IN THE HEIGHTS
Director Jon M. Chu follows up his all-conquering romcom smash hit with another vibrant summer movie that brings minority stories into the mainstream
Jon M. Chu, director of the Lin-manuel Miranda musical that isn’t Hamilton, on how he’s not throwing away his shot.
In 2018, Crazy rich asians lived up to its title: a big, splashy studio romcom with an all-asian cast, that racked up fat stacks of box office cash. now that film’s director, Jon M. Chu, is back with In The Heights, a big-screen adaptation of Lin-manuel Miranda’s preHamilton stage show, set to bring a similar jolt of life to the movie musical.
Set in the predominantly Latino-american community of Washington Heights in new York, the all-singing, all-dancing story of gentrification, generations and American dreams connected with Chu years before his smash-hit romcom. “I’d never seen anything that spoke to me at such a level,” he recalls of the stage show. When a version of the movie script came his way, he took notice. “It became very clear that I knew how to tell this story,” he says. “And then when I did Crazy rich asians, the representation part of it became very clear, too. I learned how powerful those details can be.
Asians see [Crazy rich asians] and say, ‘I know the smell of that dish,’ but other people who didn’t know could say, ‘That’s my lasagne, that’s my ravioli.’”
With the crazy rich box office receipts on his side, Chu was once again empowered to tell a culturally specific story the way it should be told: shot on location in Washington Heights, with a Latino-american cast led by a Star Is Born and original Hamilton cast member Anthony Ramos, and all within a mainstream American studio movie. “I used the Crazy rich asians card so many times,” says Chu. “It took more time, it took more money, it took many rounds of seeing actors. That extra effort is important — lighting darker skin, working with hair that is curly and big. We took the time to re-light, to move the camera. We put that upfront from the beginning, and Warner Bros. understood.”
If anything, In The Heights — about a vibrant immigrant community facing the pressures of gentrification, a rising tide of rent and questioning the true meaning of ‘home’ — has only become more relevant in Trump’s America, over a decade on from its Broadway debut. Just as Crazy rich asians blasted the dormant romcom genre into the 21st century,
In The Heights is a none-more-now musical. “Art is made when it’s supposed to be made,” Chu concurs. That he is the filmmaker behind it is its own success story. “The American Dream I was taught was, it doesn’t matter where you’re from, if you love what you do and work hard, you can do anything,” he says. “This idea in recent years that that doesn’t exist? no, I lived it. I’m in the most American business in the world, the Hollywood studio system. That dream is real. Through this story of family and community, we can show that to the world. It’s the perfect moment for this to be made.”