Jon Chu on Wicked, Silicon Valley, and Defying Hollywood’s Gravity

Jon Chu grew up in Silicon Valley, in the shadow of Apple Park. His father, Chef Chu, still runs his eponymous restaurant there, and Jon worshiped Steve Jobs as a kid. As a teen, he used Apple products to learn how to make movies. Now he directs some of the biggest movies in Hollywood, but his relationship with the tech industry is much more complex. Kara and Jon discuss his “new view” trilogy: Crazy Rich Asians, In the Heights, and his latest film, Wicked. They unpack his memoir Viewfinder, and Chu explains how growing up in Silicon Valley shaped his understanding of technology — and how the industry’s switch towards data surveillance has changed his relationship with it as an artist. Questions? Comments? Email us at [email protected] or find us on Instagram/TikTok as @onwithkaraswisher Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Kara Swisher?

  I'm Ina Garten and each week on Happy Hour, I invite new and old friends for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. On this week's episode, I'm joined by Jennifer Garner. We talk all about what it means to be a good friend, Jen's encyclopedic knowledge of my recipes, and the Paris tour I put together for Jen and her daughter. New episodes of Happy Hour are available every Wednesday. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Cheers.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Election Day delivered the blue tsunami we've been waiting for. So what will Democrats actually do with their newfound power? And how could this historic election reshape the country? I'm Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov will be joining me to break down the results, the fallout, and what comes next on, you guessed it, Raging Moderates. Watch now on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:04Speaker 02

  Have you ever looked up and realized your leisure time isn't actually all that leisurely?

• 1:10Speaker 03

  So what starts out as wanting to learn something and wanting to progress through different ways of knowing how to do something turns into something that you're sort of like giving yourself a score on.

• 1:22Speaker 02

  This week on Explain It To Me, how to keep the grind mentality from ruining your downtime. Listen to new episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:32Kara Swisher?

  Before you were very famous when you did the dance movies.

• 1:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, the Step Ups, yeah.

• 1:38Kara Swisher?

  Step Ups. He showed them to me and he said, "My son is going to be very famous." And he brought me right over and showed me the pictures. "Don't you understand how big my son will be?" And he goes, "As big as Chef Chu." He refers to himself in the third person.

• 1:53Speaker 04

  Oh, of course. I know, I know. I grew up in that. But I will always actually be Chef Chu's son. Everywhere I go, LA, San Francisco, doesn't matter. I'm Chef Chu's son.

• 2:14Kara Swisher?

  From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm a Kara Swisher with a bad voice. But my guest today is a fantastic person, so hopefully it will drown out the noise of my voice. My guest today is John Chu, the director behind the new Wicked movie, which will be in theaters this Friday. Wicked is a classic for musical lovers. It's a story about challenging power and perceptions that is always relatable, especially important today. I've been waiting for this movie, and let me tell you, I have been very deeply moved by it. I think it's beautifully done, because John Chu makes beautiful movies. But it really went well beyond expectations for so many different reasons, including it stars Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande.

• 2:56Kara Swisher?

  They star as Elphaba, the wicked witch of the West, if you didn't know, and maybe she's not so wicked, and Galinda, the good witch, and maybe she's not so good. They are, in fact, spectacular, and their chemistry is off the charts. And they center a really wonderful movie and a massive production. The choreography alone is insane, and Chu did a beautiful job bringing it to the big screen. I saw the original musical on Broadway with the original cast, and this is really something special. He creates a specific kind of magic in his films. He did it with Crazy Rich Asians, another movie I really love and watch over and over again. It came out in 2018 and 2021, adapting Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical In the Heights. Not, I didn't like it as much, but it was sure

• 3:41Kara Swisher?

  beautiful. And one of the interesting things about John is that he grew up and was shaped by the tech revolution in Silicon Valley. His parents own Chef Chu's in Los Altos, one of the best Chinese restaurants in the area. I have gone there a bidillion times. And in fact, John talks a lot about it in his memoir, Viewfinder, A Memoir of Seeing and Being Seen, which he co-wrote with Jeremy McCarter. So we're going to talk about all that, how Hollywood and Silicon Valley have merged over the years for better and worse, and what impact our current political climate could have on John's efforts to expand representation on screen. Let me be clear, there are a lot of wizards out there trying to get us And we'll see who wins. Our expert question this week comes from Tony Award winning director Bart Shear,

• 4:25Kara Swisher?

  who's currently adopting the musical film La La Land for Broadway and will be directing Dolly Parton's musical Hello, I'm Dolly. And I absolutely can't wait for either of these. So it should be fun defying gravity with John Chu, even though my voice is probably going to bring me down. Let's get to it.

• 4:56Kara Swisher?

  John, welcome. Thanks for being on ON.

• 4:59Speaker 04

  Thank you very much. It's an honor to be here with you.

• 5:01Kara Swisher?

  I almost went to your dad's restaurant in Silicon Valley. I was just there.

• 5:06Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 5:07Kara Swisher?

  And I was like, should I go to Chef Chu's and ask him a question for his son?

• 5:12Speaker 04

  You gotta go. You gotta go.

• 5:13Kara Swisher?

  I've been there a hundred and nine times. Every Chinese company that was headquartered in Silicon Valley did their banquets there. So I've been there a million zillion times. But everybody goes there. Everybody goes there. Your dad is very proud of you. What did you learn from him? He's an entrepreneur and of course, he's surrounded by entrepreneurs and serves entrepreneurs. What did you learn from him?

• 5:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, I learned a ton from watching him, just, just his work ethic. And that's not just him, him and my mom, you know, they, they built this from nothing. 1969 is when they started it. And that's tough. The, the restaurant business is tough. And, and I've watched him work really hard in the kitchen. Like he, if a chef was down, he would get in there and he would get greasy and he loved it. It was like playing music to him back there and he would draw his, um, his dishes, his new dishes on a napkin. So I would watch him draw these dishes and then he would go make them and get sweaty and then go into the front of the house and wipe himself off. And my mom would be there and they'd be greeting, um, the customers and they'd be the hosts of the night and, and, and watching that charm, watching them tell stories. It was literally a house of stories there.

