A Conversation with the Creative Team Behind HAMILTON | Producers Guild of America

[Music] hello and welcome to the producer's guild conversation with the creative team behind hamilton we'd like to thank our friends at disney for making this event possible it is my pleasure to introduce our moderator peter travers peter is a contributing writer at rolling stone who currently reviews movies tv and the best of what streaming for abc news travers also interviews celebrities from all aspects of show business as host of popcorn with peter travers for abc news welcome peter welcome panelists and please peter take it away okay is everybody ready all right well welcome to this look at us we are so ready we're gonna do this this producer's guild q a about this filmed version of hamilton which to me is like the most exuberant gift that you guys could give all of us pandemic shut-ins really when this came out for fourth of july everybody in my household of course that's just four of us plus the dog but i could tell people on the streets too just said let me add this i want to have it and it's such a pleasure to welcome all of you and let me introduce you so okay i will start and say our guest our producer jeffrey seller i director thomas kale who is also a producer and hamilton star lyricist composer the whole shebang lin-manuel miranda who was also a producer look at you guys three producers that's how many it takes your producers at the producer's guild and so i gotta start this whole thing by saying to you um what did you just produce what is this thing what do you call it you know is it a movie is it a tv show is it some kind of hybrid of everything else is it a streaming event what is it um i i call it the best rehearsed independent movie of all time um because that's really what it was um we sort of realized the magic in the body we had with our show and we had the thing that everyone tries to buy but you can't buy which is everyone who saw a show left and told five people about the show or posted about the show um and so we we realized um i think it's important to film this while we're all still in the building because um this cast we're all going to go with the super stardom from here um and it's it's we are in a moment right now and it took us up and it took us a full year to be able to get it together um but you know jeffrey can speak to this more but we independently financed this and filmed it um in the last week of its first year uh on broadway uh so we filmed two live performances and um and then filmed um on our day on our monday off between shows and the sunday night and the tuesday morning and um and then tommy spent a few years editing it um and and uh and then when we realized what we had we we partnered uh with disney but but this was in a vault and an editing room with tommy for for many years before it was on on disney plus but who of you had that idea that you should actually put this together and film it make a film of it look at look at this the silence i think we who do i think we all i think we all have the i mean which you'll find in talking to the three of us and we're obviously a small group representing a much larger group of other creative elements um is you know there's not a lot of disagreement and we often finish each other's sentences so i think we all understood that there was an opportunity here to make a movie and that's how i think of this i think of it as a movie and it just it felt um it felt like something that we knew early on before we even started performances on broadway that if we had the opportunity and the wherewithal and the bandwidth to do it that it was it was something that that we i think owed to the the energy around the show to these performers to the creative team that made it um and as the chance to down the line hopefully give access to people that might not have a chance to go to see it live well there's that i mean they can't especially you jeffrey you're the guy that did that but basically invented the rush ticket and the lottery system so that all of these people that are looking that were looking to get in to see hamilton now can get the best seat in the house to see it but what are the logistics speak to that a little if you can of actually getting this produced lynn described what it was and those three days that it was happening in but what hell did you have to go through to actually make it happen um i don't know if i'd say it was hell but yes well then this interview's over because i want to suffer i want the blood sweat and tears of it yeah if you make it sound easy oh you know what but he you know what's interesting about this conversation peter is that we love to make things and when a producer is blessed with a beautiful show that has resonated with audiences and is creating its own life force then we get to make even more things so that enables us to go make the hamilton book that we worked on with jeremy mccarter over the first year and it enables lin to go make hamilton's america and it enables us to go make um the album and then all of the um of the drops that lynn made thereafter and i think that we looked at this movie as an opportunity to say we can do two things we can honor what it was like to watch that original broadway cast at that theater before they leave forever and we can give audiences who are not in the theater an opportunity to get inside it to not just watch it from row f or row p but to watch it from the back of the theater because tommy put cameras back there or to watch it from right above the stage because tommy put cameras there or to be able to have that intimate moment with alexander hamilton and eliza when they're grieving over the tragic loss of their son and tommy brings the camera to a place that um we can never experience seeing the show live and that's what makes this new thing that we made its own work of art that i would say is also uh as in lin says this independent movie um and um and boy was that satisfying and and as i said that