Hamilton Q&A - Thomas Kail

um yeah i'll take this shot howdy i'm jeff goldsmith and this is the q a my agenda is simple each week i plan to bring you in-depth insights into the creative process of storytelling and folks you know i gotta say this i've been wanting to do an interview with thomas kale for many years so i'm very happy to have him in today's episode to talk about hamilton on disney plus uh of course you know it is the awards season uh for emmy nominations you can't find a more qualified director to nominate than thomas uh obviously his work speaks for itself and i felt very fortunate to be able to interview him about his creative process today and he was very forthcoming about the history of hamilton about what it took to kind of put together a perfect team and to continue to challenge them and to challenge himself all through the process so i know you're gonna dig this episode and speaking of things to dig i hope you also check out backstory magazine over at backstory.net you could read this on a desktop or laptop or via our ipad app backstory and you know if you've never read us before you could test drive us by reading our free issue and if you dig what you see you could become a subscriber uh just use coupon code save five it will save you five dollars off a one year subscription look it would really mean a lot to me to have my podcast listeners in itunes and spotify and my youtube watchers of the zoomcast at the backstory magazine youtube page consider becoming subscribers so thanks for considering and you know it is a perfect time to become a subscriber as well because we are going to have issue 44 our black widow issue hit the stands in just a few weeks so now is a perfect time to get in but now without any further ado let's jump right into our interview with director thomas kale about directing hamilton hello thomas how's it going it's good to see you it's going very well it's it's nice to see you in uh in all virtual backgrounds yeah yes yes i'm stuck in twin peaksville uh kind of uh that's that's that's been my pandemic zoom go-to um but but you know i want to i want to go back kind of to your roots and give give our our listeners and our viewers on youtube just a sense of of your path as a director when did you first realize that you wanted to direct theater were you an actor first who kind of fell into it because that's that's the way that some people go thank goodness no i though the world did not need me acting um so you know it really for me came out of um i think a search for a community once i stopped playing sports so i was a kid who grew up playing sports i played soccer and baseball um a lot uh mostly soccer um growing up and i really played all through high school i took one acting class in high school which was compulsory so i had to take it my sophomore year right and it was interesting to me not as someone who was keen to be a performer but just it was a different way to experience the educational process because there was no one right answer and that was fascinating and that to me i think probably connected in some way to my experience and love of playing sports is there was technique and there was a way to do something and then there also was improvisation within that and you weren't just seeking one thing so once i stopped playing sports and got to college i went to wesleyan university in connecticut i fell in with a group of uh kids from the theater community there and the the very active film department they have at wesleyan and there's a lot of student film in student theater and i was pulled into the student theater so it really wasn't until my third year of wesleyan that i ever worked on a a play in any official capacity and i was an assistant director for my friend anthony and once i was there i was like oh i think i know where i need to be now um i saw a lot of you know analogs you know there was like things that were analogous is a better way to say it so the coach was the director i could see things in my head but i couldn't necessarily execute them but i knew how to get a group of people that had never met and motivate them rehearsal in practice the game and you know all of that stuff so that made me feel very comfortable and that's when i really made the decision in my last couple years of college well it makes sense too because you know a production is a team and it's and it's it really is a big group of people so i i like this code analogy that that makes a lot of sense you know people sometimes debate at theater school film school the merits of it what did you get out of wesleyan what was something really important that you did get out of it because it sounds like you're obviously a fan i went to school for theater and film as well i i love it too but some people really rag on it but what did you get out of it well you know i went to so a couple things one is wesleyan is not a conservatory and wesleyan is a liberal arts college and i went and graduated with a degree in american history and studied a lot of american literature and did my theater arts really uh you know in an extracurricular way i only took one theater class in my entire time wesleyan and i took two of the film classes there uh when you need to take 10 or 11 to major so i was not even close to that um i think it depends on the person what was really helpful for me about wesleyan is it was a place through the student theater that effectively taught you how to produce because they would say okay you have a date three months from now here's the venue go make a show and you pick the show and you cast the show and you marketed the show and you sold the show and you hired the designers it taught you how to be a producer when you didn't even know that that was a thing that you could learn or think that you could do so i feel like that was incredibly useful once i got out of college and i started a little theater company and i realized oh we might have to rent the venue on 44th street instead of going to the you know you know the the you know the the cafeteria that we converted at wesleyan but it was all the same uh it was all the same skills that were required and i really liked the idea of to use you know your phrase like putting a team together i loved that and and i liked doing that production to production taking some people with you meeting new people you know as you head into other and new stuff well speaking of teams your your major teammate was lin manuel miranda and you guys met at wesleyan what were your first impressions of them sometimes sometimes in theater communities there's a sense of competition but but when people put that aside and focus and lean more into collaboration the the fruits could be amazing so so tell us about the early days of of kind of meeting up and realizing that you you wanted to work together well i didn't officially meet lynn until i graduated so i heard about linda met him while you're at school i heard about him so lynn was a freshman when i was a senior and i wasn't talking to a lot of freshmen and be honest with you