• 6:23Speaker 04

  And I always watched them go back and forth. And what I realized is when I, when I was really drawing. To was the guy in the kitchen. To me, that that's where he's like, this is where the work actually happens.

• 6:33Kara Swisher?

  It is like being a director, right? It's putting on a theatrical show. For people who don't know it, Chef Chews is just, it's so fantastic. It's so over the top, um, banquetty and a very, a classic Chinese restaurant, but super popular amongst Silicon Valley people. So it is like putting on theater and putting on a show.

• 6:50Speaker 04

  Absolutely, yeah. And even working with the chefs and the busboys in the back and everybody, it was, it was chaos. It was a pirate ship in my, in my, in my eyes. And, uh, and, and he had to maneuver and get to the vision of what he wanted to do. And, and it was, it was very rarely glamorous. And so I would sit there at the bar doing my homework. And so it was, he always included us. He always included us in the work itself, telling us what he was doing, so.

• 7:14Kara Swisher?

  But you didn't want to go into it?

• 7:16Speaker 04

  No, I didn't. And, and not because of anything other than I think my parents, my parents were always like, you're doing other things, including my mom, who, you know, they wanted us to be president of the United States. They wanted us, they thought we were the Asian Kennedys. They would like dress us up the same. We'd go to like, um, uh, etiquette classes. We'd go to dance classes. We'd go to musical, opera, ballet in the city. We had season tickets. And so they really wanted to immerse us in American culture. They did not want us to feel, I mean, I'm named after a television show. Jennifer and Jonathan, me and my sister, Jennifer and Jonathan from Heart to Heart.

• 7:48Kara Swisher?

  Wow, what?

• 7:50Speaker 04

  It's crazy, yeah. Uh, so media stories, what the American dream was, that's what they wanted to achieve in everything that they did. And they, and they put that on us, um, in not a bad way. It was just, that was the dream and they, and they lived it every day for us.

• 8:06Kara Swisher?

  So congratulations, you've got two new babies. Um, you missed the red carpet premiere of Wicked because your wife was giving birth to your fifth child, is that correct?

• 8:16Speaker 04

  Fifth child, and I'm the youngest of five.

• 8:18Kara Swisher?

  I have four kids.

• 8:18Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 8:19Kara Swisher?

  So talk to me about this. It seems like a movie moment, you rush from the red carpet to that.

• 8:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was crazy. So I've been working three years on Wicked so far. And I already had two babies during Wicked, one but when I got the job named Ruby over the ruby slippers, and another one while we were shooting. And so getting all the way to the opening of the premiere and we're in a hotel room, my whole family has flown in, my wife's family has flown in, we're looking over the red carpet and at four in the morning, I get a nudge from my wife and she's like, "My water broke." Of all days, of all my... And so we just left our suits there, left our clothes and went to the hospital and my family went on the red carpet, which was very scary for me because I'm usually the one managing how they talk to Jeff Goldblum

• 9:06Speaker 04

  or Ariana Grande. So they were off on their own and while the movie was playing, the baby was born. Little Stevie Sky, chew.

• 9:17Kara Swisher?

  Why that name?

• 9:19Speaker 04

  Well, I have some heroes, one of which is Steve Jobs, one of which is Steven Spielberg, one of which is Stevie Wonder, Stevie Nicks, and maybe even a little Steven Schwartz on this round. But I... So my wife said, "She was born on your premiere day, you get your name." And I was like, "Well, you have to be okay with this." And I was fine with it. My mom did say, "That doesn't sound like a president of the United States, President Stevie." And I said, "She's gonna be a rock star mom, sorry."

• 9:51Kara Swisher?

  Oh, okay, all right. So when do you have others to give to that cause? So you talk about your love of Steve Jobs. I mean, I can see Steven Spielberg, obviously, great director. Why Steve Jobs? You had a poster in your bedroom as a kid.

• 10:05Speaker 04

  I had every poster in my... I had all the Think Different posters, like wallpapered on my thing. But even before the Think Different, it was, one, he was our hometown hero. He was the guy who dreamed big and we lived in a neighborhood that dreamed big and valued engineers first. And he was the great storyteller of that. He could connect it. I watched every Macworld keynote. I would sneak out of school and go to San Francisco. We flew to New York to go see it. We rarely got actual tickets, but we'd get close enough. And I just loved the way he talked about the tools and creativity and...

• 10:40Speaker 04

  Almost like he was just letting you in on a secret. He was never selling anything. And I, and I was really drawn to that connection. And the tools that I actually finally did get my hands on because of customers at Chef Choose. They would hear my dad's story and give us computers, beta computers. It was, it was sort of the dawn of digital video editing. It was video cards and things were coming into play. And so I got this stuff very early and I saw the power. I felt the power of what that was doing for me. And so I just looked to him as somebody who.

• 11:10Kara Swisher?

  Did you meet him?

• 11:10Speaker 04

  I did, I did. I met him.

• 11:12Kara Swisher?

  Tell me about that. I knew him very well, so.

• 11:15Speaker 04

  And I've watched all your interviews. I've watched all your interviews. I know everything. I've seen, I've seen everything. Um, I was very lucky. Uh, I, well, I was at the Academy Awards, uh, and not because of anything other than our dance company that I had was performing it. So I was there early and he rolls in with Bob Iger into the, uh, to the VIP like, uh, bar area. And, um, I was like, oh my gosh, that's Steve Jobs. That's Steve Jobs. I can't talk to him. I don't want to talk to him here. I don't, I know that he probably wouldn't want to talk to me. I can't, I wouldn't be able to live with him looking at me like he doesn't want me to be there. So I'm just going to avoid it.

• 11:49Kara Swisher?

  And he can, he could do that. He could do that.

