was like, oh, I could write one one day. And no other musical made me feel like that. I admired them and I loved being in the school play, but they always just felt like they were in some other time and some other place. And this felt like here and now and accessible. And opened a door, I guess, to In The Heights.

I can make a show about where I live. It's a very short walk. It's just 200 blocks up town. And to, yeah, you know, and then like, you know, two years later, I'm writing, you know, about my neighborhood and the challenges it's facing and bringing in the music that I know and advancing that thesis Jonathan Larson had that, like, musical theater should be in touch with the rest of the world. That was something he felt really passionately about and in conversation with the world.

And so, yeah, I mean, it's, and, you know, you mentioned Hamilton earlier. A lot of the DNA of Hamilton of, like, I have to write as fast as I can because I'm aware of this ticking clock. That DNA goes back to my experience of Jonathan Larson's work in Tick, Tick, Boom. Like, there's a lot of my experience of Jonathan Larson's work and life that went into the creating of that character. Sometimes, I hear it implicitly, it's sometimes explicitly in the Hamilton remix album.

Yeah. Right? Oh, yeah. He's in there. I even made a reference to Jonathan Larson. I said running out of time like I'm Jonathan Larson's rent check. Exactly.

That's the line I was thinking of. Speaking of Jonathan Larson and finding somebody to fill those shoes, Andrew Garfield is extraordinary in this. You know and I know that he's great out here on Broadway, but I think the public sees Spider-Man maybe. 100%. So what-

They see Spider-Man. like, is he in it? Is he in it? Tell us he's in it. Please. What did you see in him that you thought he's the guy? Yeah. Well, I knew I needed a theater beast. I knew that you can't just like cast a movie star as Jonathan Larson because Jonathan Larson lived and breathed the theater. And in my conception of the movie, he would be playing piano and singing for half the film. And so I needed someone who could articulate the smaller heartbreaking moments of John Jonathan's life, you know, in a close-up in a camera, and someone who could play to the rafters. This is my one-man show.

Please produce my work, which is that energy that Jonathan's giving off in waves when you see footage of him on VHS. And I was lucky enough to see Andrew Garfield play prior in Angels in America, Tony Kushner's masterpiece, the National in London before it came to Broadway. And, you know, it's a six and a half, seven-hour show. It's in two parts. You see the matinee. You eat dinner.

C, part two. I did it. And I mean, to say those lines in a monotone for that long is a feat of endurance. But Andrew did the whole thing with his chest cracked open. He was just this raw, shattering nerve on stage. And he got to do all the things. I feel like he accesses his joy and his rage and just like 600 colors that I'd never seen before.

And I just left. I remember just taking the cab home being like, that guy can. can do anything. Like, I can do anything. And, and he, you know, he became Jonathan Larson in my head in that moment. And was Tick-Tick on the radar at that point? And he said, maybe he's the guy. Yeah. I had begun talking to Julie about making the movie and I was just daydreaming about who it could be. And he got the part. Does he remind you in any way of Jonathan based on what you know about Jonathan Larson? Well, they're both incredibly deep thinkers about their craft. And they think about why they do, what they do so intensely. And, you know,

know, I think that, man, he had not, he was not familiar with Jonathan's story when we first sat down to talk about it. But once he was in, he was all the way in. To the point where we'd be on set and we'd be having discussions, like always bleeding with like, what would Jonathan do and what would Jonathan want? And he got such a good, he had such a good gut check of like, this doesn't feel right. And I was like, all right, like, what's Jonathan telling us to do? Like, I really treated him as like my divining rod for Jonathan's spirit, because, he went just as far in on the research and talking to friends and family and reading what Jonathan wrote. And it really, and it's funny. Like, people think actors are like good pretenders, but

actually the opposite is true. They're terrible liars. Like, Andrew Garfield's maybe the worst liar I've ever seen in my life. And because it's, it's all about it feeling real. It's about feeling your way to honesty. And so I really used, like, Andrew's gut, like, to guide every choice that we made. And so, you know, he was an incredible asset. And he can sing. And he can really sing.