so um in one of those student productions where they had given us the gymnasium we were sharing our lighting equipment with some kid who was a freshman who was doing a musical and that kid was lynn and so the first time i heard about him he was stealing my stuff effectively i was like what do you mean he's taking our lights every night so we had to share um because you know there were only 50 lights on campus so that was the first i ever heard about him um and then his next year he wrote a very early version of in the heights which he directed in the same student-run theater and two of my friends were still at college saw it and called me i had graduated to be an asm an assistant stage manager basically like a pa at this theater company and so i was driving a 15-pass van with my big cell phone and they called me one day and i said i'm the professional i drive vans i know things um and they sent me a script of in the heights and a demo cd and i fell in love with it and that was two years before he graduated and i said um when does he graduate they said 2002. i said well let's find him when he graduates and we did and then we invited him to our little basement theater at the drama bookshop in may of 2002 and the joke about it is we had a five hour conversation that day that just never ended it just we we've been talking for 19 years so lynn and i we clicked immediately i i had such a an instinctive feeling that we were going to be um you know uh creative collaborators that were just in sync you know i wasn't trying to fix anything i you know he he was this pretty formed person at 22 and 20 22 i guess when i met him and he hadn't thought about in the heights in two years and i'd only been thinking about it for two years so i had a lot to say um but he he heard that my my intent was to find out what was at the center of what was the spirit and try to help actualize that well so in the heights is a great place to start you know because you were tony nominated for it and we could of course do a whole episode on it but we're not going to hamilton is going to be the focus tell tell me just one thing that that is really your fondest memory as a director from in the heights and and something that you felt your your creative skills growing as as as a director and i'm sure there's a million things but if you could boil it down to one big lesson learned or something that was a new part of your creative habits that you've brought forward since that experience i'd love to hear it yeah i think that my experience on in the heights which lasted from 2002 until 2011 when the show closed so it's nine years of my life the show was off-broadway in 2007 and on broadway in 2008 i think that by 2007 2008 i was i just turned 30 uh in the off-broadway production and i think i was finally allowing myself to live in a place of i don't know of not thinking that i had to have the answer or the solution and what i realized is the director's job isn't necessarily to always provide the idea but it's to recognize the idea and so it's about trusting collaboration and so with the rest of the creative team with lynn manuel and kiara who wrote the libretto andy blankenbuilder choreographer and alex rmd you know i realized that i had so many incredibly trustworthy people around me who had skills that i didn't have not to mention the designers and you know the actors in the company so it's about uh i think giving yourself space to to explore and and not feeling the burden of having to have the answer with a capital t in a capital a that's a good transition into today's topic hamilton i kind of i want to talk about the early days because you you were with the project for so long and of course you know what we're going to ultimately be talking about is the disney plus version that that that people now know and see and it was it was filmed of a live staged event which is which is difficult to do so we're going to get to that but i want to start very early on tell us about your earliest memories of of coming into the world of it you know most people first learned about it when there was the 2009 white house the white house visit when when lynn you know sang what became the alexander hamilton song from a project he was working on that was currently known as the hamilton mixtape and i i'm just curious when he first broached the idea with you and and how you saw it kind of evolve from that point to the 2013 vassar workshop version where there was there was a bit more of it obviously yeah lynn took a vacation from in the heights in 2009 maybe even late 2008 i think it was late 2008 grabbed ron chernow's book took it with him read it and emailed me from his trip and he basically said i'm reading this book and i think it's really good and i said uh okay cool what about you know it's like it was just like we were just chopping it up and then when he came back he said i think there's a story here i think it might be a collection of songs maybe it's a song cycle or it's a concept album but i think there's i think there's something here and my job you know as a friend to anybody let alone someone that i've just come out of a six year collaboration with is to say great keep going you know like follow the impulse and how can i help and then he wrote that first song and you know he would play it for me and alex and some of his friends and and when he got the call to go to the white house and they said you want to do something from heights about the american experience he said well actually i have something else i'd like to debut if you wouldn't mind and we thought well if you're gonna do something about the treasury secretary might as well do it at the white house um and then the first time i saw it though was when the the filmed version of it came out because they were they were filming something for like hbo and so they had like a really nice five camera setup and they they captured it and then all of a sudden it started ricocheting around the internet and it was interesting that this one song was finding teachers in california and people in canada and people in the uk and something something was stirring and about a year and a half later we were doing an event for this show we have called freestyle love supreme which is improv hip-hop show that i started with my friend anthony from um from my uh acting company and then lin and lin said i have this other song i've been working on and it was called my shot and we said why don't we as a you know we're doing this little fundraiser we were doing scripted material that each of our members had written and then said i could do this next tune from hamilton and so we did it in this little theater for about 90 people and it went pretty well and afterwards while everybody was high-fiving them i thought it was a good time to try to motivate them and i thought wow two songs in two and a half years lynn we're going to be very old by the time you're done writing this so what if we pick a date six months from now and you write and we work on two songs a month and let's just see what we