• 11:51Speaker 04

  I, I know. And, uh, my, my buddy who was in a bunch of iPod commercials, like, I don't care. So he went over and talked to him. And as he's talking, he grabs my arm and pulls me over and says, hey, Steve, this is John. He really wanted to meet you. And I'm like, uh, hi, I'm from Los Altos and my family has this restaurant and I really love your stuff. And you, and you really gave me the tools. And he's like, that's great. He's like, you're from Los Altos. It's like, we're neighbors. I was like, yeah. And he's like, oh, I know Chef Choose. I was like, yeah, great. And he's like, uh, I was like, you know, these tools really gave me a voice. I didn't know what I was going to do. I had, uh, but the, it's the computers that allowed me. Now I'm making movies in Hollywood. And he's like, that's so great. And I said, you know, even your commercial, it's a mantra that I say every day. And I memorized it and he sort of leaned in and I was like, oh, oh, you, okay.

• 12:36Speaker 04

  Uh, here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the trouble. And I start doing it. And he just keeps leaning in every time I stop like I'm gonna stop and and I do the whole thing and by the end he's saying it with me.

• 12:47Kara Swisher?

  Wow.

• 12:48Speaker 04

  And it was the most amazing time. He shook my hand. He said, "Thank you, John. That means so much." And Bob Iger comes around and he goes, "Hey, Steve, you, you, this John, he directed our Step Up movies. You heard of the Step Up movies?" And Steve Jobs was like, "No." And then, but Lorene came over and she's like, "Our daughters love those movies." And I was like, "Yes!" And then I left him alone.

• 13:08Kara Swisher?

  The first line of your memoir was, "I grew up in the future." And as you said, you grew up in Los Altos. For people who don't know, it's a dead center of Silicon Valley. One of the towns, Palo Alto, Los Altos. And as I said, your, your parents have the restaurant there. You, you just talked about how it shaped you as a filmmaker, that you used these tools. You were also a tech and a drama kid. You took tap dancing 12 years. You were immersed in the theater. Talk about these two twin things and how they fit together. I think very few filmmakers have a technology love. They just sort of accept it. I mean, obviously, you're all in it now.

• 13:45Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, I think technology, it just was a lifestyle, like, growing up, that was, that was what you did. And there was new things all the time and change was just normal. And in fact, it was encouraged. And, and so for me, it always opened up a new window. And so there's always discovery. And, and with the camera itself, that technology was changing so fast because I did not have access to all this stuff. So, a film, developing Super 8 film was, you had to pay money. You had to get the thing. I had to have lights. And that was just not accessible. But the people at the restaurant would give me these cameras, these digital cameras that were, you know, 320 by 240, you know, 640 by 480 was like the big thing. And, but it, it gave me a, a leg up on all the people that, and

• 14:29Speaker 04

  I was young. I was like 10, 12 years old. And, and so those, I already understood the power of technology or the accessibility that it gave me and the advantage it gave me. Even in school, I convinced my teachers to not write papers, but to make videos. And, and watching people react to what I was doing felt like I could be heard for the first First time and I so those two things were never separate. And I learned a lot of lessons doing that by the time I went to USC. They they were not fully digital. I got to learn film. I got to do 16 millimeters on a flatbed with splicing. And I finally understood like, oh, a real bin is like a place where you put the frames of the thing that you actually splice, that you actually cut something.

• 15:11Speaker 04

  And and so I I was sort of on that edge of the digital takeover. And through my years of of film school, by the end, it was all digital. But at the beginning, it wasn't so.

• 15:22Kara Swisher?

  But you started out as a tech enthusiast. But your memoir, it seems you've become more of a tech skeptic, myself also, throughout your career. Mostly because I've gotten to know them. I miss Steve Jobs terribly, I have to say, and his spirit. At least in terms of the mentality, especially when it comes to the idea that Hollywood should be more like Silicon Valley. Talk about when that happened for you. To me, the death of Steve Jobs was a very big moment. I remember it to this day, but it switched from think different to move fast and break things. You know, and I pay a lot of attention to words, obviously. Talk a little bit about that shift for you.

• 16:00Speaker 04

  Well, I remember the the day Steve passed as well. I was shooting I was shooting G I Joe and I was working with some actors and it was a hard day. And my my assistant came and whispered to me that he had passed. And everything went away that day. I excused myself, went to the bathroom, and I just wept on the floor. I met that guy once, but his effect on me was so was so deep because I think even his ideas. He he gave all the employees this when he when he was changing the campaign to the think different. He gave them all this book that had these poems of each of his heroes. And he said in that in the intro of like, that it's about your purpose and about the soul of a company. You're not just selling computers, of course, they'll do the fastest computers and that. But like, it's about what you're doing it for.

• 16:45Speaker 04

  And and that's the philosophy that I grew up in. That's the philosophy that I I I loved. And.

• 16:53Speaker 04

  Honestly, I do believe that that is still true. I think it's more when the Silicon Valley mentality came to Hollywood, I was all for it. It's digital. When I went there, it was film, film, film. Nothing will replace film. I was like, you guys are idiots, it'll change. So you could see it coming. And every time, Silicon Valley was right. And I guess I got more skeptical only more recently when it shifted from inspiration to data. You know, Hollywood used to be run by mavericks and artists. And yes, it's a business, but it was like you rolled the dice to bet on culture that they were going to discover something new.

• 17:32Speaker 04

  And when it became about data, it was like run over by this idea of using stories to just collect your clicks and your attention. And art and stories aren't about your attention. There is a patience to going to a theater and sitting in the dark and not having the control to skip forward.

• 17:51Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 17:52Speaker 04

  And so that's where it started to change for me because everyone's mentality was different about what stories should be told or where the money was going to be told. Because money speaks so much that it just, everything shifted.

• 18:03Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, what was interesting is they resisted it forever. You know, they did resist it for far too long and in terms of their own updating of them and allowed others to take control, one of which was Netflix. And that was, was that part of your decision to turn down Netflix's offer for crazy recitations? You took less money to stay and premiere it at Warner Brothers. How much money did you leave on the table? Now, it was a huge box office hit. It grossed $240 million worldwide about. That had been your metric for success with your previous films. Talk a little bit about that decision because you are tech forward, as am I, but there's something wrong. I agree with you, something went wrong in the calculation.