He can really sing. As soon as he told me, you know, it's something I have not done, but it's a thing I've always wanted to explore. I knew we were good. Because I knew he would go all the way in on doing what he needed to do.

And I just needed to give him the resources and the time to get where he needed to get. And we had about a year and a half between that first conversation and really starting to pick up steam with the project. So it was, you know, I wasn't worried. I really weirdly wasn't worried.

He's great. He's really good. Because there's no bad habits. It wasn't like someone like who's like, I think I can sing. It was like, you think you can. Like you haven't been singing wrong for 30 some odd years. He was someone who had never sung. So it was like this kind of bright new instrument to play with.

I think I can sing as a red flag. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It is. Hey, guys. Thanks for listening to the Sunday Sit Down podcast.

Stick around to hear more from Lynn Manuel Miranda. right after the break. Welcome back to the Sunday Sit Down podcast. Now more of my conversation with Lynn Manuel Miranda. As you look back on your own story pre-Johnathan Larson, when did you start to discover that you maybe had a talent or at least a passion for making music, writing songs, performance? What was that moment?

Well, I was a film baby first. So my dad had an early camcorder and I was making movies since I was seven years old. And in the summers, my grandfather owned a video store in Puerto Rico called Miranda Video. And he would lend me, he was a bank manager at the local town bank.

And he would lend me the camcorder that they used for surveillance footage that was mounted up in the corner. And I would film movies. And you can see, I have old stop motion videos of G.I. Joe's hitting each other. And in between them,

you see footage of people online at the bank. But again, like, it was an amazing, there were amazing summers. I would just watch any movie that I felt like taking home. And some of them very age inappropriate. But I just watched anything and everything. And then was like making little movies just sort of at my grandparents' house. And so that was my first love.

And then I fell in love with theater because of my elementary school music teacher, Barbara Ames, and our shop teacher, Robert Sherman. They would always direct the sixth grade play. And, you know, the whole school sees the sixth grade play. So by the time you're in fifth grade, you're like, what are we going to do for our sixth grade play? For our sixth grade play, we did previous, we did like 20-minute versions of the previous six years for the productions. So it was this four-hour. I shudder as a parent to think four-hour like medley where I got to play a farmer in Oklahoma, a son in Fiddler,

Bernard and West Side Story, Captain Hook, and Adapurl backup in The Whiz, and then the most important, Conrad Birdie and Bye Bye Birdie. And when you play Conrad Birdie and you're 12 and you're three feet tall, and every time you sing,

everyone is supposed to faint and gasp, Conrad! I was like, I'm doing this for the rest of my life. Like, there was no other choice. And so I really sort of fell in love with school theater as a result and just started auditioning for the school play. and then graduated to directing the school play

because it was all student run at Hunter High School. And yeah, that was my path. But I always wanted to do both things. So I've sort of come a long way to come back around to my first love of stealing my grandpa's bank camcorder. That's incredible. That's incredible. I even know those came off the ceiling.

Yeah. Yeah, it wasn't the smaller ones that they have now. It was the like, take out the cassette. Yeah, and by the way, working at Hunter with the famed director Chris Hayes. doing some of the work my colleague. Yes. Chris Hayes was Zach in our chorus line,

which I assistant directed. That means he's the director in the back, shouting in direction. It came very naturally to him. And then he directed my first musical, which was called Nightmare in D major. And it was, I mean, it's total Larson, knockoff. Like, I had not found my voice yet,

but he did a great job. And he says he can still hum all the tunes, Chris says. I know, if you ask them, he can hum all, knows all the music still. Yeah. I think also an important part of your story that leads you to In The Heights and Hamilton as well is music, hip hop of that time. Yeah.