have and he he looked at me and he nodded his head and he was like let me think about it next morning he woke up he's like i think i have a venue and so the first presentation we did was in january of 2012 at the lincoln center jazz sort of uh under their umbrella and we did 10 or 11 songs there and that was the first time where we had a group of actors and a four or five piece band interact with an audience it was a one night event and that night was electric and i think we knew that it could absolutely be a concept album but there also was some sort of presentation live that should be considered we were still thinking of it as a mixtape and then we started to go to work you know every three months we get together with a few actors we then went to vassar which hosts this you know basically i think we're there for like nine or ten days which was just like a lab and we worked on the first act up there and then we partnered with the public theater jeffrey seller the producer had been on board prior to that and we would just incrementally try to grow it but we really did it one act at a time when we went to vassar we presented an entire version of the first act standing at music stands no staging and four songs from the second act and then from 2013 to 2014 and 15 we finished the show so that was that was sort of how that worked it interrupt but in a way that harkens back to what you were talking about at wesleyan in which you're you're given a date you're told you could do it by then but you have to figure out how to do it so having that that date on the calendar gives you the impetus the drive to creatively move forward and it's fascinating that you you gave him this two-month deadline to to really get stuff together i mean the the word from vassar spread a lot and i'm just curious directorially again it seems like almost you were you're acting as a cheerleader producer collaborator to get him on that path to getting more songs done and as you said it was basically the first act with a little bit of the second act at the vassar performance what if anything do you remember being important to direct or was it really just still a workshop experience of doing what you just said which is experimenting as the most important way to find your path well i think you know when we came out of that event in 2011 where we did my shot i knew that there was gonna need to be half a year where he should work i was like because then you know in a month you might not be able to get enough so it's like okay so what felt like a good flag to plant and so six months felt good there and then after that every three months or every two months or whatever it was and i think that i think that is part of directing i think it's a little bit of producing but i think there's some inherent producing and directing but then you know it was working on all the songs it was helping shape the narrative it was finding the right actors it was directing the performance it was making sure that the sequence of events felt like a story and not just this happened this happened this happened because one of the things lyndon i talked about a lot from that roncino book is a series of events in one's life does not a story make that's not a story that's a bunch of things that happened so a lot of my job was to be there for lin and support him dramaturgically as we were building the story deciding what characters we thought we should hear from what what parts of the story could be focused on and and to your point and trying to inspire and trying to elicit and nudge and and shape and suggest in any way that was gonna keep his creative fires burning that's absolutely the job of the director in those in those early days up until you know you open the show or up until the movie is locked well you were really forging your own path because in theater terms really only 1776 the the musical was was kind of like the only other touchstone to deal with that period as a musical that was you know popular right that was that was still known and you guys were going so far away from it you know something i've always wondered is is the um the decision to have actors play more than one role it's it's it's commonly done in theater but but you know it was something that grew out of often low budget productions in which it it had a a smaller cast to worry about tell us you know just obviously diggs you know being both lafayette and jefferson is the one people cite but it's all throughout there you know like there's there's multiple actors doing double lifting tell us how that grew out of the experience well yeah it's absolutely connected to old theatrical traditions that probably did come from necessity and yet also there's something about the theater which allows us to meet a character uh played by anthony ramos who is hamilton's best friend in act one and then can play hamilton's son in act two and then oak playing mulligan and madison so and then of course we had jasmine stevis jones was playing mariah and peggy um so we felt like there was also some important and inherent storytelling uh advantage to that which is you know and you see it in the opening number like this idea that these three men fought with him and they fought by his side in act one and they fought against him in act two so that to me felt like we were we were telling story this is someone in his life who pushed away everybody hamilton was always blowing up every relationship and there was something about the reflection back of who you were from that first part of your life through who you you know become that it felt like we could use those literal mirror images by having the same characters play and game for someone like peggy mariah peggy skyler a young woman born to privilege and opportunity and mariah given none of those opportunities and so what were the choices that those two young women have in their lives and it was it was a way for us by having the same actor play it to ask that question as well yeah and she was excellent i mean really transformative in those two in those two roles i i know people that saw the musical did not realize it was the same actress playing but it's a credit to her now in blind spotting on stars yeah that's right um you know it's interesting though because what you were talking about a little earlier was dramaturgy essentially which is which is you know kind of crafting a story as it's evolving which is rare and in hollywood it could very often be a contentious process where writers fear and hate studio notes but you were coming to it as a collaborator as a supporter and there's this you know danger in which you don't want to give a note that is in any way destructive because you want the project moving forward and you want to give a constructive note so that there's a greater sense of exploration what do you remember about some of the earlier notes that you were giving when the the script was kind of being formed as as a way to just keep lynn on his path of exploration but to reel it in so it's not all over because as you just said you're