• 18:43Speaker 04

  I think that's where the fault line hit for me is that decision. Because had you asked me then, and is the argument of Netflix, which by the way, I love Netflix, I watch Netflix, it's great. It's a different medium though than I think movies are. So when they approached, it was a...

• 19:02Speaker 04

  I think I really thought about what their idea was. You you want everyone to see Asian as as lead actors and beautiful. Then you have to have as many eyeballs as possible. And we are worldwide and we're day and date and everyone will see on the same day and get it for free or get it for their subscription.

• 19:21Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 19:21Speaker 04

  That is what your purpose is and we fulfill that purpose. And I think what hit me was, yes, but, and I talked about this with Kevin Kwan, the author, was it's movies, though, are in this, it's like a museum. And people pay money to go see the museum. It's the best of the best. And you go there and you get people's attention and the deal with the audience is different. The value is different. They're gonna pay you money to sit in the dark and let you take them on a ride. And they cannot leave. And that takes and and someone's gonna pay hundreds of millions of dollars or millions of dollars to market these things to get you to go in. That has a that's part of the story beyond the movie.

• 20:02Speaker 04

  And that is and that's what we were looking for always is like, when is a giant company going to market? Movie stars is looking like this, heroes looking like this. And in a streaming platform, again, this is this is at that time and maybe shifting, but it couldn't change culture. It couldn't it couldn't. In a weird way, reviewers and pundits could always determine, oh, this movie's good, this movie's bad, and it's and it's gonna work. But what an audience can do that no other thing is they just show up and their vote is in the money. So movies like even Oppenheimer, you're like, did you think Oppenheimer was gonna be a billion-dollar movie? No, but audiences showed up and proved that that could be. I mean, that's a giant version of that. But like, and there's plenty of other movies that that you just don't think and the audience changes it.

• 20:45Speaker 04

  So I knew that in the the real purpose of Crazy Witches was to change the the habits of the world a little bit and see it differently. And so we took less money and chose that we were in very privileged places in our lives where we could do that. And the way we saw that as the sign that we had to do that.

• 21:03Kara Swisher?

  Was there a lot of pressure not to?

• 21:06Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. All the lawyers on that phone call were like, because we had 15 minutes to decide because they everyone put down their. Offers at the same time and Warner Brothers had actually put less down than they did than their offer than they did the week before.

• 21:18Kara Swisher?

  Oh wow.

• 21:18Speaker 04

  Because it was, I don't know, they're being assholes, but but uh but that was hard to swallow. That was really hard to swallow because I was like, they're gonna win off of do it trying to slight us.

• 21:28Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 21:28Speaker 04

  But I need that thing and we we need to do this. This is why we're here. So um I just think movies, there's a value. There was someone, something I saw on the internet where they're like, hey, you know, when when a when envelope comes in and you just think it's junk mail, you toss it. But when a FedEx envelope is in the room, that's never left unopened. Because the packaging is some sort of value that you know something valuable is inside. So you pay more attention to it. I really do think that movies have a framework that people pay more attention to and bring it into their lives.

• 22:00Kara Swisher?

  Now, do you think that's true now because Netflix has only gotten bigger? It's lapping everybody else, although Disney's coming up with streaming is probably the number two player. How do you, how do you calculate these things now? You used to have a lot of power of production and distribution decisions. How do you think about that now? And I want to ask you about Project Popcorn and how it impacted you.

• 22:26Speaker 04

  I I think that eyeballs and views don't um don't equate to attention.

• 22:33Kara Swisher?

  Okay.

• 22:34Speaker 04

  I have to think about where the audience's position is. Whenever they're watching a movie or whatever they're watching, if we're doing something for TV or I have to understand like where they're, where they are so I can meet them there and bring them into my world. And I I often think that, you know, in Netflix, yes, the movies, the TV shows are are high quality, great storytellers. Serial storytelling, amazing. Those are like novels you can get dive into and those, that's its own medium. And and they have some great cultural shifting series, but that's because of their series and you live with them for a while. In terms of a movie and a two hour movie, I think a two hour movie and a streaming service is like nothing. It's like you're microwaving your popcorn.

• 23:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. And I and I I see it because I see it in the movie theater. When we show Wicked, I see it when everyone's cheering at the end. And they're standing up like that has an effect and they want to bring their friends and that takes effort and it becomes a part of their life. I mean, look at the marketing effort in itself that we're presenting these characters.

• 23:31Kara Swisher?

  I'm paying a lot of attention to it.

• 23:32Speaker 04

  Sorry about that. You can't, you can't avoid it.

• 23:33Kara Swisher?

  It's very good. It's very good. I don't think it's bad. I think it's actually brilliant, frankly.

• 23:38Speaker 04

  And with a streaming service, you just, that's just not your business. And so I, I think, I think it's still the same. I just think the quality of all these things are getting better, just in their own islands of how they, of you consume entertainment.

• 23:50Kara Swisher?

  What was your experience within the heights? I, when I'm referring to Project Popcorn, just when they announced at the last minute, it was going to be streamed at the same time as a theater release. Explain how that hit you.

• 24:01Speaker 04

  Well, I found out 15 minutes before the world found out, we had been in very close contact with, with Warren Brothers this whole time of making the movie because we got shut down during COVID. We were in their final mix of it, which means we only had like two months before the movie was coming out. And so we all got together with Lin-Manuel Miranda and the executives and we decided we're going to hold and wait for a theatrical release until this thing is over. So when, when I got the call out of nowhere saying, hey, we just want to let you know it's sort of over our heads, but they're doing this thing, releasing all movies on, on streaming. There was part of my brain that understood this, like if had we had a conversation and they explained this, me of all people, understand the situation we're at.

• 24:46Speaker 04

  We have a movie. This could be another year. Is this, will this movie be relevant in a year? That's a valid question, but they didn't ask us. They just did it. And I also understand that decision-making in terms of they couldn't be bespoke to everybody, but it doesn't take away

• 25:05Speaker 04

  how that takes away your trust for a studio that you've, you've really fought for and worked with.