meant putting 20 cameras in the richard rogers theater and bringing those three trucks outside and parking them for over four days because we didn't shoot just one performance we shot two performances and then we gave ourselves another i think 24 man hours of time in the theater in which tommy could shoot his close-ups and his panning shots and his handheld shots which he can speak to in more detail yeah well tommy was everybody was everybody in the cast thrilled that you were doing this i mean at the end of that run even though it doesn't ever show up on stage there had to be an element of exhaustion of doing this eight times a week while this was happening and this is when you decide at the end of the run to shoot this you know how did everybody feel about it or did they think it was the three of you who wanted to just have this for your own personal souvenir i can't sound like that maybe you would do that you know look i think we make things that want to share them i don't i'm i don't believe in making things so they can be in some vacuum sealed uh room that you know that only lin has access to that doesn't feel like very much fun the wu-tang album that only exists in one place so you know i mean and lynn can speak to what it felt like to be in a cast that had done at that point you know 117 performances downtown at the public theater and probably another 250 or 300 by the time we did it but my sense about it is when you're doing a run the thing especially when you get deep into the run that makes it feel alive again is what's new so if you introduce a new element if you start to um say all right we're going to do the show and it's going to be an actor's fun benefit and there's going to be the entire community is going to be there at 10 o'clock on a sunday night that show is going to be fine because all of a sudden everyone's you know able to ratchet up to another level because there's a new experience in the midst when we did the the live grammy capture that felt like a new thing even in the midst of and it doesn't mean one has more value than the other it's just another thing to get excited about so on june 26 27 and 28 of that year of 2016 when we brought in some cameras when we had a couple trucks out front the cast i think had a chance to do something they hadn't done which was you know try to think about and be in the moment but know that it would not just be for that room that it could that it could resonate beyond the 1300 people in the audience on that sunday the 1300 people in the audience on that tuesday and i i've said this many times and i'll say it again no director has ever been blessed with having to talk to actors less about what to do that part of my that part of my day was was the previous four years of my life that's not what the conversation was every actor on stage knew exactly what to do they knew the size and scale of the performance they they knew how to feel the camera in the moment and so i was i was trying to honor their work and i think that they felt that even then and it was really you know probably the most meaningful thing was when they got to watch the movie those years later that you know that's what i was waiting for because none of them never got to see the show they made with all of them in it so that that was really special for me well the cameras i mean talk a little about that where are they you know you spoke before jeffrey about well you could see the back you could see this but on that middle day was that the the day off that would have been the day off you've got cameras on stage moving through what's happening which is something i just haven't seen a lot i mean i grew up basically watching joe's like the ed sullivan show tried to destroy showing this scenes from these great musicals that were so static and so awful you wondered why anybody would want to go to them and here is the opposite of that this completely immersive experience that having seen hamilton on stage four times i saw something different at the same i was seeing it in a way i couldn't have seen it before and it became unique and it made me want to say why don't they do this for everything why didn't that happen for a course line why why didn't somebody figure this out and do it this way so that we always had it but you weren't thinking that you were thinking basically about preserving this with this cast correct yes and look the i mean part of theater and i'm paraphrasing peter brooke is writing messages in the melting snow the contract with the audience is that it will disappear if the curtain brings it in and then when the curtain comes down at the end what's left is what you remember and call and you hold your play bill and you talk to the person you're with and you talk about when you saw a chorus line when it came to detroit on tour or you talk about when your community put up uh you know ragtime you know or you know a show that lives in a memory and our thought was what if more people have access to a a memory making machine which is really what broadway is it is and now you've made it something else so that if i want to i could go in there and i can look at it again and i can this doesn't say in any way that you made this that hamilton wouldn't eventually become a full-scale film musical i'm assuming you mean like a narrative feature like outside of the theater yeah no that yeah you would make that it could be made again that this is the preservation of this that has just worked so well that any of us that have that memory or those that just wish they had it could go and look at it again but like anything that really becomes a work of art it can be done and done and done so many ways i mean after the original cast left i went back to see it again and you're seeing it again interpreted by a whole group of new people who find the passion and the heart that they need to do it yeah it's funny before 10 years ago at the beginning of 2020 um i i was in uh i was in london with uh david diggs we were in pre-production on