absolutely right you know a story is not just a series of events it has to permeate from character which you know was there's three dimensional characters throughout here what do you remember about some of the early notes and or interestingly debates that you and lynn had during the screenwriting phase or the the playwriting phase pardon me yeah i don't know um i think we had just come off of such a fruitful and trusting partnership on heights so we were building from that foundation and and i think that's why we were able to i think move relatively quickly you know to make a musical really from 2011 even though i started writing in 2009 absolutely but really from 2011 to 2015 is very fast for a musical and i think a lot of that is because lin was just so on target like he was just so focused there's very very few cut songs from hamilton because if he was writing it it was you know it was hit in the center of the mark way way more often than it wasn't and anything that did get cut and again there were a handful of songs were excellent pieces of writing that just didn't fit into the story we were telling so i think because of that in some way there's any of the you're trying to fix or change that sometimes comes with new collaborations was wasn't didn't even enter into the room and so i think you know what we really talked about was is is this particular scene part of the the trunk of the tree right like you wanna have the trunk of the tree and you have the branches that go out but is is this a scene that is contributing to what this overall question of our show is and and i think that you know we were so synchronized at that point that i feel like we really you know we might have i mean like we never disagreed about anything um like and and there might we might have been on well what about this or what about this but it it honestly felt a little more like we were finishing each other's sentences more than anything else um and again like i can't stress enough how he was so clear on what the story was like every time we like we put a brick out there it felt like oh that's that's a brick that's going to stay and so you we went into it with um you know consciousness of that uh sort of collective experience that we had all had and also thought all right so then we can go further because we're not spending any of our extra energy wondering where that note is coming from or what the motivation is we all know it was the same thing is this the best and most realized way to tell the story you know i interview a lot of film directors and and one of the things that i want to say is a mystery but you know they're they're filmmakers they're not all musicians so when they work with a composer there is another level that is added to the film for emotional resonance that comes through the score of the song you had all that covered here you didn't have to worry about that because this is a musical like your your music was was set from the beginning but what's interesting about theatrical directing is that some of the emotional resonance and subtext comes from the choreography and you worked with with andy blankenbueller uh on in the heights and here and it's it's it's a part that lives a little outside the script because there's so many intimate moments in the choreography that do help move the story do support the characters even help for something as simple as transitions i'm curious what you could tell us as a theater director doing something that's so choreographed because you know the chorus is on stage for most of the show and that's a that's a lot of stuff you know those are a lot of moves obviously your choreographer has it covered but tell us as a director how you kind of find some of those little moments in collaboration but also know when to step back and let let andy just do his thing part of team building is about identifying people that can find their way both on their own and collaboratively and andy's someone that was very clear because we talked through every song and every character so comprehensively that he could go off to the lab and then show me something that was formed or partially formed or still baking and i i know how to talk to andy having collaborated with him for you know 10 or 12 years at that point had to go in and try to again be encouraging and constructive and always understand from him where the thing was coming from where was that impulse coming from because i i work with andy the same way i would work with lynn it's it's a creative collaborator who is sharing and being vulnerable and so you want to be sensitive to that always in the same way that when they walk into the room where you are that they are with you as you're making and and creating and i also think that there's something that i felt was part of the fun challenge of this is because there's so much storytelling done in the bodies of the ensemble to your point throughout the entire show and they're playing 50 different characters each um you know we have the principal actors playing two um you know in the four occasions that we spoke about but you have this ensemble and from scene to scene to scene they're embodying you know completely different you know human beings so it really changed mostly how i wanted to shoot the thing when we were making the film because i knew that every time you went in tight you were missing some kind of visual storytelling whereas when you're watching on stage you're able to take in the picture because you're in a proscenium and you're almost in a master the whole time and what you do is you focus with the lighting designer and the choreographer we can tell you where to look in the theater but you have the opportunity to look somewhere else in film you control the frame so much more and so what i wanted to make sure to do was honor the way that the storytelling you know we have a surround a second level that has a huge impact on how we're telling our story in the theater and necessarily if you're in a medium or close or even like head to toe on someone shooting a film you're not going to see any of that so if you if you watch the film and i went through with my editor jonah moran you know we went through assiduously and andy was obviously very very much a part of this and made sure that we weren't missing the the way that the choreography would highlight or underscore or sometimes provide the subtext um or you know or that how those two texts would be in tension what we're saying and then what the bodies might be doing moving through space so i loved that and again you know my joke about this was on the edit was this was the only thing i'll ever do in my life where we weren't cutting for time and asking questions about moving scenes i knew exactly what the order was um and and that actually allows part of your brain to go into you know a a different you know a different room because you don't have to worry about that stuff and so that for me was how do i balance the choreographic storytelling with the lyrical and textual storytelling it's always wild when i