• 25:11Kara Swisher?

  This is Jason Kylar at the time, correct? Jason Kylar.

• 25:14Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, I never met Jason Kylar. I met him once at our premiere and he's a smart guy. I like, I get him. I get him. I understand him. I just think that the way they do it is different when you're working with artists. We're pouring our lives into these things and we understand, we're not idiots. We understand where we're at. And that really hurt me and that really made it seem like, oh, we're not, they're not in charge anymore. The people that I trust aren't in charge. There's somebody above them that is driving this.

• 25:38Kara Swisher?

  Right. It's making the decisions. But how did that change the way you make deals? With studios wicked is with universal with Donna Langley, who is impeccable taste. I would say um having a proper box office weekend release kicking off the holiday season. How did it change? And then I want to get into making of wicked and everything.

• 25:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, deal making is all different now. Now you've got to figure out like, is this streaming? Is this not? And you always have to know that there is a possibility, whether you think it's theatrical or not, they could flip the switch on you like.

• 26:06Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 26:06Speaker 04

  Now we have like trauma against this thing and some people don't want to deal with that part of those deals. And so they just take a little bit longer, but places like Universal, who Comcast and that company has a true investment in theatrical entertainment. I think the people who held on to this idea that you could trickle down the value of property by presenting the story in movies and continue like, I think that philosophy won in the end. I'm not sure, but but there is a sense of like, OK, that actually could exist instead of the way it was, you know, six months ago, where it was like, oh, no, theatrical is totally out.

• 26:42Kara Swisher?

  No, it will eventually go to Peacock, for example.

• 26:44Speaker 04

  Yes, exactly, exactly. And those deals are interesting because they can go on Peacock and they can sell it, do it to Netflix and all these places. I think that's the way we're going. But I think people like Donna Langley understand that and work. I've known Donna Langley for 20 years, so she can speak to me in those terms and not some other, not someone who's outside of the storytelling business and especially something like wicked, where it's never, it's an IP that's never been shot on stage or in movies or in animated. Those are the things I'm drawn to because I knew that we could make impact with this thing and we can make impact at a time that it needed to be told.

• 27:20Kara Swisher?

  It's also a big movie, right? When I interviewed Ted Sarandos, he's like, there's either going to be the big movies and then everybody else is going to be on streaming. So let's talk about wicked. In the Heights, wicked, both musicals, Crazy Rich Asians had a similar, over the top, magical quality. It really did. And you said you wanted to create a delicious Wizard of Oz world. Talk about your films, how they're connected creatively. And again, wicked could have been a different movie, all green screen and CGI, but you built a set with a huge soundstage in England instead. In your book, you said you wanted to find a balance between cutting-edge technology and old-fashioned craft, between these things we've just been talking about.

• 28:00Kara Swisher?

  Talk a little bit about how you've moved forward with these films and to result in this one.

• 28:07Speaker 04

  Well, when I first started in the business, I was doing like dance movies and I was raised in two worlds. I was raised in Silicon Valley and came to Hollywood and grew up in Hollywood. So I feel like I have a very good compass of which parts of each world work for what I do. So I'm always, I will never bet against technology. I mean, technology, when it's coming, there's nothing you can stop. I've seen it, I've witnessed it, and there's beautiful things that can come from it. And I think in my first seven movies that I made, I was sort of, I was really young, learning how to make movies with a studio, with a giant company. These weren't independent movies, they were studio movies with franchises and fanbases. After I did Crazy Rich Asians, which was the one that I, the first time, right before that I figured out that, I think I did my 10,000 hours and I was like, oh, I belong

• 28:52Speaker 04

  here. So I want to do something that makes me really scared. So I did Crazy Rich Asians. And when you witness something like Crazy Rich Asians, how that can change a landscape and change a group of actors and change how people see lead actors, it's really hard to go back. You realize the power of cinema and when that bet pays off and right in front of your eyes, it never goes away. Like, okay, this is where, this is the power of movies. So within The Heights, we tried to do the same. And in Wicked, even more so. This is sort of the pinnacle of that. If I thought those three movies as my new sort of view, it's my new view trilogy. Crazy Rich Asians, In the Heights, it's new view of classic stories that sweep you away to other lands but bring you home.

• 29:33Speaker 04

  And again, redefining what beauty is, what family looks like, what a hero is, what a villain is. And actually sort of kicks the tire on the American story, the Americana thing that my parents grew me up on, which was very helpful, but now for a new generation, now that I have kids, may not be as helpful. And what's the new story that America is? And so that's what Wicked deals with.

• 29:55Kara Swisher?

  It's also perfectly timed. We'll get that for some reason politically. It's propaganda, it's about misinformation, it's about the other. We'll be back in a minute.

• 30:14Kara Swisher?

  Support for this show comes from Delete Me. Have you ever Googled yourself and found your home address, phone number, and name of a family member? It's unsettling. Here's what you can do to help clean up your online data footprint. Go to joindelete.me/kara and enter the code Kara. You'll get 20% off Delete Me. Delete Me, of course, removes your personal information from data broker sites that sell it online. Delete Me was named the top pick for data removal services by Wirecutter, so you know you're in good hands. I know, I talk about this a lot. I am very adamant about privacy. I'm very good at it, and it's always a surprise when I go to my Delete Me dashboard and find all the nefarious things these data brokers are up to. You need to be aware and you need to have tools to help you deal with it.

• 30:58Kara Swisher?

  So take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for Delete Me. Now at a special discount for our listeners, get 20% off your Delete Me plan when you go to joindelete.me/kara and use the promo code Kara at checkout. The only way to get 20% off is to go to joindelete.me/kara and enter code Kara at checkout. That's joindelete.me/kara, code Kara. I'm Kara Swisher, and I like people who say the quiet part out loud. In fact, I love it. That's Tiger Sisters, a new podcast that recently joined the Vox Media Podcast Network. Cherie Brooke Lu and Jean Lu are real sisters who built their careers at LinkedIn and Goldman Sachs.