We were both late 80s, early 90s, fans of everything that was happening. And man, for me, who grew up on that, to sit in that theater and listen to Hamilton to hear all those sometimes obscure references to people that I heard on video music box after school. It was amazing. So how important was that education and hip hop to the style that you created for your shows? Sure. Well, listen, I'm a little younger than hip hop itself, and I grew up one neighborhood's out of the Bronx. And, you know, as you know, like having a cooler, older sibling is always going to be an advantage in terms of your taste. So I remember stealing her De La Sol CDs and her Ice Cube cassettes and Tribe Called Quest. You know, everyone thinks the music they listen to when they were a teenager is the best, but we're right.

because I think there was so much diversity in the genre of hip hop right at that time. It was like you had PM Dawn next to Grave Diggers, next to Tribe Called Quest, next to, you know, Dre and Snoop.

It was like next to Arrested Development. Like all that early 90s stew was like when I was at Nobody Beats the Whiz buying Cassette's not. And so it's all in there. And it was even fun. I mean, so yes, Hamilton has references to Mob Deep

and Biggie and Jay-Z. But even in Tick-Tick-Bomb, one of the amazing opportunities was that Jonathan Larson wrote this rap song in his original monologue called Play Game. And it's all about how deeply ambivalent he is about the state of Broadway. And when he performs it, you know,

it's just like a drum beat and he's got a sideways pink hat. But, you know, again, since our thesis in the movie is like, it's the world in Jonathan's mind, I was able to cast Black Thought to sing that song who makes it sound way cooler than it has any right to sound

and I was able to make a music video circa 1990. Yeah, through that filter. Yeah, so it's all sort of, I wanted it to look like it was on the box. Or, you know, VH1 or YOMTV raps. And that was like, it was so much fun to film that, I think on day five,

Tariq, who was the star of the number was like, I mean, this is great, Lynn, but like this song is a minute and 30 seconds Why do you need so much coverage? I was like, because this is my happy place to get to make a rap video from 1990. That's the dream. Even got the font right on the bottom of the screen. It was all, it was all in there.

Yeah, and his emcee name, it's like Hawk Smooth. And it's because I called Tarik during editing being like, what was your MC name in 1990 when he's like a teenager? He was like, oh, back then it was Hawk Smooth. I was like, it's in the movie. That's incredible. Yeah, that's those little. snippets are amazing. They put you back in that place in time as well. There's a moment in your life, again, the parallels of Larson where your father writes you a letter where you're at this crossroads.

Yeah. Right. And you're thinking, okay, I don't know if it's going to happen the same way Jonathan Larson taught. What did he say in that letter and what did it mean to you? Well, what was scary to me was that I, my first job out of college was teaching English at my old high school and I loved it. Like, it's very exciting to watch kids fall in love with writing and fall in love with poetry. and fall in love with literature and being able to help spark that that connection that will feed you your whole life if it happens early. And so they had offered me a full-time position

and I could see the Mr. Holland's opus version of my life where I just kind of teach kids and hopefully I'm fondly remembered and never finish my play, never finish my symphony in Mr. Holland's case. And I wrote my dad and said, like, what do I do? I could also just like quit and sub and I may not make my rent month to month, but I'll have time to work on this thing. And he said, I really want to tell you to take the full-time job.

I really want to tell you. But I would be betraying, you know, the memory of my own mother who, when I told her I have to go to Puerto Rico to go to school, didn't blink. And you have to do the thing that matters the most to you. and follow your gut. What a blessing. One absolute blessing because that was, that guy was also saying, be a lawyer the entire time I was in high school and college. And so something switched and the way in which he kind of gave me the right advice right

when I needed it. So when did in the Heights click? You finished it. This is your great work. You've hung in. You've put in all these years to get it done. What was the moment where you got a phone call or talk to somebody and said, oh, this is going to, this is going to go.

This is going to work. Honestly, I felt so much lighter the moment we did our first performant on stage. And I was able to experience that because I've already, like, been able to cross that distance that Jonathan never got to cross. You know, because that was my yardstick and that was my inspiration. It was like, oh, my gosh, this thing is going to be on stage. And I've done it. I've gotten it across the finish line. Forget, like, how long it runs.