talk to a film director because you know it it's it's a coin toss what they're going to say when i bring up rehearsal because you know essentially they're doing one minute takes you know they're trying to capture a minute's worth of dialogue let's let's be generous and say five minutes you can't blow off rehearsal in the theater because you are doing a two hour plus show how how long was the rehearsal uh when you when you opened off-broadway how long was your rehearsal period and tell us something that was really um a light bulb turning on moment for you because there's so much to discover in rehearsal what was something that you just remember really coming together in rehearsal to your point and and my joke with lynn about this is we always say this was the best rehearsed movie in the history of movies right because we've been we've been working on it with that group for a year and a half but remember many of those actors had been at vassar with us in 2013 and then we did subsequent workshops in 2014 so yeah it was like a you know it's like vanya on 42nd street or something like that you know it's like in the russian you know the russian you know like uh theater where they would rehearse for six months and then only perform for three days um so we you know we had discovery in each place and again because theater is iterative and it's and it's an accumulation that conversation we had in 2013 made it into the in the film in some way in 2016 because it might have been the thing that i had said to this actor to that actor and they sparked and took it somewhere else so i believe deeply in rehearsal i i love rehearsal and i think that one of the real revelations for me even before we got into rehearsal for the production of the public was when we did our final workshop we staged the first act and then read the second act but we did it all together in may of 2014 and that was a hundred light bulbs coming on because it was the first time that we interacted with set pieces the first time that we tried out the idea with our costume designer paul caswell of having costumes that hearken back to them even though from the you know the neck up we wanted to make sure that our character is reflected now so we were able to see that that intersection and that tension worked and also to get a sense of how the show could move because we did not have a turntable at that workshop and david koren's our set designer said i think it's a turntable but i think it's a double turntable and here's what i think it can provide and david was absolutely right and so we then instituted that when we went into rehearsal for the the production and i think that by having a turntable we have the ability in a very simple example that you could not move your feet but still travel which of course is about the movement through time that hamilton was always struggling at this is about somebody who's felt they're running out of time it keeps your actors center stage and allows them to have movement so i mean it keeps the focus going and you know you were you were directing with these turntables from corn's great set you know because the bare bones aspect of it is kind of reflexive of the off-broadway run but it but it also really works well for the show it keeps focus it feels like there isn't a backstage even though of course there is um what's fascinating to me is from what i've read you guys had a reflecting pool reveal in your off-broadway under your turntable and then it was cut for your broadway show what was the deal with that because i'm just fascinated by it and i guess it was revealed at the end right that's correct yeah so you know david korens and i would work with our other designers paul who did costumes nevin who did sound evan steinberg's sound and hal binkley who was our lighting designer and we would look at the model in 2013 and 2014 leading up 2015 and all of us i'd like to have all of my designers looking at the same thing along with our choreographer andy was there all the time as well and so we would talk about these ideas how do we create a an envelope for the show in the in the physical representation that david would make it felt like it gave us the things we needed but it did not get in the way of the propulsive nature of the storytelling the only thing that can move as fast as hamilton was light so we knew that hal binkley was going to be the person who created space for us not us flying in lots of things not lots of automation we wanted everything to be motivated by the performers meaning that they were doing all of the moving the furniture because this was about a country that was built by people by without a lot of technology so we wanted to keep a fundamental rudimentary feel to our set um and i think david has created an ingenious set that sort of doesn't in some way get the full credit it deserves because it looks so simple um but i think it's you know it's a it's a real marvel and so i feel like once we were then moving into those next conversations we thought all right well in some way this show is a monument to the past what we're doing is trying to pull the pass into the present and so i grew up in the dc area and there were lots of reflecting pools and we thought what if in the center we revealed a reflecting pool and the final image of the show used water as a way to um evoke that and so we did it for actually i think only four previews downtown we did it on the first night and we had staged it and it looked beautiful in the final image but the getting there was not quite as elegant and as soon as we did it that first performance i knew that i had to cut it but i also knew that david and his team had been working on it for a long time and it was from an idea that we had had and i wanted to respect that like let's try it a couple more times and see although i knew that it was probably not not long for this particular world and i think that the thing that i said to lynn and i said to the rest of the designers and to the companies it's asking a question at the time we don't want to be asking another question and so it felt like at that moment the revelation of that the juice wasn't worth the squeeze it was too much to get there um and it was really a vestige of an idea we have with what if we flooded the whole stage and you had the actors standing on what looked like deep water like in front of the washington monument and of course that was completely unfeasible in terms of practical application so it ultimately became this small reflecting pool and then went away and it did not travel with us uh beyond that fourth preview off broadway and there's about you know 290 people that saw the show at night so i think about 1200 people right saw that but now like 40 000 people claim to it's very funny it's like i was there when there was a reflecting pool but it was just those three or four performances ooh hey i'm jumping in really quick to remind you about backstory magazine over at backstory.net you know you can read us on a desktop or laptop or via our ipad app backstory if you've