this uh live-action little mermaid he's doing the voice of sebastian the crab and it was a badly cap secret then and now everybody knows um but we were in rehearsal for that and he finished early and i said we can get to london let's go watch hamilton on the west end and i'd never watched the show with david the movie wasn't out yet it didn't exist yet and so david and i jumped in a cab and went to see our show with this incredible uk company uh and we sat in a booth in the back and it may be the most fun i've ever had watching the show because i could lean over a debbie and be like do you think you still remember your schuyler sister's choreography because then i don't think i knew it while it was happening um and we just had the best time experiencing that show and even that was an approximate version of seeing what we built when it was our bodies on that stage um and so it this thing's been such a gift because when i watch our film and it is a film to me it's distinct from watching hamilton live um i i watch it with the double vision of what it felt like to be inside it um more so than when i'm watching another company perform the show i'm i'm remembering what my inside joke is with renee before we walk on stage for the end of non-stop um you know the smell uh of the pale after burn because we're playing with real fire and that's and we can all smell it in the wings um that's the stuff that that comes to me thanks to this gift of a movie uh that tommy's made what was that inside joke can you tell us it's it was different it was different every night um and you know doing a show eight times a week is a yoga you know and so you you lean into certain moments and there are entire months where something's not clicking in their entire months where something's just on fire um but i can tell you you know i'm gonna try to make renee laugh before we walk out for for non-stop and there's a moment in room where it happens it's the only moment in act 2 where david and i are on the same side of the stage in the wings and we freestyle with each other and he always almost misses his entrance again to meet madison in room where it happens and that's the stuff that came flooding back to me uh watching the film more so than the text and and the show on stage when i'm when i'm watching another company but you have you've created this world that all of you lived in for that period that you played it and what's it like when you had that day where suddenly the audience isn't there and this these cameras and tommy is saying no go over here and do this wasn't that a little bit freaked out stuff for a while when that was happening honestly the extent of my freakout was for our steadicam operator who had to learn how to walk on a moving turntable when we have all had a year and a half of practice you know so you know again tommy was was was so incredible the direction was do your show like dial in it makes no difference whether the camera is here or or out in the house like you do your show you know your show um but there were moments where we had to sort of like kind of figure out the choreography around a steadicam operator if we were getting a close-up moment and and that was exhilarating it was just exhilarating to to re-examine the stuff because you know again i like knowing who's in the audience when i'm performing live anything to make the show different that night you know why is this night different from all the other nights they asked on passover like oh it's different because julie louis dreyfus is sitting in the fifth row it's different because my orthodontist from when i was a kid uh has my house seats tonight um anything that makes the show different so the the day off other than losing a day off when we all could have used it um it was also it was it was a chance to to re-examine things and play with them in a different way so when you look at it lynn's looking at it from a person who's is on that stage and tommy and jeffrey are looking at it as something that they helped create and put on there what did the three of you discover if anything that seemed new to you when you just watched it not filming it but when it was all put together did you see something that made you say wow i never noticed that before something that you would think you you know every detail of something but a camera changes that it just does you know there was an instagram post that our social media channel put up yesterday um that plays the satisfied rewind and then plays it back to back against the choreography for a winter's ball and helpless and you see how incredibly detailed um the work is so that the satisfied rewind is a true rewind and the same physical moments and the same emotional moments are happening but through a different lens uh and to watch it stacked up like that which you could never do with a live show it's truly overwhelming andy and tommy's work in that suite of songs from winter's ball through helpless through satisfying because i can just say rewind in a song but then they have to go figure out the math of it and how it truly works um and it's it's staggering uh when you when you watch them uh lined up together um so there were things like that uh throughout i remember having a great time talking about what intermission is on disney plus remember peter we were gonna release this theatrically uh october 21. and we were gonna do a 10 minute countdown clock for intermission uh like old school fiddler on the roof on track like go get popcorn go pee we'll be here when you get back we'll play an overture um and then suddenly we we pivot to streaming and we go so how long is our intermission and i remember tommy sending us tests of like here's what it feels like in 10 minutes here's what it feels like five minutes and because you can press pause it only needed to be a minute to like cleanse the palette pause it however long you want to pause it and then like come back when you're ready for act two um so there were also really fun decisions to be made