“Wicked” editor Myron Kerstein is no strangers to editing musicals, having previously worked on “In the Heights” and “tick, tick…BOOM!” Unlike the other two films, “Wicked” just happens to be the biggest film that Kerstein has worked on by far, requiring two rough assembly cuts ready to go two weeks after principal photography had wrapped.
Based on the hit musical, “Wicked” works as an origin story and prequel to “The Wizard of Oz”. Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande star as Elphaba and Glinda, respectively. They meet at Shiz University in the Land of Oz where they become unlikely friends. Upon meeting the Wizard, they depart on separate paths–Elphaba gets othered while Glinda falls in line with Oz and his propaganda.
Kerstein previously moved in with filmmaker Lin-Manuel Miranda while editing the Oscar-nominated “tick, tick…BOOM!” This time around, he didn’t move in with filmmaker Jon M. Chu but they did set up a remote Avid in Chu’s backyard.
Kerstein knew upon signing onto the film that it was going to be split into two, recalling how the filming process was similar to television with a block production system. He’d get dailies from one film and then the next day, there would be dailies from the other film.
“It’s a pretty overwhelming experience to show your director two movies back-to-back, a day apart,” Kerstein explains. “It was important to us right away to show him what he has in the can, and then to roll up our sleeves and get started.”
Kerstein spoke with Awards Focus about the similarities of the film production with television, the scenes snuck into the trailer from part II, how the writer’s and actor’s strikes impacted filming for “Defying Gravity”, and the most challenging sequence to edit.
Wicked is available to purchase through digital retailers and is currently playing in theaters.
Awards Focus: It’s so nice to talk with you again. How are you doing?
Myron Kerstein: I’m hanging in there. What a journey it’s been since the last time I talked to you, maybe a couple of years ago. I’m really excited about how people are responding to the film after being in the trenches for a couple of years.
AF: You didn’t have to move into Jon’s house this time around, did you?
Kerstein: (Laughs) No, but we did set up a remote Avid in his little hut in his backyard just in case he ever wanted to cut at his house. We spent a couple of days there. Anywhere I can. If he was like, go edit in London, I’m gonna edit in London, go edit in my backyard, I will. Whatever it takes.
AF: “Wicked” was phenomenal. Seeing as how this was my first “Wicked”experience, I’m not liking that I have to wait a year for the second part!
Kerstein: I think the idea was that if we could make it feel like a big “Empire Strikes Back” cliffhanger, then people will wanna return to the theaters in a year and it’ll be a nice tasty emotional experience when you come back.
AF: I didn’t realize just how much it resonates with the Jewish experience, especially the 1930s, until watching the film.
Kerstein: There’s definitely themes, of course, in that Winnie and Stephen—Stephen Schwartz wrote about 25 years ago—that still has resonance in the past and in the present. I think that history repeats itself and we have to be cognizant of people seeing each other differently and how that resonates, I think, is really timely.
AF: At what point after signing onto the film did you find out that they were splitting “Wicked” into two films?
Kerstein: I knew right away. I was given two scripts that I read right away. I read the first script and when I finished it, I burst out into tears. I felt a real impact on how they were dividing the two movies and how the first one felt like an origin story for the Wicked Witch of the West and establishing this love story between these two women. And the second story, it’s about consequences, what happens with with the choices that we make, a bit of a cautionary tale, and also, a heartbreak in telling the greatest love story ever told, as Alice Brooks would say, and just presenting something that felt very epic and grand in the tradition of “The Sound of Music” or “Wizard of Oz” itself.
AF: I didn’t watch the trailers until after watching the film. There are a few shots in the trailer featuring Dorothy and gang visiting the Wizard that I don’t recall seeing in the film. Was that ever going to be in the first film or is this one of those cases where scenes were shot for the second film and they somehow ended up in the first look?
Kerstein: I haven’t asked them about this but I think the marketing strategy was to maybe give whoever doesn’t know this IP at all a look at what the whole “Wicked” universe might look like and so there’s definitely some easter eggs in there that are from the second movie. They were never supposed to be in the first movie and in fact, there’s shots that are that we were toying with in the first movie that was scripted and shot for the first movie that didn’t end up making it in.
AF: I’m curious now what those shots were, if you’re allowed to say.
Kerstein: Well, there’s a particular line read that there was definitely some debate about when Glinda says, you’re green. Everyone has asked me, “why didn’t you stick to that line read?” Well, in a trailer, you can cut things at a certain way that I can’t edit in a film. I happen to particularly like the deadpan nature of the line read we ended up using in the film. There’s certain things that they do in trailers that you’re like, err or okay, they have the ability to do what they need to do. I have a different needs for the film and so it is what it is.
AF: At what point did you have a rough assembly cut ready to go for the first film?
Kerstein: Two weeks after the shoot was finished, I had an assembly for Jon. In fact, we had two films for Jon to watch, not just the first film. It was good to give him a complete idea of what the whole story was. It’s a pretty overwhelming experience to show your director two movies back-to-back, a day apart. It was important to us right away to show him what he has in the can, and then to roll up our sleeves and get started.
AF: Were both films were shot back-to-back or were bits and pieces being shot at the same time?