never read us before i hope you check us out we have a free issue that you could read and if you dig what you read i hope you consider becoming a subscriber and if you do you could use coupon code save five that'll save you five dollars off a one-year subscription they'll give you access to anything new that we produce and by the way issue 44 is going to be our new issue it's coming out in a few weeks it's gonna have a black widow cover a lot of great stuff in it so uh now is a perfect time to get in as a subscriber and look it would really mean a lot to me to have my youtube watchers of these zoom casts at the backstory magazine youtube page and my podcast listeners and itunes and spotify become subscribers of my passion project so thanks for considering but now without any further ado let's jump right back into our interview with director thomas kale about bringing his stage production of hamilton to life on the screen you know i want to get to the filming of it in a second but it's interesting because when you went from off broadway to broadway there were a few numbers that were cut and then kind of a revision of one last time and you would think that this thing that is selling out so popular ready to go to broadway most people would say don't touch it but it's it's good that you guys had the wherewithal to let the project continue to evolve and to be critical and constructively critical and honest about it tell us about those decisions of what was cut and why well you know most of working on theater or anything or foam or television is at a certain point you have to put your pencil down and you've run out of time no matter how much time you have right rehearsal or post-production is like closet space you use whatever you have and you always want a little bit more and so when we opened off-broadway we had to put our pencils down and there were still about 20 more things that we hadn't gotten to and then there were things that we learned through the course of watching it over and over and over again that we realized we could sharpen or deepen one last time is a great example of that it was called one last ride downtown and what we did was get a chance night in and night out to see what was playing and what wasn't playing and we realized that there was a there was an element of that as a you know as a sort of thematic idea that made sense in that moment but there was a larger gesture towards george washington that took it from just one last ride to the last time we would see him last time he would be our president and there was a there was a whiskey rebellion uh in 1794 it was squashed by hamilton and george washington who put their uniforms back on and rode out and that was in the off-broadway version and it just felt like a left turn and we didn't need to be there um and so that was excised and and lots of other things that number would change so it's just part of the natural evolution i think we have to keep on pushing each other and and yet trust that if something's not broken we don't have to put our hands on it just to say that we did but there were things we knew that we could deepen and sharpen and so we we were buoyed and encouraged by the reaction and it didn't make us trepidatious about it we weren't worried about the thing was so strong we knew we weren't going to break it we also knew this is the time to do it because once you open on broadway that is to show and there is no more work to be done and you have to put the pencil down forever well it's interesting because you know you do reference the whiskey rebellion in in in the song still be between you know jefferson and hamilton when they're having the the dueling mike's debate so it is you know there's still a trace of it mentioned in there but but right here's what's fascinating so christopher mccrory brought me out to new york in 2015 to do a q a screening of mission impossible rogue nation which was just a blast i came to new york a couple days early and this is july of 2015 and i had i had been seeing bits and pieces of what was becoming hamilton and i'm like you know i'm gonna go i'm gonna get a ticket no problem i got a 125 ticket fifth row something that you know nobody would be able to do very soon thereafter and i saw it in in late july during previews to the point where i was so blown away i went out to the lobby during intermission i'm like can i get a soundtrack can i get anything and they're like nope you know there was nothing to buy there was nothing out there right yeah i think there was a hat the soundtrack came out in september it went on to become a phenomenon what you guys did was absolutely brilliant by filming it in as you as you told me earlier i guess it was towards the end of the official first cast run in june of 2016. and and it's you know i look i love theater and i'm a subscriber to broadway hd along with disney plus of course and and look you go through some of those those those recordings on broadway hd and some are great and some are not some are just recordings it really takes something to capture a performance so when you knew that you were going to direct and you would directed some television previously what were some of the tenets that you set for yourself to accomplish in capturing hamilton on screen so that it became an emotional piece of art which you truly were able to do which is rare for a stage production versus just a recording and how many nights did you film it over so we filmed it over uh three days so a sunday a monday and a tuesday the 26th 27th and 28th of june of 2016. so on the sunday we filmed a matinee with an audience and then we did some pickups on stage where we got on camera i think we might have like wait for it that night and then the next day we were in without an audience and that's where we had steadicam in and we had our dolly and we could have a crane and we did like 11 or 12 of the numbers there's 46 total numbers and so we knew that we would only have to um uh we only be able to pick and choose so we did that and then we filmed a little bit on the tuesday morning without an audience and then one more performance on tuesday night and then that was it so all of that was captured in that period of time and as you know having that perimeter made us more creative like that was the time we had allotted to shoot it so it forces you to prioritize and really think about what you want to try to capture and we knew we weren't going to go back and reshoot because seven days later 10 days later many people in that cast were going to be gone not to return so what i thought was how do we use this opportunity to give everybody the same seat that's what film can do and so i really was excited to work with jacqueline quinn who was our dp and think about how to honor the show honor the fact that it is happening live so there's a lot of sustained takes it's it's a show that we shot with six cameras on the sunday then we did the specialty stuff and then we we had three fixed cameras also so there were nine total cameras on the sunday the tuesday and we