Forget, like, it exists. Other people know it. It is on sheet music. It is no longer just in my head. It's out in the world. So everything from then has been just amazing. That's the scariest moment because, you know, it's when your hero is Jonathan Larson and you saw how achingly close he got to seeing his vision do exactly what he thought it would do,

which has changed the landscape of musical theater. You know, it's just such an enormous relief to hit that stage. So many people in the country around the world picked you up after Hamilton exploded, but you have to look back at In The Heights, we won four Tony Awards, you were best musical. Like, that was the moment. And I thought I could do,

I thought it did everything a show can do. Like, we, we, we did it. Like, we won the big prize. Yeah. We made back our investors money, you know, and we had suddenly all these incredible roles for Latino performers, which was incredible,

is the incredible legacy that kind of keeps on giving as I meet more and more artists for whom Heights was their first show. show or Nina first spoke to them as a character. I mean, it's just kind of the waves keep coming back at you. So, yeah, you know, it's like, Hamilton was like this whole other thing. You know, you dream of just getting off the arts and leisure page and into the larger conversation and boy, boy did it.

But, you know, many years of just like making stuff and many years of just working on Hamilton exclusively. Yeah, then you go on vacation. Yeah, 2008. Yeah, it's a good book. It's a good, very good book. And you come up with a preposterous idea. You're going to tell the story of the founding fathers with black and Latin cast through hip hop.

The earliest pitch of that idea, how was it received? Luckily, it was to people who'd been with me before. So they're like, all right, you know. But it was, yeah, it's a terrible pitch. It's a terrible elevator pitch. David is always the funniest person who is just like, yeah, that sounds terrible, but I'll be there. You're paying me for the workshop?

Let's go. And then, you know, but you know, it's funny. Like, the first time I ever performed anything from it was at the White House. It was 2009. I'd been invited to perform something from in the Heights. It was like the White House's first evening of poetry and spoken word. And they said, unless you have something about the American experience. I was like, I got 16 bars on Hamilton.

I don't really have a chorus yet. I'll write it for this occasion. I knew I didn't want to like rap to a pre-recorded beat or the beat I'd been writing and creating to. So I asked Alex Lackamore to join me at the piano and we figured it out. And I just thought if it doesn't work in this room, it's probably as bad as everyone says it is.

But if anyone's going to get it, it's this White House and this, you know, this group of folks who are, well-versed in hip-hop and in the history of the room in which we find ourselves in. And I've never been more nervous in my life. I'm sure. The day began with me splitting a van with James Earl Jones to the White House. I was like, the day could end here.

I'm in a van with James Earl Jones. And then, you know, I ended up closing out the evening. And in that video is a microcosm of the world's reaction. You say it and everyone laughs. Then you start telling the story and I'm going to go, wait, what happens? Right. Everyone leans in. And so, you know, in a lot of ways, it was insane and foolhardy to perform such an unfinished piece on such a, you know, national visible stage.

On the other hand, it gave me resolve for, you know, and strengthened my resolve that this is a good idea because I saw how it played in that room. Right. And that was enough to keep me going. You know, just how in Tick, boom, when he's like, the five nice words from Sontime were able to keep it writing for the next two years, like the reaction in that room was like, okay, I have to finish this thing.

And debuting it for the president of the United States, that's no joke. That's no joke. And I had no idea it would ever be seen beyond that room. You know, the fact that HBO was there filming some of their poets is the reason it's on YouTube and is, like, shot in high-deaf

and is not like a C-SPAN camera. So there's weird, good luck in that has nothing to do with me that was also in that room that night. So what was the moment once you get it up on its feet, it starts at the public, gets this incredible energy around it, what was the moment where you and everybody in the cast said, there's something happening here?

