The long-awaited film adaptation of “Wicked” is finally here.

This week, “Wicked” opened the gates to a cinematic Oz, giving audiences a closer look at the Broadway giant than ever before.

Many longtime fans of the Broadway musical are bursting with questions about how director Jon M. Chu translated the show for the screen.

The Deseret News spoke with Chu on Friday and asked him about his process, including how he cast beloved characters and why he split “Wicked” into two parts. This is what he told us.

This discussion has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Desert news: What does the film adaptation of ‘Wicked’ offer audiences that the Broadway production doesn’t?

Jon M. Chu: I think cinema is a very different medium than the stage, and I was lucky enough to see the show when it was still in San Francisco, before it ever reached New York, and so I was kind of patient zero, and I got a few good seats because we had season tickets. And I remember being blown away at how cinematic it felt.

We can bring the audience closer than ever before, not even just in the third row. We’re allowed to keep you two inches from their faces. And I think in a movie like this, which has so much nuance about relationships and good versus evil… that makes a huge difference.

So I hope you get the dynamic of what it feels like to see a cinematic experience, but you also get the intimacy of being with two women you’re going to fall in love with… , even though their fates may be separate .

DN: What were some of the major challenges you faced in adapting “Wicked” for the screen, and what were your favorite assets?

JMC: The biggest challenge is that there are a lot of people for whom this means a lot of different things – whether it’s “The Wizard of Oz,” L. Frank Baum’s book, or the 1939 movie (“The Wizard of Oz”) or the book of “Wicked”…or the musical itself that has been around for 20 years.

So for me, I had to balance those ideas, and I really had to protect my brain from the influence of too many people telling me what it should be. And then really tap into my instincts of what made me fall in love with the musical in the first place.

The reason I fell in love with it is because I have a history with Wizard of Oz. It was a fairytale that my parents, who were from China and came here with five children, taught us that America was a great place and that we could dream as big as we wanted, so I wanted to keep that.

I’m really proud that we’re also trying to dig through and get to these truths in this fairy tale, which hopefully generations will see.

DN: What prompted your decision to split ‘Wicked’ into two parts?

JMC: It was kind of a no-brainer. Once you start getting into it, there are a lot of holes in the plot that a movie audience just wouldn’t buy into. There are a lot of holes in Elphaba and Glinda’s emotional journey that you just accept on stage… so we had to clear the decks a bit.

What we realized is that you completely change ‘Wicked’ – you take songs out and you really condense it, and it’s not going to be the ‘Wicked’ that we all love, or you’re going to expand it and make each thing the best version be his thing. …I’m really excited because it allows us to find Elphaba and Glinda where they are and really delve into those ideas as they become best friends.

If movie one is about choices, then movie two is about the consequences of those choices, and how it gets even more complicated… and you get the time and space to really play with that.

DN: How did you approach casting beloved characters like Elphaba and Glinda?

JMC: That was really difficult. Ultimately, we knew that if we don’t find the right Elphaba and the right Glinda, you just don’t make the movie. No matter how much work we did before, they were the center. You had to have someone who could pilot this ship, who could imbue them with so much humanity and still be the characters we know, but in a new way that we’ve never experienced before.

Cynthia Erivo came in wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and she sang ‘Wizard and I’ – it blew us out of the water, words we’ve heard a million times meant something completely different came out of her mouth. And she can be very small and very young, and then she can be extraordinary and iconic.

The same goes for Ariana Grande. We were like, “There’s no way (Grande) can rid herself of this character she’s playing, because that’s probably her.” And what we realized is, no, that’s actually not her. That’s a role that she’s playing, and that she’s a person who’s actually also finding her own life at the same time that she would be shooting this film, and Glinda gave her a vehicle in which she could express those things about what it means to live. in a bubble.

DN: What did it take to get Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel on board for their cameos?

JMC: We knew we wanted to involve them in some way. We all had different ideas, and we didn’t want to present them until we had a really good idea for them.

Then Stephen Schwartz (the executive producer) and I were talking and we had a section in Wizomania where we needed some backstory on The Grimmerie and Oz… and (Schwartz said), “What if we made it with them ?” and it was just something brilliant.

So we wrote it because… they were playing the wise women in this fake play in the middle of Emerald City. And it was just too good to have them play the most famous actors in Emerald City. And as soon as we presented that to them, they were in.