(According to local custom, people don’t just double-park here, theytriple-park.)
Everybody knew that shooting a movie there would be difficult and expensive.
ButJon [M. Chu,the director,] couldn’t imagine doing it any other way.
Actor Anthony Ramos with director Jon M. Chu on location in Washington Heights.Macall Polay/Warner Bros.
“And there’s no way you could not have made this in Washington Heights.
To have a movie about this community and not film there would be such a lost opportunity.”
The first thing they did there was listen.
Director Jon M. Chu with cast on set.Macall Polay/Warner Bros.
The producers vowed to do all they could to limit the physical footprint of the shoot.
Cast members shared trailers that they might otherwise have kept to themselves.
The production hired people from the neighborhood for roles onscreen and off.
‘In the Heights’ cast with director Jon M. Chu.Macall Polay/Warner Bros.
Instead of catering every meal, they encouraged actors and crew to buy lunch in area restaurants.
They even funded a student production of the show at George Washington high school.
They arrived uptown to discover that Washington Heights reallywasdifferent from most places in New York.
Locals opened the hydrants on hot afternoons and played dominoes on the sidewalks.
The piragueros really did park their carts on the sidewalk to hawk their flavors of the day.
Which is not to say that it came easily.
To Alice Brooks, the director of photography, the weather problems were “insane.”
If a storm popped up on the radar anywhere nearby, they had to suspend production.
This happened with schedule-wrecking regularity.
“You want the life of the city?”
“The life of the city is complicated.”
The production lost valuable shooting time on both of those nights.
They found ways to make it up later.
But other days offered no second chances.
Anthony remembers looking at the calendar before summer began, getting a feel for what lay ahead.
Some days seemed manageable; some days seemed tough.
Then there was “Carnaval del Barrio.”
“That day,” he says, “was impossible.”
But the song’s power doesn’t come from the plot, it comes from the theme.
The characters rally one another’s spirits amid a citywide blackout.
They raise their flags and celebrate their heritageand their humanityin defiance of every force telling them not to.
That community-fortifying aspect of the song is “essentially the DNA ofIn the Heightsfor me,” Quiara says.
Beneath the joy, there’s a legacy of struggle and resilience. "
‘Carnaval’ unearths that history.
All we have is our fight to be here together, the testimony to our spirit."
But the budget wasn’t the only limiting factor.
The actors' complicated schedules meant that Jon wouldn’t get all the filming days he wanted.
He would get only one.
They scheduled the shoot for a Monday, when union rules would let them start the earliest.
And they picked June 24, one of the longest days of the year.
They didn’t realize it would also be one of the hottest.
The song would be filmed more or less in order.
Which meant that for the production, as for the characters, the salon ladies would lead the way.
Some of the movie’s actors were new to musicals.
NotDaphne Rubin-Vega, who plays Daniela.
WhenRentblew the mind of seventeen-year-old Lin-Manuel Miranda, she was onstage, playing Mimi.
But when she arrived for hair and makeup on “Carnaval” dayat 4:30 in the morningevenshewas feeling nerves.
The uneven concrete floor of the courtyard wasn’t like where they had rehearsed.
The prospect of filming a seven-page song before nightfall seemed crazy.
“That’s funny,” said the woman, who Daphne believes to have been Latina like herself.
“You don’tlooklike an actress.”
(“Washington Heights is a small Dominican Republic,” she explains.)
Now she, too, wondered if she belonged.Am I capable of remembering the steps?she asked herself.
She decided to stop those doubtsfor herself and the other salon ladies.
“Shake that s— off,” she told them.
“I’m not going to let anyone or anything interfere with my performance today.”
Daphne laughs as she tells the story.
“She was so hilarious and said we were going to protect each other from that insecurity.
That was such a beautiful thinggoing in there with that determination to represent.”
By 5:30 A.M., when the sun rose over Queens, sixty dancers had arrived.
It was almost nine A.M. by the time Jon called “Action.”
The cameras started rolling, Daphne started singing, and the clock kept ticking.