It was when your mom called you and said, we have to see this. She did? She saw it at the public. She did. That's a true story. That's the moment. No, no, actually the moment was,

well, it was a lot of little moments, but I remember, I remember thinking, if nothing else, this will have a healthy life because school groups, if they can get over the three uses of the F word, will bring their kids. I knew enough about the business that if you can get the school group crowd, like, you can fill a Wednesday man, nay. Field trips. Field trips are the lifeblood of our industry. And so, and I knew that we had overlap with APUS history. So, like, that was my pragmatic thought. We can run a couple of years on school trips, alone. And then I think when we announced our second

extension and the tickets went on sale, I remember Oscar Eustace came into the theater and said, the phones are broken. We've had the website go down due to ticket sale demand. We've never had someone break the phones. Like this is another thing. And, you know,

given that the public is home to hair and chorus line and some pretty big like, you know, genre Redefining things. That's when I knew we were in a weird other place, that somehow we'd gotten the thing that no one can buy, which is everyone who left the show told five people you have to see the show.

And you can't buy that and you can't fake that. It happens or it doesn't. And we just celebrated our 2000th performance on Broadway yesterday. That's amazing. And I never in a million years would have imagined it. I know it's hard to have any perspective on something you're so close to. but are you able with a little distance now to articulate why it caught fire the way I did

beyond the originality of it and how great the music is and the acting, the performances? But what was it about that? It was so different from anything else we'd see. Well, I think the things that it's quote-unquote are about are not really what it's about. It's not really about American history,

although it details American history. It's not really about politics, although it is in a way about the birth of our American politics and how everything that was present at the founding good and bad is still present in our present day. It's really about what are we doing with our time.

It's the same thing tick-tick-boom's about. How do we respond to the fact that we don't know how long we have here? And you have three characters dealing with that. You have Hamilton, who's life is marked by early trauma, and here's the ticking clock so loud that he's moving as fast and as recklessly as he can. You have Aaron Burr, whose life is marked by the same early childhood trauma, and his response to the clock is to be incredibly cautious and paralyzed for fear of making a mistake or sticking his neck out too far.

And then you have Eliza who worries only about what's best, like what is the good thing to do versus she's never reaching for greatness. She's reaching for goodness to steal a phrase from my collaborator on his dark materials, Jack Thorold. It's not about greatness. It's about being good. And in the moment when Hamilton is his most cautious and Burr is reckless, one kills the other, and that's how they're remembered forever. And then you have the third story of Eliza, who lives more than twice the age of anybody else in the thing and probably does more, has a more significant and meaningful life than the folks who were all chasing legacy.

And so you can't leave that show without thinking, what am I doing with my life? In, you know, I always tell folks, like, I didn't get like, thank you for the tickets, text. I would get like 3 a.m. What am I doing with my life emails in those early days when people saw the show for the first time. And so I think that's the secret sauce of it. It's the same secret. It's the same feeling I got when I saw Tick-Tick Boom at age 21 and thought, what am I really doing with my life? I think Hamilton hits that weird chord in the same way. And it wasn't, despite the way you handled it, it wasn't like niche. It wasn't like, oh, I have to understand hip hop. It was my young children and my 70-year-old dad were both moved in totally

different ways by it. And so the spectrum of people who love that show is infinite. Well, yeah, it has a lot of on-ramps, right? Like, I'm sneaking in everything I love about hip-hop. I'm sneaking everything I love about musical theater and trying to make everyone meet in the middle. And anytime someone meets me and goes, I hate musicals, but I love Hamilton, I go, I'm so sorry, you've been missing out on so much. I hope you start watching. more musicals. And I get the same thing from the other side. I don't like rap, but I like your show. I go, wow, I'm so sorry to hear that. You've really been missing out. I can give you some artists if you want to get started on your journey. Because I come from someone who loves all those

things. And so to have something that is really a gateway for those folks to meet in the middle has been really exciting for me. Can you speak to what it's done to your life? Forget the professional side of it, but to go from a highly regarded Broadway composer and actor, within the heights to something completely else around the world. Yeah, it's, I kept waiting for my life to come back to normal and it still hasn't happened. You know, I, and in a way, I feel lucky that I had 35 years of a very normal life before it happened, because I already knew who I was when the success happened. And sometimes when something hits popular culture like that and you're too young to process it,

it's really, like, knocks you off course. I think I was still doing the show. I was in seven shows a week. I couldn't go to all the things that were being thrown at me and all the invites. I was like, no, I have two shows tomorrow. I can't go out. And I also, you know, I was very well settled. And I have a family and a wife that really keeps my head on a head on straight.

