Profile

Lin-Manuel Miranda talks to Ed Potton about his two new films Encanto and Tick Tick . . . Boom! - and how Stephen Sondheim became his creative counsellor.

‘Idefinitely hear a ticking clock in my life,” Lin-Manuel Miranda says. “I think that’s clear from a lot of the work I’ve done.” In 2015 the goateed New Yorker somersaulted to the top of the musical-theatre tree as the creator and star of Hamilton. The bravura, hip-hop-powered tale of Alexander Hamilton, one of the more obscure founding fathers of America, became a stage sensation in New York, London and Sydney and won Miranda two Tonys, an Olivier and a Pulitzer, plus an estimated fortune of £60 million (NZ$115 million). “You write like you’re running out of time,” one of the songs in the show, Non-Stop, said of his restless title character.

Well, life has imitated art because in the subsequent six years Miranda has been everywhere. He has written songs for Moana, Star Wars: The Force Awakens and the forthcoming live-action remake of The Little Mermaid. He has had big acting roles as Jack the lamplighter in Mary Poppins Returns and the balloonist Lee Scoresby in His Dark Materials. He has voiced animated characters for the DuckTales series and Vivo, a film for which he also wrote the songs, and this year his stage musical In the Heights became a Hollywood movie. Now, when you would be expecting him to be having a breather, Miranda, 41, has two of the biggest projects of his life coming out within days of each other. Released in cinemas internationally next week is Encanto, an animated extravaganza from Disney for which he wrote a suite of songs that embrace Latin, pop, R’n’B and show tunes. Already in cinemas and on Netflix is Tick, Tick . . . Boom! – there’s that clock again – an explosively moving adaptation of Jonathan “Rent” Larson’s musical in which Miranda makes his debut as a feature director. Phew. I feel tired just typing it.

Does he ever feel overwhelmed? “Well, I chose to do it,” he says via Zoom from his home in New York, where he lives with his wife, Vanessa Nadal, and their sons, Sebastian, 7, and Francisco, 3. “That’s an important mindshift sometimes. What I learnt from my time at university [he went to Wesleyan in Connecticut] was, ‘Oh, these things can be in conversation with each other. What I’m learning here is applicable there.” “Besides, he adds, “I don’t feel like I’m running out of time so much as that’s the fantasy. Non-Stop is the fantasy of what a writer’s life is like. It’s much more tedious and slow than that. I’m incredibly impatient to get my work out into the world, but I also work on projects that take years to complete.”

Encanto, directed by Byron Howard (Tangled,

Zootopia and ared Bush Moana, Zootopia , is the story of a Colombian family with supernatural powers that draws heavily on the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Maruez.“Wew ante dan entire family on screen because that often gets whittled away in the moviemaking process,” Miranda says. “Moana had eight brothers when I signed on...” She ended up with none.

One of the things that attracts him to magic realism, he says, citing Maruez’ s One Hundred Years of Solitude, is “the ways in which magic presents itself as an expression of character”. So the gossipy sister in Encanto has enhanced hearing and the nurturing aunt cooks meals with magical healing properties. “As a songwriter that’s very exciting: to establish themes for all these characters, to dig into how they see themselves or how the family sees them,” Miranda says. “That’s stuff you talk about with your shrink – to write Disney songs about it is really fun.”

He has worked with Disney on a string of projects, from Star Wars to Mary Poppins. He holds up an original animation cell of Sebastian, the crab from the first Little Mermaid, that he was given as a gift. “The biggest mental block I have on every one is fear and intimidation,” he says. “If you are doing your job well, you’re going on a playlist with A Whole New World, Into the Unknown, Circle of Life and When You Wish upon a f...ing Star.”

On Encanto, obert Lopez and risten Anderson-Lopez, who wrote the songs for Frozen, became his “de facto shrinks when I would be, like, ‘I just don’t f...ing have it’.” To say thank you he included a musical nod to Let It Go at the end of Encanto.

On The Little Mermaid, due out in 3, the pressure was even more intense because Miranda was collaborating with Alan Menken, the celebrated composer for Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and the original animated Little Mermaid. “There was a moment of each waiting for the other person to dance first,” Miranda says.

“But once I started just writing lyrics it was fast because Alan is maybe the most gifted melodist this side of ichard odgers. His body of work speaks for itself. He’ s fast He’ s, like ,‘ How about this’ And you’re, like, ‘That’s the best melody I’ve heard in my life’. So keeping up with him became the task, and that’s fun.”

Some worry that Disney is too powerful, having absorbed Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars. Miranda, unsurprisingly, has no truck with that. “You’re talking to someone who has made four movies for four different companies this year. I’m very honoured to be part of that tradition, but I also know that Tick, Tick ... Boom! is not a natural fit for Disney.”

