Few editors working today have shaped modern movie musicals as profoundly as Myron Kerstein. An Oscar nominee for “Wicked: Part One”, Kerstein has spent the last decade defining how contemporary audiences experience cinematic song and story, from the propulsive intimacy of “tick, tick… BOOM!” to the sweeping emotion of “In the Heights”. His work fuses character-first storytelling with a deep understanding of performance, rhythm, and the shared breath between actor and audience, an approach that reaches its most ambitious scale yet in Jon M. Chu’s conclusion to the Oz saga, “Wicked: Part Two”.
Picking up after the dramatic events of the first film, “Wicked: Part Two” reenters Oz at a moment of reckoning. Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo), now a fugitive and mythic figurehead for rebellion, crosses paths again with Glinda (Ariana Grande), whose ascent to public adoration masks deep conflict and painful truths about power. The film charts the unraveling and reshaping of iconic relationships, Boq, Fiyero, Nessa, and The Wizard, while building toward the legendary “For Good,” the emotional apex of Gregory Maguire’s story and Stephen Schwartz’s music.
With tornadoes, revolutions, political machinations, magical transformations, and two of the most vocally gifted performers on the planet at its center, “Part Two” is both bigger in scale and more intimate in feeling than its predecessor.
For Kerstein, assembling the final chapter meant navigating personal and artistic extremes. As he candidly shares, he was displaced by the California fires even as his work on “Wicked: Part One” garnered attention for his awards. While sifting through 250 hours of footage, he often edited remotely from a home he was unable to return to, a surreal period he describes as “a time capsule, bittersweet and healing,” all while the team raced to deliver two films that demanded technical fluidity and emotional precision.
In our conversation, Kerstein dives into the creative endurance required to shape two interconnected features, including the yearlong intermission separating their releases and the unique challenge of re-entering a world that audiences already carry in their hearts. He breaks down how he and Chu crafted the propulsive opening sequence on the Yellow Brick Road, the horror-tinged transformation of Boq into the Tin Man, and the film’s careful tonal calibration as it shifts from spectacle to heartbreak.
Kerstein also takes us inside the construction of “For Good,” the film’s most beloved number, a scene he approached not as a musical set piece, but as a farewell between two souls. From experimenting with structure, silence, and reaction shots to the emotional impact of Cynthia Erivo’s and Ariana Grande’s performances, he explains how the team built a moment designed to stop time.
What follows is a candid, generous exploration of craft, collaboration, and the emotional architecture behind one of the year’s most anticipated films.