But in terms of the show itself, there's a point at which you have to think of it as separate from you. You know, it's people you. use Hamilton as a jumping off point to talk about whatever they want. I go to the drama bookshop fairly often and I see books on the shelf about Hamilton that I didn't know existed. It'll be Hamilton and philosophy. Hamilton and race, Hamilton and the law. And like good, bad or indifferent, like it is a way for people to talk. It's just like a jumping off point. And in a way, that's kind of amazing because you can kind of go, okay, that belongs to the world. I remember when it only lived in my arms, but now it belongs to the world. And, and

the very real way. And you have to then figure out, all right, what else can I do? What else am I making? And this is what you're making. Tick, Tick, boom, as a director, and with the opportunities that were in front of you, how do you consider your post-Hamilton career? Like, what are you looking for? Because I'm sure everything on earth's been thrown at you. Every history book's been thrown at me. Yeah. Well, you know, I, um, again, I think I chose really good heroes when I was young, beginning obviously with Jonathan Larson. But another hero of mine when I was in high school was Robert Rodriguez, who wrote his own ticket to Hollywood with El Mariachi.

He made himself a lab rat. He maxed out his credit cards, and he made his first movie for $8,000. And it was so good and so pulpy and great that he kind of wrote his own ticket. And he wrote a book that I devoured in high school called Rebel Without a Crew. That's just basically the, if I could sum it up in one sentence, it's like, Stop waiting for permission. Like, make the thing. Like, just do it.

And everything you can learn in film school, you'll learn in a few weeks. Like, I can explain the lenses to you. Like, go start working and start writing and start making. And he said something really smart about the sophomore slump. He goes, everyone's waiting for you to fail on the next thing. So go just do so much different shit that no one knows what your next thing is. And that's really how I've treated the post-Hamilton time. I'm going to go work for Rob Marshall.

I'm going to go act in his dark materials. But something that I was very conscious of since Julie O. presented me with directing Tick-Tick-Boom is getting myself in the rooms with people who know how to direct musical films. And so I've been really on this journey to sort of have the film school I couldn't afford back in the day.

You know, beginning with working for Rob Marshall and Mary Poppins Returns, you know, I think Chicago is one of the great modern musicals and I wanted to watch him and how he had. how he did that and how he put numbers together. Working with my best friend Tommy Cale to make essentially eight mini-movies about Bob Fawsey and Gwen Verdon, as talk about running out of time.

That entire miniseries was sort of structured as this, you know, this genius who, again, made another masterpiece with Cabaret and all that jazz, like the whole series about like how did they do that? Right. How did he and Gwen do that? So that was an enormous education for me. And then my final year of myself-made film school was watching John M2 work with my best friend, Kiara,

in the Heights movie, and how he was so collaborative with the neighborhood itself and collaborative with sort of letting in the right idea, letting the best idea in the room win. Those are all really good role models. And I felt ready to direct Tick-Tick-Boom because I felt like I'd seen the kind of set I'd want to be on and the kind of set I'd want to run as a director.

And you waited until you were ready. You learned all these things and now I can do it. Yeah, I think I got the offer in 2016 and we didn't start production until 2019. So I wanted all these other experiences under my belt. You've also got the animated film Encanto, which is about to come out. We were just talking about John Leguizama, who I interviewed in part. Oh, I know. For that.

Yeah. Love talking to him about that. You've been involved since the beginning of this process a few years. So what is that story? And again, as you looked at the menu of podcast. possibilities, what grabbed you about that? Yeah, well, I had such a great time working on Moana. I was working on at the same time as Hamilton, often writing in my dressing room in between shows.

And I just said, I want to be in there from the beginning on the next one, because I was hired several years into the development process on Moana. And if it's Latino-themed, like, I'm there, like, you just have to call me. And so I was able to be there from the beginning of the process with Jared Bush and Byron Howard and Cherie Castro Smith. And we knew we wanted to set in Latin America. And the team was really inspired by the literature and culture of magical realism that came out of Colombia.

