‘Wicked’ editor Myron Kerstein knew he had to get the Ozdust Ballroom scene right

Myron Kerstein was completing the edit on another musical, “Tick… Tick… Boom!”, for which he received an Oscar nomination, when Jon M. Chu called about their third collaboration: “Wicked.” It would be their third film together — well, technically third and fourth if you count both parts — after “Crazy Rich Asians” and “In the Heights.”

“When somebody tells you that you’re going to do a film that’s going to be really challenging, at first you’re like, ‘Yay!’ And then you’re like, ‘Yay, this is going to be very challenging.’ And it was,” Kerstein tells Gold Derby during our Meet the Experts: Editing panel. “It was an eight-month shoot, 155 days between two movies, 250 hours of footage. Jon jokingly said to me, ‘We’ve been training for this all our lives.’ Between the musical films I’ve worked on and just indies and other musicals, like ‘Hedwig and the Angry Inch,’ then of course ‘In the Heights’ and ‘Tick… Tick… Boom!’, I at least felt like I was in a good place to at least start working on something this big and I, of course, had an amazing team behind me.” Watch the video interview above.

“Wicked: Part 1” covers the first act of the Broadway musical, in which Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) and Glinda (Ariana Grande) go from mandatory roommates to enemies to best friends before separating after they learn the truth about the Wizard (Jeff Goldblum). Pacing the pair’s relationship was of utmost importance.

“Jon said we were making ‘The ‘Wizard of Oz’ meets ‘The Lord of the Rings’ and then the greatest love story that’s ever been told.’ I was balancing the fantasy elements of this epic, but at the end of the day, it was about this relationship. It’s really challenging to have a relationship develop so quickly,” Kerstein says. “And then by the end of the first movie, you’re rooting for both of them, you’re feeling heartbreak. So you have to balance how long should they be enemies, when do they come together as friends. When they get torn apart, does that feel earned?”

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The “centerpiece” of the film and when the duo’s relationship changes is in the Ozdust Ballroom. Wearing the pointy hat that Glinda had given her as a joke, Elphaba is once again ostracized by her classmates and performs an emotional dance by herself before Glinda joins in.

“We always felt like if that scene didn’t work, the rest of the movie basically fell apart,” Kerstein says. “Because if we didn’t feel the heartache and feeling Elphaba feeling ostracized and bullied and made fun on, and if we didn’t feel how alone she was yet she was trying to find some power, and if we didn’t feel that moment when Glinda makes this gesture towards her and they’re bonding because of that, the rest of the movie would just not work. Jon shot 10-minute takes of oners of basically the scene from start to finish — and by the way, every take made me cry the same was as the finished scene — so it was really challenging and I didn’t even know where to begin because every take had a lot of resonance and felt emotional. Trying to construct something that intimate in the middle of this fantasy and being really bold about silence and feeling really uncomfortable, ultimately I think worked and hopefully the audience feels the same way.”

Kerstein has already made a first cut of the second film, out next year, but it was put on the backburner while the team focused on first one. “It was sort of like block shooting television where I was given two different episodes,” he says of editing two films at once. “So I had different projects to help the assistants organize the two movies, but I was basically bouncing around two complete different tones, and so that was challenging to know where I was going any given moment. Of course, I had the musical from Broadway to help guide me a bit. But I kind of had to put that away because it’s our own adaptation, so I just tried to cut scenes the way I thought Jon would want to tell it dramatically. He gives me a lot of freedom in the edit to approach the footage any way I want.”