in in the in sort of the medium that we were we're gearing this towards jeffrey what was something oh i'm sorry peter oh it's okay i was just thinking about you know because like i was in the weeds you know and then got to go and show my friends um jeffrey was there something that did you remember in some of those early screenings or first time we watched through act one thing hamilton is um epic in its scale on a broadway stage and um what i was so moved by um was the yearning in alexander hamilton's heart if he's on the precipice of going to this new land new york city i could feel his um um his need to get out of saint croix i could feel renee's powerful powerful feelings toward alexander hamilton and her sense of loss in such a palpable way when she's saying satisfied because the camera got into her heart and i think that the intimate moments of the play the interpersonal moments um come through in a beautiful and unique um um immediacy with with great immediacy in the film peter i'm sorry i gotta stop running this interview continue i was gonna say something about andy um andy blankenburger is our choreographer and uh and alex lackmore is our music director and both obviously have an enormous influence in impact and everything that you see on the stage or here you know a lot of the references that we have are filmic references that we tried to put on stage to wit ratatouille in satisfied is the moment when the critic tries the food and i don't just say it because it's you peter the the matrix was a huge influence if you think about our literal bullet time which is what they called it in 99 when the matrix came out and the way that andy found a vocabulary to stop time when lynn wrote helpless chronologically before he wrote satisfied what he did was he created a framework but then satisfied changed the complete trajectory of the rest of our show it's like the moment in chorus line it's at the ballet if you think it's going to be everybody gets to do one thing and then all of a sudden this happens and so in that moment of rewind and that very simple you know when lynn can write it on a page or it's like when they say like an epic battle right and then that's this much on the page and it's four days of shooting you know so lynn writes rewind you know and and you have to think about what that means but what we're also trying to do there is to both honor a cinematic vocabulary in the theater so you don't want it to be a hat on the hat when you're then filming it you want to be able to to trust it i think part of the reason that that's such a moving moment is we've never filmed it and shown it anywhere else and so little of our show was available in that way because we wanted the experience to be as the author intended which is to be in the building with the performers so when the pandemic took that away from us and we made the decision to to film this what we also have a chance to do is to show the construction that lin laid out which is this the stopping and the rewinding is also giving you permission at the final duel to stop time again so we're we're teaching uh we're teaching the audience the the way they can ex experience this and absorb it and so our editor jonah moran who spent hundreds and hundreds of hours in the edit room um many of them without me as as everybody who produces things knows what the editor does um you know the the work that we were thinking about when we go into renee's brain that this the subjectivity of the of the edit pattern in the rewind is very different from anything else in the rest of the film but it's also trying to embrace the cinematic technique in the way that we embraced a theatrical technique on stage and mirror that even if it's using a different language that the things still rhyme as it were well it it makes sense that all because you you basically are all coming up with a different vocabulary to do something um it's it's not confusing to me it's kind of exciting to me that nobody knows where to put it you know the academy says well maybe this isn't a movie so it can't be but the other guilds are saying well it is but what do we call it is it a television movie is it a limited tv series will there be prequels to hamilton will be any of those things that happening but the pandemic the crappy pandemic has basically taught us that what we see that's a work of art or just a work of fun um has changed the way we receive it has changed there's really no such thing as the movie of the tv show the one thing there is that you can't substitute for is live theater it's it's there or it's not there and this captures that uh you in the beginning tommy made it sound relatively simple you know there's the cameras there's three cameras here we're over here uh we take a day and we shoot these other scenes but something that magical something that no one can figure out because if we could everybody would do it that makes it work that makes it come alive on that screen in such a way that you just want to keep it close you just want to keep that close so i'm assuming when you all watch it i don't know anybody would win jeffrey were you in that editing room for 10 years with tommy while he was putting it together well how many times was the door basically blasted into and people said to you tommy the hell are you doing in there no one ever said that because we had no timeline because we made the movie ourselves so there was no nobody was knocking on the doors they had to be curious i think i saw the first cut i want to say christmas 17 yeah um and i think it was just before i went away to go uh work on mary poppins returns uh on the contrary it was i was hoping for christmas break your hybrid rehearsing for three months and then i was going to to film the movie um and that was a very different movie than the movie that came out on disney plus and one of the gifts we have is that our theatrical director tommy kale is also an incredibly gifted film director like i i kind of can't underline that enough that's