• 31:42Kara Swisher?

  On their weekly podcast, they're giving the next generation practical tips on how to get ahead, how to write emails people actually answer, how to make your LinkedIn profile stand out, and how to keep learning as an adult. It's straight talk about money, career, and relationships every Monday. Follow Tiger Sisters wherever you get your podcasts. Support for this show comes from Quince. Great clothes get better the more you wear them, and that's great news because if you get anything from Quince, you're going to want to wear it a lot. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials. Their 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters start at just $50, giving you the softness and quality you'd expect from a luxury brand. And without the luxury price tag. And it's not just the apparel. Quince brings the same approach to everything they make.

• 32:27Kara Swisher?

  From hotel quality bedding and bath to kitchen essentials and thoughtfully designed furniture. I have some Quince pieces myself and one that I'm wearing a lot lately because the weather is turning is a lovely sweater I use. And it's incredibly soft and I find it really versatile. It goes with a lot of things. I also love their T shirts and a lot of their sports clothes. And recently I bought a set of sheets that I love. I'm kind of someone who loves really soft sheets and usually they're very expensive. These were not expensive and they feel as if they are. Find the fall pieces. You'll reach for most at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was on with Kara Swisher.

• 33:12Kara Swisher?

  It's the best way to support the show.

• 33:17Kara Swisher?

  The dance scenes are amazing. I'm going to touch on them for a second, especially one of the library. I don't want to have too many spoilers since the movie is coming to US theaters on Friday. But talk about how you choreographed that scene for Wicked fans. It's this one.

• 33:41Kara Swisher?

  So talk about that scene and it has this, for people that don't know, it has this beautiful, you can see how much you love dancing. It has a beautiful element to it.

• 33:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's called Dancing Through Life. It's Fiero, the prince, the rebel prince who comes into the school and he's sort of showing the other students who follow all the rules and follow the story of the wizard and Shiz University. That breaking the rules is kind of funny, sort of loosens them up. This is the beginning of what I call the sort of the awakening up of Oz. You know, Oz is this place that has, the wizard has told the story that you don't have to live in fear. You don't have to confront each other about anything. Happiness is the number one thing. Follow the yellow brick road and there's a wizard that will give you your heart's desire. And then this is the first sort of, he comes in here and we have the spinning wheel, this giant spinning wheel, which. Sort of takes from like 2001 or from

• 34:33Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, dude.

• 34:33Speaker 04

  A royal wedding or things like that. We tried to take images of American cinema, not just American musicals, but American cinema and put them in this movie.

• 34:42Kara Swisher?

  It had a little Busby Berkeley, I'll tell you, I was watching.

• 34:45Speaker 04

  There's a little Busby Berkeley, there's even 80s John Huston as you roll into the school, like they're rolling into the parking lot. Even E.T. at the end with the drums. So there are all these little pieces because we are dissecting what the American story is and what it means to us. So in this scene, we have all these dancers and that spinning wheel, I mean, the insurance companies did not want this spinning wheel. And it took a lot of engineering to build it and not just the tech of it, but also to build it into an actual set. We built sets, 17 stages, we built different sets on. We built Emerald City, we built Munchkin Land, we built a 60.

• 35:21Kara Swisher?

  It looks like it.

• 35:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:22Kara Swisher?

  It does not look like A.I., I'll tell you that.

• 35:25Speaker 04

  And don't get me wrong, VFX is in this movie. We have flying monkeys, we have animated animals. But the VFX people would tell us, build as much as you can. We worked with ILM and Frame Store. Like, if you build as much, then we can only make it better. And so that was really fun to just like throw down. In a way, when we talked to Universal, we knew we were doing a moonshot. We were like, we need to define why the movie musical is necessary now and why you can only do this in this medium. They would not spend this money in a Netflix thing. You could not get the scope of the Netflix thing. And this is, again, nothing against Netflix, I love Netflix.

• 35:59Kara Swisher?

  It wouldn't look as beautiful.

• 36:01Speaker 04

  You just wouldn't shoot, you wouldn't go to the moon in this. Like, this is a very specific thing. So I love reminding people, it's sort of a nod to the golden era of Hollywood, of Ben Hur or Lawrence Villarreal.

• 36:11Kara Swisher?

  It had a lot of those elements.

• 36:13Speaker 04

  We can still do this. Hands have touched this and painted, all the walls in the dorm room are painted, hand painted. It's pretty incredible, the costumes, the hair and makeup. Getting 300 munchkins in hair and makeup in the morning, and they're arriving at 2 a.m. And they're there, and I get there at 6, and you have, you know, you only have a portion of them ready, and each of them have to be different. They can't be the same, so it's, it was an enormous task by a lot of people. This is, this was, this was going to space.

• 36:42Kara Swisher?

  Then, of course, there's "Defying Gravity," the main song of the show, although I would think there's a couple others I like better, but it's a fan favorite in a really crucial scene. And you do it a little differently. I saw the original Broadway production with Idina Menzel and Christian Chenoweth, but Alfie is flying and singing. Talk about how you did that.

• 37:01Speaker 04

  Uh, yeah, "Defying Gravity" was probably the hardest thing I've ever shot in my life because it, it required all departments. It required our sets when we're building it. We, we had like three different sections. We had the, the actual bottom with the staircase spinning up. We had the top, and then we had to have another top for the outside because we needed room for the rigging because she was actually going to be all flown around and singing live. So you, you can't do this if you don't have Cynthia Revo.

• 37:27Kara Swisher?

  Right. You sang live even if you overlaid it later, just for people to know.