This tricksy musical-about-a-musical is certainly a long way from magical Colombians and singing mermaids. Before he struck gold with Rent, Larson spent years of his life on Superbia, a wildly ambitious science-fiction musical. It never got made, but the process of writing it, while living in a scabby apartment and doing awful jobs, inspired Larson’s next stage show, Tick, Tick ... Boom!, on which Miranda’s film is based. Larson is brilliantly played by Andrew Garfield in a movie that, despite all those postmodern layers, teems with big tunes and big emotions.

Directing for the first time was, he says, “really scary, and magnified by a shutdown and a pandemic and then directing with a mask and a face shield on. I have a very expressive face. I like to use it”.

As with Hamilton, there were parallels between him and his hero. “I’ve been a struggling songwriter in my s, incredibly impatient to get the s... out of my head and on to a stage.” Larson had Superbia, Miranda had In the Heights, a musical about the largely Latino neighbourhood of Washington Heights in Manhattan. Miranda started writing it at college and based it partly on growing up in a family of Puerto ican descent in nearby Inwood. His mother is Luz Towns-Miranda, a clinical psychologist, and his father is Luis Mi rand ar, a consultant for the Democratic Party.

The difference between Superbia and In the Heights is that the latter got made, and won four Tonys. That was in 8, so Miranda wasn’t a struggling songwriter for long. The ticking bomb motif was poignant for Larson, who died unexpectedly from a rare genetic disorder at 35, just before Rent opened on Broadway. For Miranda it just reflects a fearsome ambition and work ethic. Having won Pulitzer, Emmy, Grammy and Tony awards, he just needs an Oscar for a PEGOT, which only odgers and his fellow composer Marvin Hamlisch have done. He says he doesn’t strive for accolades, but I bet he’d love that one.

Miranda and Larson benefited from the guidance of Stephen Sondheim, who is played in Tick, Tick ... Boom! by Bradley Whitford, aka osh in The West Wing. Miranda met Sondheim in when he was asked to write Spanish lyrics for a revival of West Side Story. “He’s been a mentor to me, as he has been to countless generations of songwriters,” he says. “I kept him in the loop every step of the way while I was making this.” In one scene, Larson hears an answerphone message from Sondheim. When Sondheim heard it he thought it sounded cliched so he reworded and re-recorded it himself. The version you hear in the film is Sondheim, not Whitford.

What’s the best piece of advice Sondheim has given him “ariety, variety, variety,” he says. “Continue to find variety and surprise us.” Miranda certainly took that on board in Hamilton, combining rap and 18th-century American history with a virtuoso chronological elasticity. “It was my doctoral thesis in what time can do,” he says. “I can cover 1 years, or I can sit in a moment and dilate it.” He points to the last song, which combines a slow-motion deconstruction of Hamiton’s last moments before dying in a duel and a fast-forward section showing how his widow, Eliza, preserved his legacy.

Encanto, In the Heights and Vivo, which is set in Cuba, showcased his musical breadth, taking in salsa, reggaeton, jazz, Latin rock and much more. “Exploring Latin music is like going to your cousin’s house,” he says. “Cuba and Puerto

ico share a lot of musical heritage, but there are specificities that are really different.”

The In the Heights film was criticised for its lack of dark-skinned Latinos, a point that Miranda acknowledged this year, saying: “I just have to do better on the next one”. Yet he has done much to promote diversity, with most of the roles in Hamilton taken by black actors. In the Heights may not be perfect, but it features a positive array ofHispanicpeople MirandathinksPuerto icansin particular have been stereotyped as knife-wielding thugs thanks to West Side Story and the like. “That’s such a tiny, infinitesimal subsection of what we are and it’s been blown up to massive size because of the success of that show.”

Still, he’s a big fan of West Side Story. How could he not be I ask what he thinks about Steven Spielberg’s forthcoming film version and it turns out that he visited its set in New York. “We were filming the last scene of In the Heights on 175th street, and they were filming

the song Maria on 177th Street,” he says. “It was one of my all-time great days. We said, ‘That’s a wrap,’ on the day and then at sundown I snuck over and I got to see the last strains of Maria being shot.”

The coming months could bring more jollies like that. Miranda, for once, is at a loose end. “With Encanto and Tick, Tick ... Boom! I clear my desk,” he says. He has written some new songs, but a Hamilton se uelisnotonthecards.“Mynextmusicalwillnotbe a historical fiction musical. I don’t know what it’ll be. That’s the exciting part.”

In the meantime, “I’m looking forward to tucking my kids in, being a house husband and figuring out what the next major thing is,” he says. “I’m at the bottom of the hill and climbing again, and that’s very exciting for me. I haven’t been there in a long time.”

But once I started just writing lyrics it was fast because Alan is maybe the most gifted melodist this side of Richard Rodgers. His body of work speaks for itself. He’s fast! He’s, like, ‘How about this?’ And you’re, like, ‘That’s the best melody I’ve heard in my life’.