Kerstein: Yeah, the same time. It was very similar to block shooting in television where I was shooting two different episodes. One day, I would get part one, the next day I’d get part two and I’d be scratching my head. It’s like, wow, these characters are really—they’re really struggling here. And then, the next day, you have “Popular” or something like that. It was really amazing to see how incredible these actors were and how Jon was as far as keeping the whole story together. It’s really interesting as an editor when you get this gigantic story arc. I had some experience cutting television so it was helpful to understand the big picture, having done that before. It was a lot to tackle for sure. We had 250 hours of footage between the two movies over eight months, 155 days of shooting. It was quite a feat, the footage coming in.
AF: Did you stay busy during the strikes when they couldn’t film?
Kerstein: Yeah. We had filmed everything in the first movie except “Defying Gravity,” which was really frustrating because that was ending our movie. It was our finale, that was the thing we’re building up to. We had a handful of scenes that we hadn’t shot for the second movie. What we decided to do was just, we were just going to cut the movie as if we had all the footage and it gave us a lot of time to understand what we needed for “Defying Gravity” itself and also if we needed to pick up anything else.
It was kind of a blessing in a way that we had extra time to get back in there and really understand what we needed and put it together emotionally and from a storytelling and dramatic point of view. But yes, we never stopped, we just pedal to the metal. Let’s get a film as much as we can get done until the strike is over.
AF: What sequence in the first film provided the biggest challenge from an editing perspective?
Kerstein: “Defying Gravity” was definitely pretty challenging as far as the starting and stopping nature of it, the emotional stakes, that it feel like a finale, flying monkeys, these huge sort of action sequences sort of intertwined with it, live vocals.
I would say the hardest piece of the puzzle was actually the opening of the movie. It’s one thing to have a finale which, in your gut, you know that with someone like Cynthia Erivo singing it and Jon directing it and time to really kind of put it together, it was gonna work as complicated as it was.
The opening, “No One Mourns the Wicked,” is not a banger song. It’s very emotional, it’s very dark. It’s got a lot of backstory, flashbacks in it. For whoever doesn’t know “The Wizard of Oz”, you need to make sure you give them enough information that they’re not completely lost. It was a real puzzle. We were breaking that thing apart and putting it back together again, all the way up to the last months of the edit and trying to get that right to make it feel like a grand big opening that felt, even though it was dark and emotional, that it still felt satisfying. It just took a lot of time, patience, and willing to just sort of tear things apart again and try again.
AF: Of course, going into the film, I stayed away from Wikipedia as much as I could so as to not read up on the plot. When I saw that brief clip of them walking the yellow brick road, I’m like, did they just borrow that directly from “The Wizard of Oz”? And then I saw where Dorothy, of course, has her name in the credits.
Kerstein: Yeah, there’s some things from the Frank L. Baum books that we stole from. Of course, the iconic characters from the film. Of course, we want to be able to hint at these things, part of the larger story, to understand that this is a prequel, an origin story, and that we’re leading to “The Wizard of Oz.” It’s so nice to be able to be able to to give those little easter eggs to the audience right away.
AF: Where did things currently stand on the second film as far as post-production?
Kerstein: We have an advanced rough assembly of it. I worked on it a little bit more after my first cut of the movie. I had brought on this great editor, Tatiana Riegel, to help me on the second movie with the assembly. She helped put it together, then she left and I worked on it a little bit more and showed both versions to the studio. We put it to sleep while we worked on the first movie for seven months. We just cracked it open again right before we went on a hiatus in November. We’ll come back to it and it’ll be a race to the finish, giving Jon his full cut and testing it as much as we can with audiences, and just try to get a handle of what the expectations were after people have seen so much of the first movie. The reaction to it and trying to get VFX started. All the things that you need to try to get going on a film of this scale.
AF: Given that you’ve edited quite a few musicals in a row now, which one would you say has been the biggest challenge by far?
Kerstein: Oh, it’s definitely “Wicked”. The scale of it is so massive in comparison to “In the Heights” and “tick, tick…Boom!” It’s a musical on steroids between the world-building, the CG animals, the character arcs, the live singing, just having so many balls in the air comparatively to those two movies. It was just a huge difference in the swing we were taking. It was good to have those experiences with those other films. Otherwise, I would not have been ready for a film like “Wicked”. I had the skillset of cutting a musical and then I needed to then develop new skills for learning how to cut big VFX action scenes, which I really hadn’t ever done before.
AF: When it comes to editing musicals, is it easier when they’re singing live on set or do you find it easier editing when they’re singing to pre-records?
Kerstein: I don’t think it’s ever easy. It’s really difficult. There isn’t much of a difference between somebody who’s singing to pre-records and someone singing live. I respond to the footage in the same way—what affects me emotionally, what do I laugh at, what do I feel tells the best story dramatically, what are the best shots, etc. If it’s performance driven, if it’s an expression done to pre-record or sung live, then it’s going to go in the movie. Treating the vocals like it’s dialogue so if they’re saying something in just a dramatic or comedic scene with just dialogue, it would be the same way I made choices with the live singing.
However, there’s certain things about live singing where sometimes they’re doing live singing to a pre-record, sometimes they’re doing it to a live piano that’s playing along with them. I have to have some sense of understanding how things work rhythmically. If it was just a pre-record track that was just straight on a musical grid, that takes a little bit of experimentation, a lot of experimentation, and then leaning on my music editors to help me say, this doesn’t feel right. They’re like, well, you’re off a half a bar or four frames or three frames or then just trying to help me find my way if I get lost in it. The song’s can be really complex with live singing, ensemble backing them up, and then these big orchestra bits. It’s all hard, but the approach is basically the same.