The actors started to step up on the wall and I had a lot things where I’d be like, “I think this is going to work.” The Platform: A Practical Shift in Gravity I was in a dance studio just setting tables down sideways, so if you had a bird’s eye view it would represent a wall with a fire escape, and I just start playing around with my iPhone and swooping, turning it at the same time. Scott: I didn’t have the tools to create it, which was tricky, but it also forced me to be cleverer. And so Chris had to choreograph according to gravity changing.
So that first minute and half there’s no cuts, it turns and we get to see the gravity shift in them, because the moment we cut people will call bullshit, it doesn’t matter, it’s a not a magic trick anymore, it’s a movie trick. We started talking about this on day one of prep and it was the last thing we shot on the sound stage.Ĭhu: Then we started to get into logistics of how do you turn, and I had just done a magic movie (“Now You See Me 2”), so I knew that magic only works when you see it in real time. “A Magic Trick”: No Cutsīrooks: When Jon presented this idea, “It was OK, how do we execute it?” It was meeting after meeting after meeting.
We didn’t want to compete with that in any way, but it did feel like when you say goodbye to the love of your life and not knowing where that may lead, sometimes you just want to be present and the rules of the world go away and float away.Īnd this idea that we could turn a building on it’s side, do it not just inside like “Royal Wedding,” but outside, and that these buildings that you walk by everyday with these fire escapes could become benches, and the brick wall that has graffiti could turn into a ballroom floor, and windows would turn into a see-through glass, to us, that was the most beautiful way to honor this neighborhood. We kept thinking, “Do they lose gravity?”Īnd then we thought about “Royal Wedding,” and many people have done the “Royal Wedding” nod, the Fred Astaire dancing inside the room on the, and no one does it better than him. Chu: were in my apartment one day thinking about this number, and throughout we’d been challenging ourselves, “How does it feel to be in the emotion our characters are in?” Because that’s what going lead, not to dance numbers, but, “What does it feel like to be in love?” We kept going back to that Warner Brothers cartoon idea of flying, of lifting up, when you see those characters float up off the ground when they kiss somebody. I remember sitting there talking to Jon, he was just going off on one of his riffs.ĭirector Jon M. And through the years, we all sort of had this dream of doing some sort of anti-gravity number.Ĭhoreographer Christopher Scott: That idea of the revolving room, it’s always been floating around our creative discussion for 10 years, and it just never felt like the moment for it, and then for this one Jon had clear vision for it, a clear reason why. We did “The League of Extraordinary Dancers,” which was a great playground for In the Heights in many ways.
Below is a thorough oral history of “When the Sun Goes Down” with Chu, cinematographer Alice Brooks, and choreographer Christopher Scott, who for the first time were permitted to go into full detail of the behind-the-scenes details of how they created the magical scene.Ĭhu, Brooks, and Scott have been collaborating on creating onscreen musical dance for over a decade, dating back to the “Step Up” movies (“Step Up 3D” and “Step Up 2: The Streets”) and the TV series “The LXD: The Legion of Extraordinary Dancers.” “In the Heights” supplied the trio a canvas to try out a number of ideas that had been percolating for years, none moreso than Nina and Benny’s sunset glide up a building.Ĭinematographer Alice Brooks: Chris Scott, Jon and I have been working together for a really long time.
Chu was recently a guest on the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast to discuss the scene (and others). Nina (Leslie Grace) and Benny (Corey Hawkins), in a quiet moment between two young lovers about be apart, dance up the side of a Washington Heights apartment building in the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers-inspired musical number “When the Sun Goes Down.”
It seems like a visual effect, a piece of gravity defying wizardry created in a computer.