It Won’t Be Long Now: How In the Heights Finally Made the Leap From Stage to Screen

As for handing the keys over to Chu, director of such crowd-pleasers as Step Up 2: The Streets and Crazy Rich Asians, Lacamoire said it was actually a great thing to see the production they knew inside and out through fresh eyes, someone who “respected the material but also had a clear vision of what he wanted it to be.”

Chu, who next is helming the big-screen adaptation of Broadway mega-hit Wicked, seemed to be “walking on eggshells, at least in the beginning,” Sherman recalled, before the director was sure “that we believed in his vision as much as he did.”

“And then once I think he figured that out and we started to roll, like both as a film and on film, he loved having our input and he loved us being there,” the producer said. “And then it all just became—one of the great things about In the Heights is, like Lac had said at the beginning, like once you kind of get into it, you just become part of this fabric of this family. And Jon just became that guy, and he was our faithful leader.” 

Chu told Variety in a recent interview, “When you are trying to make stories that change what we’ve seen before, you can get caught in the small things. But you try to do as much as you can, to be as truthful as you can. And the rest, other people are going to fill. We got to crack it open a little bit.” (And for further guidance, Chu had the note Miranda playfully wrote on the director’s copy of the script: “Don’t f–k this up.”)

Sherman admitted to E! News, “To take notes and things from a guy who you’ve never worked for, it was a very interesting process. But [Jon] was so confident—and I don’t mean that as a negative thing—but he knew what he wanted and he was very specific with us, and he fought us when he wanted to, and we fought him. And it was a really fascinating sort of thing, but it all felt like we had known each other for years. Like he and I now send pictures of our kids back and forth, and we’ve been talking s–t constantly.”