• 37:32Speaker 04

  I mean, she couldn't even do it without, I had it as backup options. I think, hey, you know, we're gonna be throwing wind at you, like, if you wanna just lip sync to it, and she's like, I can't, I can't. So we were spinning her around, she had to train for a year to learn how to do these stunts on her own. And that's with visual effects, that's with costumes, because her cape plays a big role in this. And, and there's a huge emotional core to this because you have to be as intimate as when she says, "Come with me," and Glinda's looking at her and without words is saying, "I, I, I can't," and there's silence in this. So as big as the number gets, we had to be very focused on what story are we telling? And that intimate story of the separation of these two, and because it's the end of the movie, it has to be emotionally satisfying, it has to be the thing that we've been waiting for the whole movie.

• 38:17Kara Swisher?

  The end of the first half of the movie, it's a two-parter.

• 38:19Speaker 04

  Yes, yes, yes, but that, we had to make it feel like this was the end of a movie. So if you don't know anything about Wicked, I think you feel, that's what was our intent, to feel emotionally satisfied that we were waiting for. And there's even her falling out the window, which isn't in the show, and that falling Falling out the window is she has to earn her flight. So that when she comes down, she has to figure out why she's flying and she sees her younger self. She grabs the broomstick and she goes up. So when she says, it's me, she really means it's me. It's just taking the words that we've heard over and over again and giving them real purpose. And witnessing and living with that purpose. So that the words become even stronger and we see it in new ways.

• 38:56Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, it's interesting. Also, she's the, she's the dead center. I kept thinking, is Ariana Grande stealing this movie? And then I realized, no, they are so critical together, the chemistry between them. It's really astonishing chemistry, by the way.

• 39:10Speaker 04

  And we never, we never did a chemistry read between the two of them. We did chemistry reads with them with other people. And we never paired them because I never thought they would pair. But when I realized that she was Galinda and she was Elphaba, like no question. Then we sort of rolled the dice because we knew that they both shared this very rare power. Their voice, this ability to do something that physically people can't do and spiritually they can't do. So they shared that, but they're very different people in how they see the world.

• 39:37Kara Swisher?

  That's right.

• 39:37Speaker 04

  And when they came together, they actually, I think, had a meeting together and said, let's, let's on purpose make this a beautiful experience. We had heard too many stories of when you get two divas together, like what happens? And, and that has been something that we all have trusted.

• 39:52Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, it looks like a love fest on the PR tour. No, so every episode we get a question from an outside expert. Have a listen.

• 39:58Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 39:59Speaker 05

  Hi, John. This is Bart here and I'm a fellow director and I have a really wonky directing question.

• 40:08Speaker 05

  As you were making Wicked, what elements did you plan meticulously for? Did you work incredibly hard to go a certain way? And it ended up exactly the opposite of what you'd hoped for? And was it actually better in the end? I hope that's okay. It's a little wonky, but you know, one director to another.

• 40:30Kara Swisher?

  For those who don't know, I've recently interviewed Bart about his play. He was directing McNeil. He's executive producer of Lincoln Center Theater and is currently working on the Broadway adaptation of the movie musical La La Land.

• 40:43Speaker 04

  Wow, that's great. That's a good question.

• 40:45Kara Swisher?

  It is.

• 40:45Speaker 04

  That's a really good question. That ended up the exact opposite and maybe even better. I don't know if it got to the exact opposite. But there are areas that I didn't know where we were gonna end up. And how deep it could go. There's a scene in the Oz Dust Ballroom where Elphaba comes in and she's wearing a hat that Glinda told her was cool.

• 41:13Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 41:14Speaker 04

  And actually it's meant to humiliate her. And in the show, it's, it is emotional by the end, but it's sort of a silly dance that she does. She does like a witch dance.

• 41:24Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 41:24Speaker 04

  Because that's the conceit of the show. And in our movie, that just doesn't work. She, even Cynthia is like, I'm not a joke. I'm not gonna come in there. And when she felt the humiliation, I sent her and Christopher Scott, our amazing choreographer, and they worked out like, how does she find her space, her emotional space? And what they found is it's just these little movements and it's not a defiant like, I'm, this is who I am and screw you. It was like, instead of the control that she's being asked to have over her emotions, she surrenders to her own powers.

• 41:56Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 41:56Speaker 04

  And she just barely is there and she's, and she, and the fact that it's silent, like I didn't think that could survive in this movie, in a movie like this, in the middle of a musical number. And the way Cynthia and Ari play this, these two women finding each other in this humiliation and being totally vulnerable, and then Glinda has to walk in and strip herself of all the things that she holds dear and they're both there not knowing what to do next. And when their hands touch, she offers, you know, her hand out and they touch. To me, that was the most beautiful, it's like, they're gonna, she's gonna teach her and they're gonna do this together. And I did not think that we could retain that kind of silence, kind of silence and emotion in this movie for that long. And it really speaks to people.

• 42:37Kara Swisher?

  Right. That's not something you planned.

• 42:38Speaker 04

  It's not something, I mean, we didn't plan it at first. No, that's for sure.

• 42:42Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 42:43Speaker 04

  It was only when we saw it and started to get.

• 42:44Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, it could have gone a number of different ways. So, one of the things you also do, because that was a very human moment, right? That was an extraordinary human moment. Through the, of all these films, the importance of finding and appreciating your own identity, which is what you're just talking about there, that hasn't been smooth sailing. You said you regretted the depiction of South Asians and Crazy Rich Asians. And there was criticism after in the heights. That the Afro-Latino community felt underrepresented. Have you changed your casting and pre-production process at all to address that? And Wicked has a very diverse cast, but it's quite effortless, actually. It feels like an effortlessly, it doesn't feel like you're, I'm seeing it happen, if that makes sense.

• 43:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that was the intent with Wicked, that it was, that it's, if you're re-telling a timeless story, a story that feels like it should have been there for all these years in Hollywood, then it should feel like all these iconic characters are just, it's just normalized. That the kids in the, in the school are all sorts of people and shapes and sizes, and the design is made for that, that accessibility is just a part of a fantasy world. We might be the first fantasy movie where we have accessibility ramps and stuff for characters that exist there, and it's not really a big part of the story. It's just these people who live there. And I'm really proud that we do that, because that takes more thought and design. It takes breaking out of the mold of thinking.