And then the fun part was we really wanted to write a thing about family. Like that's what kind of kept coming up in our conversations. So often in the movie making process, it becomes about your main character and their quest. And anything that isn't to do with that quest and the same. stakes like gets paired away. When I got hired for Moana, Moana had eight brothers. One had more important stuff to do. Goodbye, eight brothers. Like, let's go. Let's go save the world. And so we really kind of started with the thesis of can we make the relationships between our family members, the actual meat of the story, and how those relationships shift

and change and grow, or the distance between how you see yourself versus the role you play in your family. And sometimes that's really short and sometimes it's a gulf. And, you know, to then explore that in Colombia through the sort of amazing prism of Colombian music and culture has been just this joyous five years. And again, working at the same time as I'm editing Tick-Tick-Bomb and I'm telling the story of this guy who just wanted the songs from his keyboard to be in the world. Like, how can I not then, like, go to my own keyboard with gratitude? with just enormous gratitude that I get to write these songs and tell stories for a living. I actually get to live out Jonathan Larson's wildest dreams.

It's amazing. He inspires you in everything. Yeah, absolutely. No, and you know, it's funny. Like when you have more than, I'm a terrible multitasker is the secret. It doesn't sound like it. I know, but, you know, it's, I really,

I need to drift out and I need to space out for the good ideas to come in. It's not an accident that I read Ron Chernell's book on my first vacation. I needed the vacation. And, and, but when I, when I do have more than one project, something that I kind of do that is,

it's like a helpful trick I play on myself as I just pretend I'm back in school. And I go, these aren't projects, these aren't responsibilities, they're classes. I'm auditing Jonathan Larson intensive. I'm auditing this Disney songwriting process. And if I think of it that way,

because college sets you up to think this way, I think about the ways in which they feed each other. I don't think about like, oh, God, I've got all this to do and oh, God, I've got all this to do. I think, oh, this informs this, and I can take what I'm learning from this and apply it here. It's a silly, and it's only a game I play in my own mind, but it's really helpful in terms of changing your mindset from I have to do this to I get to do this. And that's all the difference in the world.

We were talking about John Leguizamo, and in our interview, he said, the phone rang one day, and he said it was the great Lin-Manuel Miranda. He said, I couldn't believe he was calling me. And I suspect you feel just the opposite. I can't believe I live in a world but I get to call John Leguizamo. I can't believe he's in the movie. Because again, as Jonathan was, you know, inspired to make his one-man show

because he was seeing folks like Eric Bogosian and Anadivir Smith and John Leguizamo do their one-person, create their one-person devised theater, I was taping his monologues off of HBO, you know, Mambo-mouth and Freak and all of his incredible works. Like, that was to see a Latino kid

because he was a kid doing it all himself writing these hilarious incredibly lived in character pieces I could perform Spicorama for you right now the way he would play all the members of a family

were so exciting to me and again it came from that same Robert Ojugas place of like do it yourself I'll play all the members of the family let's go and he was so versatile and just incredible

So I can't believe he's in the movie Well, he said something that you've said too Which is the roles I was getting I had a knife or a gun in my hand And he said and I realized as a Latino man I gotta do this myself So I have to do a one-man show Because I know what it's gonna be

And I can control all the story And I can control the performance of it And it sounds like even going back to In Heights You sort of felt that way I have to write this I have to put this in the universe I was studying theater I was studying the history of theater

When I looked at the musical theater canon, we have West Side Story, we have Zoot suit, we have a couple of parts in chorus line, and that's it. For Latinos in the canon, it's just slim pickets. And it really began from a place of fear of like, I need to

write what I see is missing. And I didn't realize at the time that, like, actually, that's the best advice you could give any writer, is write what's missing. Because it means, like, the perspective that only exists in your head is what you're putting out into the world. Does that feel good? to be able to put those kind of people on a stage in a movie

to write a story and compose something like Enkanto that tells the stories that we haven't heard before. Yeah, absolutely. And what's wonderful, what I'm so proud of with Enkanto is it really is, it's this family, and it's like this intergenerational Latino family all under one roof, but everyone can relate to it. Like the conversations that come out of watching the movie

have been so amazing. I remember seeing Inside Out. for the first time. And how it was amazing how that movie gave us a vocabulary for the different folks in our head that get to push the button. Oh, rage is pushing the button. Like, let's go. Oh, Joy's got the wheel.