changed all of the locations of the the six shooters on the tuesday but kept this three fixed which was an overhead like a reverse and then that one that's that's a reverse like when uh when george washington enters like that's that you know that sort of fixed camera so really 66. it was one of the things that you'd already accomplished as a director with such fantastic transitions between your numbers so part of part of your job was already done you know editorially in camera just by having these fantastic transitions but i'm curious about your editing process because you're taking sound from night one and putting it sometimes with picture from night two or stuff like that how long was the editing process because most people think that you're you're capturing one show but as you said of course you're getting steadicam when an audience isn't there and you're capturing these very intimate up close and personal moments what were the challenges during editing significant um but as i mentioned not time and not order and not story so to take that off of your brain allowed you to just sift and sort i mean think about how many you know if we did three or four takes of 13 numbers and then had the two live performances the multiplicity gets high of like how many options you actually have and so jonah moran and i sat down really starting pretty short in july i probably first started like sitting with him in like august or september of that year and then i would just go and check in with him i mean at that point i was putting up another production of hamilton and and then casting for london so i had sort of four versions of it dancing in my head right there was the one captured in amber that we were looking at um you know from the original company and by the time we were editing it you know five six seven eight of them had already left so that was already a recent you know a recent memory and then we just took our time because we were making it independently we didn't have to we didn't have to adhere to any sort of timeline i think i think by the end of the year we got to a rough cut of act one and showed it to lynn and he was very excited and encouraging and then over the next six months after that uh into 2017-ish we finished and then i would say we probably had something to share like at the top of 18. but again like i was in there twice a week or then there would be three days i was available like you know we jonah was cutting cutting cutting and i was sort of flying around and would come in and watch and sit with him and then we would have some experience we had real chunks of time where like i was there for a week or you know there for a couple weeks um and then we uh we had something that we felt was representative of what the show was um and then we went back once we knew we were gonna come out um on disney plus and did a lot of fine tuning the show was basically sound you know like the sound was pretty locked in as was color but this was in like the absolute early days of the pandemic where this is actually the ipad now that i've figured out my eye line this is the ipad that i finished doing my color correcting for hamilton and one of the things was amazing is you know we'd be on the line with our color corrector in new york i'd be here my editor would have a different one in my dp at home and we'd be talking on phones or face timing and that's how we finish color correcting because this monitor is actually an exact match and then sound was a little trickier because you're how do you do atmos with headphones um but we figured that out too um and so we did that sort of final push um in the beginning of the pandemic so like um april may i think we had to turn it in like may 22nd to then be qc to come out on july 3rd most people consider hamilton just a complete success they think it was easy street all along i think it's important to remind people some of your toughest moments and i'm curious both in your stage productions but also in the filming of it what was your toughest scene as a director on the stage what was what was the time where just everything went wrong during a performance and you're like there's all we could do is just get through it how long is this podcast um especially also while filming it what was your toughest thing to crack as a director too so i just want to sneak both in there the stage and of course the filming of it as well yeah i mean i think in some way the helpless satisfied section that's sweet is probably the most complex obviously it's a tremendous amount of choreography and so it's something you know where you know andy's uh andy's physical pattern and physical vocabulary was really driving that but to to learn the first one without the second one especially we were doing it that initial time so it's not like there was anything to refer back to and we were we were learning it not on a turntable so they had to learn it in two different ways and they'd be like oh but now actually you're not here you're here that was pretty mind-bendy um and and it always is even with the turntable but that first time was in particular and i think that you know that sequence when angelica stops time also sets up the final duel that's our bullet time right that's our reference to the matrix and so those those two moments at that point we're sort of just proceeding in a linear way and then we stop and we rewind and we go back so i wanted to make sure to try to capture both of those numbers in the film version in a way that honored the stage version because i know for a lot of people it it was something that we've never we've never done like on like the grammys or the tony's that section like we always want people to experience it in the envelope of the show whereas the opening number pulls out a little more readily um and feels like a something you can you know put in a different arena and it will still work on its own but those two numbers need each other and so what i wanted to make sure to do was find a visual language for satisfied that felt filmic and it's actually probably one of the more stylized editorial sections when we go inside her head it gets rather non-literal and in a way like that was more subjective than a lot of the other editorial patterns that we had found and it was a big swing um in the context of this you know particular piece but it felt like it was it was an opportunity and and i i think it paid off so that was something we spent a lot of time talking about that particular transition from helpless and satisfied it certainly paid off both on the stage and and on the screen you know people forget that it was really a communal experience when it came out on july 4th of 2020 on disney plus we were in the pandemic everybody was at home you could just you could just hear like different households like i was i was out on a walk and i would hear different people watching it as i was walking down the streets here in los angeles and it was it was it was really wonderful i mean you broke all records with the musical it it sold for 75 million to