It’s been quite a year for Lin-Manuel Miranda. I mean, Lin-Manuel Miranda is always having amazing years, but this one has been slightly more special than all the other ones. In June, the long-awaited movie adaption of his breakthrough musical “In The Heights” was released to critical acclaim. A few months later the recorded version of “Hamilton” found him accepting his second Emmy Award. And this month, not only is his feature directorial debut, “Tick, Tick…BOOM!” arriving in theaters and on Netflix, but he has contributed an almost entire musical of songs for Walt Disney Animation’s wonderful “Encanto.” Oh, right. And I got seven minutes to speak to him about it. Seven.
READ MORE: “Encanto” Review: Disney’s latest animated tale is miraculous [Review]
Directed by Jared Bush and Byron Howard and then co-directed by Charise Castro Smith (confusing, I know), “Encanto” follows Mirabel Madrigal (Stephanie Beatriz), a young woman who lives with her family in a magical house in the mountains of Columbia. Everyone Family Madrigal has all been bestowed with magical powers by the house except for Mirabel. When the house begins to act strangely, Mirabel begins to investigate much to the frustration of her grandmother (María Cecilia Botero). Especially as it involves her mysterious uncle Bruno (John Leguizamo), that the family has been forbidden to talk about.
For Miranda, fostering a company of multiple Latinx characters was a goal when he began work on the project.
“All I ever saw growing up was Cheech Marin, as the voice of the Chihuahua in ‘Oliver and Company.’ That’s like all we had when I was a kid and I wanted more,” Miranda says. “And what we kept kind of circling back to was this notion of family. And can we get the complexity of an intergenerational family on screen? When I signed onto ‘Moana,’ Moana had eight brothers, those brothers went away, we had more important stuff to do, and it’s so easy to cut characters to clarify the storytelling process and our sort of mandate to ourselves was actually, can the complexity be the point? Can we get all of these folks on screen? And that’s where music became really helpful? I think we learn from every project we work on.”
One Oscar win away from EGOT, Miranda went into more details about the film’s songs over the course of our chat. Well, as much as he could in just seven minutes.
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The Playlist: Have you really been working on this project for five years? Has it been that long?
Lin-Manuel Miranda: Yes, it has been that long. It really came on the heels of “Moana.” We had an amazing time on “Moana” and I just said, “Please hire me again.” And asked to be in on the ground floor of the next one, because I was hired several years into the development process on “Moana”. And I remember jumping on a very quickly moving ship with that and had an amazing time, but I wanted to be even more involved from a story perspective. And I got to do that with this film.
From what I’ve read you came on board first before the director and writers were selected. Did start writing the songs before the story was locked? What was the gestation of your involvement?
The gestation was I remember first sitting down with Byron and Jared and Charice came along shortly thereafter on the journey and we knew we wanted it to be Latin themed and set somewhere in Latin America. That was the representation I really craved seeing in a Disney animated musical. All I ever saw growing up was Cheech Marin, as the voice of the Chihuahua in “Oliver and Company.” That’s like all we had when I was a kid and I wanted more. And what we kept kind of circling back to was this notion of family. And can we get the complexity of an intergenerational family on screen? When I signed onto “Moana,” Moana had eight brothers, those brothers went away, we had more important stuff to do, and it’s so easy to cut characters to clarify the storytelling process and our sort of mandate to ourselves was actually, can the complexity be the point? Can we get all of these folks on screen? And that’s where music became really helpful? I think we learn from every project we work on.
For me, “Hamilton” was a master’s thesis in compressing story into lyrics. We cover about a hundred years in two and a half hours in that musical. And so really early in the process before we even knew how the movie ended, I said, we’re gonna need to know who everyone is, how they’re related and what they can do. And so even though this will change, I’m going to write the opening number [“The Family Madrigal”] early. And so, the structure of it is pretty much what you see. The specifics inside it changed, but Mirabel proudly presenting this family she’s a part of, and then the delicious turn of she’s the only one born without a gift. And so the music goes even faster as she tries to tap dance away. That structure we found really early, and it became kind of the first thing we put on the corkboard. And it was our guide to all the other characters that we would begin to unlock and explore over the course of the movie.
So speaking of “The Family Madgiral,” it really speeds up in the last few minutes and there’s a ton of dialogue or lyrics in that composition. What would you have done if the actress cast as Mirabela couldn’t have pulled that off?
I wasn’t really involved in the casting. I really just trusted that my filmmakers would probably do it. And then again, I was thrilled. They cast Stephanie because I had just worked with her on “In the Heights.” I knew what an incredibly expressive voice she had and what a talented singer she was. And so I was like, “Oh, great job guys. That’s perfect.” I was really thrilled when they cast her because I met Steph when she was the lead in my co-writer Kiara’s plays, in her early plays. In New York when we were all starting actors in our twenties. So, it’s a voice I know well, and I had written that song before she was cast, but then that was integral for her next song, “Waiting on a Miracle.” Which was very specifically written to her voice and her talents.
Were there any other songs or parts of songs that you went back and rewrote for any of the voice talent?
Oh yeah. Sure. I mean, the thing about at Disney, you’re always rewriting. So, even in that opening number, what didn’t exist in that first draft was Abuela’s section. There was an Abuela section, but it wasn’t until I wrote “Dos Oruguitas,” which is the song that reveals, sort of a very emotional piece of Abuela’s backstory. And I went then back, and if you listen, she’s actually singing the melody of “Dos Oruguitas” to talk about the town, and that’s actually kind of her emotional underpinning. We just haven’t heard it yet. So, that’s always the kind of work you’re doing is you find a theme you like here, and then you bring it back here. And then, oh, actually I really like what I did here. I’m going to bring it back into this. And that’s what helps make it cohesive.
I feel like the song people are going to talk about a lot is “We Don’t Talk About Bruno.” It’s one of the ones I remember the most. What your inspiration was just musically and lyrically for that song?
Practically, it’s a chance to check in with everyone in the family and actually give solos to people for whom we don’t have the real estate for them to get their own song. So. it was exciting to me when Dolores’s voice showed up and actually she’s really quiet and she talks really fast and she actually understands the family dynamics more than anyone else, because she has supersonic hearing. So she hears everyone’s perspectives. That was a really exciting discovery. But my pitch was, there are things we talk about as a family at the dinner table, and there are things we talk about, but we’re not allowed to talk about at the dinner table. We can’t talk about that with mom in the room. We can’t talk about that with Abuela in the room. And I love that the hook is we don’t talk about that. And then they proceed to talk about it. And that just felt very true to me. And, so again, you pull from your own life and you pull from all, we pulled from all of our family’s lives, in terms of the details of that. Like the way in which Pepa and Felix next first verse are telling the story of Bruno ruining their wedding is the way my parents tell every story. Constantly interrupting each other. And like, “I can,” “I?” “Who’s telling the story?” “Are you telling?” “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Go on.” That’s how my parents really talk and then finding the musical equivalent of that was kind of delicious. So, it’s in that way, it’s really personal because we’re pulling from our own lives for inspiration.
“Encanto” opens nationwide on Nov. 24