Right. And how amazing it was to, like, have vocabulary for that. And I feel the same way coming out of Encanto, like, in terms of talking about our families. And, you know, I watched the movie with my sister for the first time last night. And it's so much about relationships between siblings. She's watching the movie and I'm just watching her like this. and her kids were there, my nephews, and we come out and she goes,

the kids say that I'm the abuela in this and that I love everyone, but I'm holding on too tight. But again, like, it gave us, like, this opportunity, the roles are there's so many complex relationships in the movie that it lets you talk about family in a really interesting way. Like, no, you're Daniela or you're, you know, like, it's so fun to dissect it

because you have this family to talk about and everyone can relate to someone on that screen. Have your boys seen it or not yet? Oh, my boys are the greatest beta testers in the world. Yeah, they've seen every version in storyboard. And, you know, when we were, there's a song in the, I've never told the story before.

There was a song called, We Don't Talk About Bruno in the movie where they're all singing about this uncle that they're not allowed to talk about. Auela doesn't like it when we talk about him. He left. But they all, you know, they all talk about him. Like, they all say,

We don't talk about Bruno and then proceed to talk about Bruno. And at the time we were living during the pandemic and my brother-in-law came to live with us. And my in-laws came to live with us because it was like the best way to keep us potted and safe. And my brother-in-law is in real estate and he doesn't really like he works. Like he works really hard. So we would just kind of see him very occasionally and he'd pop in for dinner. But he was just sort of in the walls but not around. So the song starts in the midway throat who goes,

is this song about me? Am I the weird uncle? No one talks to? And so like, you know, every kind of moment and it has kind of incredible family moments for me. Stick around to hear more of my conversation with Lynn Manuel Miranda right after a quick break. Welcome back now to the rest of my conversation

with Lynn Manuel Miranda. So as a first time director, Tick, boom is over. Credits come up directed by, Lin-Manuel Miranda. What did that feel like? Oh, man. You're trying to make me cry with this question, and you're going to succeed. It felt amazing. You know, it's such a dream come true for me.

There were challenges to this film. We made this film in the midst of a pandemic. And we had to, you know, we were filming this pre-vaccine, too. So we had to rely on the best practices and safety protocols and really all buy into adhering. to those safety protocols to make sure we kept each other safe. The safest place in the world to be with Steiner Studios in October of 2020

because we all took it so seriously. And there were so many times when I thought this movie would never get made. And so to be on this side of it is just, it's an enormous relief. And what I'm most proud of is the fact that the people in Jonathan's life are so proud of the film.

You know, that community that I first met when I met them all in 2014 and Julie Larson and Vicki Leacock and Jonathan Burckhart and Matt O'Grady and all of the people who truly were there for Jonathan's journey see him in the film and that means I've done my job.

Boy, if you didn't have enough pressure directing your first film, you want to get it right for all them, right? Yeah. But in a way it's liberating because your ego is totally out of the process. It's how do I do right by this artist? And I'm just so proud. You should be. It's amazing. I can talk to you all day, but I know you have other places to be. It's so great to talk to you. Thank you for everything you've put it into the culture, man.

Oh, thank you so much. This is a great conversation. My big thanks again to Lynn for a great conversation. You can catch his new movie Tick, Tick, Boom, in theaters and streaming on Netflix now. And my thanks to all of you for listening again this week. If you want to hear more of my conversations with my guests every week, be sure to click Follow so you never miss an episode. And don't forget to tune in to today every weekend on NBC. I'm Willie Geist. We'll see you right back here next week on the Sunday Sitdown podcast.