that's not always a skill set that translates um but tommy has both the things um he can work in both those lanes beautifully as fosse verdin can attest as you know insert uh work of tommy's here can attest um but what i what is also really exciting um and again i like that the movie defies labels i think it's a movie um but i like that we're struggling with it um and uh is that i think it obliterates the notion that um just because you uh have seen a film of a theatrical event you lose interest in seeing that theatrical event like i think it's only wedded the appetite to see hamilton live in a theater i think that's gonna i hope that changes the calculus when new musicals get up and running in terms of hey let's raise a little money for filming this thing because um it it it gives us access to an audience that can't necessarily get to new york city um or get necessarily to one of the tourist stops um so i'm curious what the legacy of the thing will be um beyond it it's a beautiful movie that tommy made but you know i know i've had conversations with other musical theater writers who are like we're working on filming our show we're trying to get our hamilton on yeah but you know when when tommy was working on fosse burton he did something amazing in that he you're telling that story of bob fosse basically making his film debut no fault of his own or for anybody screwing up the first one in sweet charity it just doesn't work it doesn't work as a movie and you watch it and you go yeah you know and then he makes maybe the best movie musical where you just go look everything comes together again no formula for all of this just basically this enthusiasm that goes into it the talent that goes into doing it and that's what i want to discuss too because yeah to me whatever you call it to me it's a movie because i watch it as a movie and that's what i do the only thing that is in this theater but a work of art is timeless and this is the founding fathers and you know people will say well why do i care about them you all went through that in the beginning who wants to see what alexander hamilton you know i care about this who is he some white guy i don't no please don't do it and now everybody loves it but speaking for now speaking for now in this time that we currently live in time of insurrection we talked a little bit before about what hamilton wrote about impeachment you know and yet to me this does how does that musical that you all helped create speak to today to right now i'd like each of you to talk about that who wants to jump in not all at once um i mean i'll go i'll go first just to lead it off then i mean my when we have a lot of these conversations um you know in in june in the lead up to you know to the movie coming out um and obviously as the nation was uh convulsing and mourning and uh and searching and seeking with george floyd's murder and countless others the the the thing that i found myself hoping is that this show given to more people than ever in that first weekend than you know the previous five years could hopefully provide language and energy for a movement you know and i think that one of the things that is laid so bare in this you know in this thing that lin wrote is the the celebration of of language and the power of language and hersen finds their group uh and so i i feel like the fact that that could be so accessible because like the medium's not the message it was supposed it was if it came out of the movie theaters we will be talking about the same thing whether it's a limited series or like none of that really matters what matters is that it's there and it's available and then hopefully that's what it provided then and continues to provide now jeffrey how do you feel about that um i absolutely affirm everything tommy just said and you know i feel that um the only condition i'm gonna make on what i'm about to say is that hamilton tells one story and like every story it can't tell every story it cannot tell every story about the american revolution and alexander hamilton's life but i think at its best hamilton is a reflection of our best instincts our best values and our best um impulses as americans it reflects what our democracy can be and i think that what it has provided this year is a very very necessary reminder about who we can be and what kind of a country we can be when we work together even when we have vociferous disagreements even when we don't like each other but what we depict is a group of people who still come together and they give birth to a country that has enormous potential an answer lynn when you you know it's a strange thing to do i just had this thing going through my head that was very scary because here's a show that people say immigrants we get the job done you know i never want to see the musical where it's white supremacists we get the jobs done you know we don't that should never happen and yet what we see in this country is rebellion is the defiance is something that's very scary in the world and hamilton and the founding fathers saw that too they they said look how this could go wrong look how it could go wrong and also look how it could go right so when when you look at this you look at this thing you create when was it right after in the heights that you started working on this i was it was i was in the middle of in the heights it was my first week off from performing and in the heights i went to mexico with my girlfriend who is now my wife i grabbed him the biggest book in the biography section of borders i could find and that was wrong and i was alexander hamilton um and i was not a very good history student i'm not some history buff who always wanted to write a history musical everything i know about history i know from other musicals i can tell you a lot about argentine history because of evita i can tell you about a failed french revolution because of limit yay broadway and i know a few days around 1776 um and and so you know what i knew about hamilton was he died in a duel