disney plus uh and you guys were just sitting on it i know i believe it was originally going to come out in 2021 so that your stage shows had more time to kind of permeate in the world but you know moving it up by year just a genius decision by disney plus it was really something everybody needed and coming out in 2020 especially during election year was fantastic too i'm curious looking back on it what was your biggest lesson of this film adaptation what was something that that really stuck with you in which it was your final recording of that cast so there was there was a sense of closure but it was also your last time as a director to do something with them what was a moment that you're really proud of that you got on film that only you would know about we we wouldn't we wouldn't i appreciate you also acknowledging the partnership of disney throughout all of this who you know pulled a movie up 14 months you know very quickly and just made the the platform and the resources so available to us to to pull this off and you know i made this as a love letter to our company and to our crew i really did and so the one of the things that i um you know i really um and dig about the movie and was something i was actually probably as excited for the cast to see as the actual film because none of them had ever seen themselves in it even if they'd seen a production was the credit sequence i just i thought it was really important for our show which is so ensemble-based to let everybody be recognized and so when we had a chance to share with the company it it just it it felt um it felt very uh gratifying to see that our company every member of our company saw in in that gesture hopefully how much we appreciate and acknowledge their contribution because it was essential every single person on stage is essential and sometimes film credits don't always make you feel like that you know because they're like squished into a thing or they have to go there before like there's like an ad for a car um and so we really wanted to take our time with that and let that and let that live and be appreciated and and i think that was that was fantastic as well the other thing for anybody that's watching the credits that's kind of revelatory is there is a lineage of music rights revealed in there in which the songs are playing and it says inspired by a bit from this song and like you know it's it's all laid out i hadn't realized some of the the the traces that were acknowledged in the credits that was fascinating you know i i guess the way to end on in the heights came out a couple weeks ago and it was just a beautiful film adaptation and you know i know you lived with it for so long it was probably fascinating for you to see it through someone else's lens could there ever be a version of hamilton like that down the line in which it's it's shot outdoors um on locations and and has that kind of hyper real feel i absolutely love this production because it captured the spark in the energy of this broadway production of course i think it could lend to other things as well and i'm just curious if that's ever been discussed with you guys i mean everything has been discussed with you know every possible form of this um and obviously that's a conversation for down the line i know that for us i'm not trying to kick the can on it too much because the short answer is like that is possible theoretically like who knows um but what we wanted to do was try to honor both film and theater simultaneously in this and and i think this felt to us like the the the best way we could capture what it felt like to be in the building in june of 2016 and to memorialize that company that cast you know i look back constantly you know at at that time and think i can't believe we were all in the same building like just every single person in that company the people off stage were so talented and and just like you know the finest at what they do and this show brought us all together for that moment in time and so i'm just i'm really proud that we were able to to preserve that and and share it well look this is not a recording by any means this is a moving living breathing experience and you brought the stage to the world so i want to congratulate you on such a great film adaptation of of hamilton and thank you for being so generous with your time today now well i really enjoyed talking to you and you clearly are a person that loves theater and film in uh in equal amounts and so i knew we were going to get along so thanks for making time thanks man i can't wait to see what you do next and that's how the q a went down special thanks again to director thomas kale for being so generous with his time and talking about bringing hamilton from stage to screen and of course he is eligible to be emmy nominated for the amazing direction that he did and folks you know while you're surfing around online i hope you also remember to check out backstory magazine over at backstory.net you could read us on a desktop or laptop or via our ipad app backstory if you've never read us before you could read our free issue and test drive us and if you like what you read you could use discount code save five to save five dollars off a one-year subscription to backstory magazine it's a perfect time to get in because you know issue 44 which is gonna be our black widow issue is coming out in a few weeks and uh it's gonna be a great issue and um look there's there's a lot of things that you could explore about our past issues and our archive over at backstory.net and learn more about us so it would really mean a lot to me to have my itunes and spotify podcast listeners and my youtube watchers of the zoom cast over the backstory magazine youtube page become subscribers so thanks for considering the q a with jeff goldsmith podcast is a copyright of unlikely films incorporated in 2021 all rights reserved and you know folks if you want to get a hold of me you could reach out anytime you can find me on social media i'm yo goldsmith on twitter and also i run the backstory underscore mag account for backstory magazine on twitter i use those same handles for instagram as well i'm not on instagram as often i gotta get on there more and there's gonna be a posting of some really nice inside art from the magazine as well but you could find me as joe goldsmith on instagram and backstory underscore mag running that account on instagram as well and uh you know you could write in if you want to backstory letters at gmail.com i promise to not respond to you immediately uh it just takes some time to sift through that inbox so i apologize about that but you'll get a response one of these days i also have a facebook fan page i don't use it that often you could always connect there too look i'm jeff goldsmith the publisher of backstory magazine and the host of the q a thanking you for tuning in and telling you to stay out of trouble till next week

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Length: 53min 3sec (3183 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 26 2021