Hundreds of extras.
Thunder on the forecast.
And only three days to nail it.
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Yo, if I won the lotto, tomorrow … Usnavis friend Benny (Corey Hawkins) starts riffing.
96 Gs aint enough to retire, Usnavi points out.
Cmon, Ill have enough to knock your ass off its axis!
Youll have a knapsack full of jack after taxes, Usnavi counters.
The main characters melodies layer over each other in counterpoint, the rest of the poolgoers joining in.
In the water, swimmers break into choreographed routines.
The camera chases a dancer doing a flip into the pool and ducks below the water.
Each of the songs inIn the Heightstakes off along its own visual gambit.
This is a big spectacle, but in the end, this is about yearning.
What would these people dream about?
We had countless four-hour meetings to talk about what era this was in, Chu says.
Its happening what do you do now?
Still, they know their position is tenuous.
Miranda says he chose the number 96,000 for very specific reasons.
That holds true today, he says.
I always saw 96th Street as this economic dividing line as a child.
It also has its own rhythm, just saying it aloud, like, Maria or Oklahoma.
It makes you wanna sing it.
Now he sings about Tiger Woods instead.
We knew we had a lot of scenes at that intersection, Chu says.
It was the entrance to the Olympic-sized Highbridge Pool.
It was immense, Chu says.
I had never seen a pool like that before.
So thats where we started, and all our producers jaws dropped.
Next idea: Get the biggest crane possible.
The sequence offers a tour of New York dance styles.
In the pool locker rooms, there are B-boys and B-girls breaking, a style born in the Bronx.
During Sonnys verse, hes surrounded by dancers doing contorted moves based in FlexN, which developed in Brooklyn.
To fill out the blocks of dancers, he hired experts in each style.
You could see people teaching each other stuff on the side.
We created a community at the pool surrounded by a real community of dancers.
Scott, Chu, and Brooks ran into problems that could only arise from a water-based dance sequence.
We had about 20 versions of that choreography.
The weather came with scattered thunderstorms, and the cast and crew had to work around their interruptions.
(They color corrected the sky and pool in postproduction to make it look sunnier.)
That made the moves a lot more challenging.
Whatever the dancer award for making it work is, they should get that.
Even then, she and her inner tube would start to drift out of frame.
So Jon jumped in the pool and held me in place for the entire shot, she says.
Its just the shot of Anthony Ramos splashing in the pool at the end.
We lit him as much as we could and then visual effects helped us get as close as possible.
But if days were long, there was also a sense of camaraderie.
One of the most special moments on set for me happened while shooting that, remembers Ramos.
At that moment, it was just like were doing something thats way bigger than us.
Well, he did that often, says Chu.
He did it whenever anything felt hard.
He was our spiritual leader.
Whats the 2.0?
They also extended some of the transitions and built out the songs climactic conclusion.
Then we had to outdo ourselves, again, on film, says Lacamoire.
It wasnt about a character choice.
That level of finesse.
We werent watching their faces, and their faces were the thing to watch, Chu says.
The song closes with the big reveal of the winning lottery numbers.
In the stage musical, we learn who won soon afterward, but the movie delays that discovery.
As for those winning numbers: 5-7-16-26-33.
Chu, whose wife was pregnant with their second child during the shoot, slipped in some special meanings.
Thirty-three is my favorite number, he says.
And the baby is due on the 27th.
They named him Jonathan Heights Chu.