and i knew his son died i wrote a paper on that in 11th grade so i i grabbed the book because i remember thinking how do you not see that coming um and so i the the secret sauce i think in the enthusiasm for the show is you're feeling my enthusiasm as i'm learning these things as i write them i didn't know that hamilton wasn't born on the mainland i didn't know that he was born in the caribbean where my father was born that he came to the states at 18 like my father did on a scholarship uh from puerto rico um and so um that was my way in the the immigrant the fact that it's sort of a proto-immigrant story and the deal that we export to the world is you're gonna have to work three times as hard and you'll get half as far but your kids might have a better life that's sort of the american promise that we export it's one of the better ones we export to the rest of the world and understanding hamilton through that prism made me be like i know this guy i'm not this guy i grew up in new york city but i know this guy because i grew up in an immigrant neighborhood with more small businesses than any other part of new york city um and my grandmother never had to learn english when she lived with us because everyone spoke spanish and english and and so that was my way in that's what made me feel like i was uniquely suited to tell it um and so the enthusiasm for that i think is the secret sauce in the show itself is i'm a lot of the musical is presented with the energy of can you believe this you believe this happened i think that's a lot of the energy in the songs because and the stuff i couldn't include the fact that hamilton's son becomes you know a divorce attorney for aaron burr 50 years later like there's i couldn't fit in here um lots of it uh so you know i think that enthusiasm and the recognition that um everything past is present every debate that jefferson hamilton have we are having a version of it as we speak um that insight also is what makes it feel fresh because we we have the same cracks in the foundation at our founding that we do 200 some odd years later which i think is why it speaks to that so i'm gonna end by basically asking the three of you in terms of those songs what is the line from a lyric from one of the songs that you've now all heard i'm assuming then listening to you talk you have that same enthusiasm for hamilton it hasn't really gone away you just know much more about right i mean you've known you learned in that time you're probably as good an expert as anybody could find and i know i know my version i know the ver the musical theater version very well um because that was something that i had to make playable and active yeah so just give me a lyric each one of you to take us out of this wonderful talk that i could keep going on and on with because the the movie that you made the show that you made it's filled with love for the theater number one for what is theatrical about american history of what we can learn from american history and what we just get really thrilled by about american history so i just want to go back to that score and to that music and to see what's in your head is if this were a raw shock test right now not something you have to write an essay about but what lyric is going through your head right at this minute as we're talking about this film not what became of the show but what this film is right now to so many people who have access to it what is it to you well to our conversation i mean who lives who you have no control who lives who dies who tells your story um because every time hamilton pops into the popular consciousness it's through a different prism and and it it weirdly reflects and refracts the moment we're in whether that is the lyric this is not a moment it's a movement on black lives matter protest signs throughout the country or john bolton grabbing a phrase for his book like you have no control who lives who dies who tells your story tommy jeffrey um you know i don't want to have this be uh you know punting on it but what i think what's powerful about what lynn wrote is that like like a true work of of art what you bring in and how it flex back changes day to day the song what comes next after trump's election was a completely different thing than it had been two days before the election and i think for me now it's all of one last time it's it's a it's about thinking about the nation and how to leave the nation stronger and understanding grace in your place in the firmament and what it means to to recognize that and that our first president actually showed us and there it is late you know with all of his flaws but yet he did he did he did put it there very clearly and uh and i think that the the the dissonance of that in our current moment is uh shocking to me now well said jeffrey no i'm looking outside um at the grass at the trees and i'm thinking about planting seeds in a garden we never get to see what are we doing now that is going to create a better future for our grandchildren and our great grandchildren well if something can make you think of that something's really working so gentlemen thank you for making this the zoom where it happens you know it was it was great sorry about that but it was irresistible okay a pleasure to finally get a chance to speak with you thank you sir for your work thank you thank you so much bye-bye bye-bye lynn call me in two minutes thanks guys thank you disney thank you pga bye thank you

Channel: Producers Guild of America

Views: 610

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: producers guild, producers guild of america, producers guild mark, hamilton film, hamilton film production, hamilton movie, hamilton movie production, hamilton movie producer, Thomas Kail, thomas kail hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda, lin-manuel miranda hamilton, Jeffrey Seller, jeffrey seller hamilton, hamilton disney plus

Id: msGSYZPCUZA

Length: 42min 0sec (2520 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 11 2021