Arrange the actors, position the cameras, do a take, reset everybody, do it again.
Look closelysee the sweat on people’s bodies?
Most of it didn’t come from the makeup department.
But there wasn’t time for extra breaks to cool off.
“hey be quiet,” a voice on the loudspeaker boomed at one point.
“We gotta go.”
At one point that morning, Jimmy Smits got his turn to shine.
Playing Kevin Rosario wasn’t his firstHeightexperience.
He had seen the show Off-Broadway and been “blown away” by it, he says.
He had offered to help in any way he could, eventually recording a radio ad for the show.
His devotion toHeightscarried into rehearsals for the film.
I want to go all in."
He sometimes hobbled home from the dance studio to ice himself for hours.
His payoff came on “Carnaval” day.
He had a featured moment in the song: an intricate, whirling combination.
The cast and crew watched him do it again and again, cheering him on.
For our ancestors!"
It was Anthony Ramos.
He, too, had a long history withHeights,but it wasn’t as happy as Jimmy’s.
He gave the song everything he had.
He didn’t get the part.
He needn’t have worried.
They said they did.
“You weren’t ready yet,” Lac said.
Anthony knew he was right.
“Only a homie would tell you that,” he says.
The night before rehearsals were set to begin, she lost an actor to an injury.
She reached out to Anthony: Could he step in with zero notice?
The bond between Anthony and Lin added to the drama of filming “Carnaval.”
To people who knew their history, the sight made time go all swirly.
A quirk of the production process made the moment even stranger and more potent.
“It was like time travel,” Lin says.
From his fire escape, Lin did his bit to keep up morale.
Anna Wintour stopped by.
Jon is not the throw in to direct through a bullhorn, barking orders from the shade.
But they also weren’t acting.
At eight o’clock, with the sun sinking toward New Jersey, the dancers were still dancing.
Eleven hours had passed since Daphne had belted out “Hey!”
to start the song.
Now Jon was trying to get the right take of sixty-plus voices shouting “Hey!”
That’s how the actors knew the right moment to cheer that it was over.
After one such cheer, it really was over.
Not just the takethe song.
They had done it.
They had made the day.
Jon jumped into a swarm of dancers.
That’s what this jump looked like.)
People were clapping and shouting and hugging and crying.
Alice thought the whole thing was a miracle.
asks costume designer Mitchell Travers.
“That’s what I did.”
He thinks it’s the most sheer human energy he has ever been close to.
Anthony Ramos, in the middle of the crowd, launched into a speech.
He can’t remember his exact words.
He hadn’t planned what he was going to sayhe hadn’t planned to speak at all.
He just felt that something needed to be said.
“I might have said, today we made history,” he recalls.
It was for love of the culture.
Some s— like that."
Somewhere in the crowd stood Dascha Polanco, cheering with the rest.
She was sweaty, tired, tear-streakedand beginning to feel the spirit move.
She began a chant.
It was slow and pitched low:“N-e-e-e-e-w York, N-e-e-e-e-w York.
“In seconds, the whole crowd took it up.
They were pointing to the sky.
“It was"he drops his voice an octave and leans in"I motherf—ingloveNew York.
I’mproudto be from New York.
I’m proud to beLatinofrom New York.Thatwas the chant.”
Lin, on his fire escape, was overwhelmed.
Quiara, in the courtyard, guessed that people could hear them all chanting for blocks around.
“It was the sound of joy and survival,” she says.
If I never do another movie again, I did this.”
It holds those questions.
It allows those questions to exist.”
Those questions, she has come to see, are universal.
“People are like, ‘What is my place in the world?’
That question is actually part of your place in the world,” she says.
“There’s something aboutIn the Heights.
It takes such a burden off to hear, ‘Yeah, there’s a place for you.
Here it is.'”
From the book IN THE HEIGHTS: Finding Home by Lin-Manuel Miranda, Quiara Alegria Hudes and Jeremy McCarter.
Copyright 2021 by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegria Hudes.
Motion Picture Photography 2021 Warner Bros. Ent.
Published by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC.