• 44:05Speaker 04

  And in casting, it's like, Madame Morrible, can she be Michelle Yeoh? Yeah, she can be. And you're not compromising anything. I think that's the main thing, is we're, this is not, this is not some exercise to compromise anything. This is the way the world looks now, in these classic fairy tales. To actually imbue that is something that was very important to me.

• 44:21Kara Swisher?

  Did you learn something from the previous experience, when you thought that, that maybe you hadn't done it quite right?

• 44:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, in Crazy Rich Asians with the South Asians, it's hard, because those are, I think, I didn't know, the argument was like, do you have more South Asians in those scenes? Yes, I would have, I didn't know Singapore as much as I did eventually when I went in there, and I would have had all, a lot more different people and cultures that were in some of those scenes. And I would have treated some of the characters in there a little differently, give them a little more human side to them. The fact is, the book itself doesn't have those characters. So it's hard to like, just create characters out of nowhere. So there are things that I'm much more hyper-aware of, that I ask a lot more questions, because sometimes I think it's these blind spots, that you just are learning at the same time. And what I really learned was, you gotta talk to everybody, but, but also like, you gotta keep going. Like, if you're on the front lines of this stuff, there are things that are happening all the time that you're learning. Oh, you call them Latinx or not Latinx?

• 45:13Speaker 04

  Like, that debate was happening even to this day, and I don't still know what to say, and I, and being aware of it.

• 45:19Kara Swisher?

  Say nothing.

• 45:20Speaker 04

  But being aware of it is really important and hearing the conversation. Thank you.

• 45:24Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 45:24Speaker 04

  But uh, so those are things are hard, but I, but that's what I'm made for. I, I made a decision that if you're going to be on the front lines, you have to be able to take the bullets and you have to be able to keep going. If you can't, then what are you doing?

• 45:36Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, what are you doing? Absolutely. So um, you do, you did um, full physical sets, but you still are, still a tech freak. You, you, I read you edited Wicked using Vision Pro. So editing virtual reality. Did you really?

• 45:50Speaker 04

  I mean, I did it when I was remote. Yeah, when I was, wasn't going in. Um, because I usually, if I go remote, we, we made a whole little system at the house, um, because I have all these kids now.

• 46:00Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 46:00Speaker 04

  And, and, and we built this whole system. But once I got the Vision Pro, I found it. It changed the game for me because I put it on and I wasn't on a computer with my editor over somewhere else, which feels very limiting. I don't get interactive with it. My blood's not pumping. But with the Vision Pro, I could make the screen as big as the room.

• 46:18Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 46:18Speaker 04

  And I could walk around and pace the way I do in the edit room. I could lay on the couch the way I do in the edit room. And then I could bring it closer. We were doing visual effects on it. And so I could give notes and, and use my finger to like mark things. And this is people in the Bay Area. This is people in London. This is people in Canada. And 40 people are on this and I'm on my couch and I can look at it, what it looks like 20 feet wide and what it would look like on an iPad. And I love that.

• 46:41Kara Swisher?

  Do you see you doing that more?

• 46:43Speaker 04

  I do see that. I mean, listen, being in person, nothing quite beats that yet, but I could see us eventually if, if we could see the same things in the same room. I look at monitors, physical monitors now and I'm like, oh, that's gonna go away. That's gonna go away.

• 46:58Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 46:58Speaker 04

  As soon as these things are, are small and are in contact lenses, like, physical monitors? Why do we even have the space for that?

• 47:05Kara Swisher?

  I know.

• 47:05Speaker 04

  It's crazy.

• 47:06Kara Swisher?

  I'm like, I'm always doing that. I'm like,

• 47:07Speaker 04

  But it'll get there.

• 47:08Kara Swisher?

  Yeah. I'm, I'm a big, I'm a big proponent of Vision Pro. Other people aren't. I'm like, it's the future. It doesn't matter directly. It's correct.

• 47:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 47:16Kara Swisher?

  So you played around with AI in the past. As I understand it, there's no AI in Wicked? That's correct? How do you envision using AI in movie making?

• 47:27Speaker 04

  Well, I'm learning every day about AI. And this is just for creativity. Like, of course, AI and all other walks of life are much bigger issues and bigger things that it's going to be doing. But in just our business alone, it's extremely powerful. I think it's a new democratization of how you express yourself. And just like, you know, digital video editing or having programs like in the 3D Studio Max or things like that, it, a kid in their bedroom, like me, would be creating stuff. And that will be a medium of something. There's no doubt that that is here. I think when we think about how to tweak that, and we don't know the answers of how you're going to tweak that to make it what we are actually thinking is really hard.

• 48:12Speaker 04

  So I don't know exactly where it goes. I do know it's really important for us to play with it and understand it. Because if we don't, we're the only ones who know what to protect or not to protect in our creative process. And someone else is going to determine that, like they did the last time, if we don't are fully immersed in this. So we can't be scared of it. And this is happening at a rate that is way faster than anything we've ever seen. And we've watched, we've seen a lot of technology. You know this is happening. This is the greatest, everything was built for this moment. The internet, the computers, the flat screen, all that stuff goes away because it was only made for these connected connections that are happening right now.

• 48:53Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 48:54Speaker 04

  No matter how many times we repeat that, people don't fully get that. So creativity is like one little rock in that, and we'll figure it out. And we put value on what we want. An audience ultimately puts value on what we think is valuable.

• 49:06Kara Swisher?

  It'll be interesting because it's getting better. But you're going to lean into AI, you're going to obviously.

• 49:11Speaker 04

  As I said, I will tell you this thing.

• 49:12Kara Swisher?

  Ideas, where do you see you using it?

• 49:14Speaker 04

  In ideation, you know, when we're designing something, it takes me two months with artists, a group of artists, to figure out kind of the zone that we're going in, then another two months to hone in on that zone. I think we'll get those two months out of the system. And I'll just be like, here's 100 different things, here are the five that I really like, let's start here, and let's use these artists to start here. I will say that when I'm working with Cynthia and Ari, for instance, you cannot Predicts the things that they do in this movie. Even if you had all the information of what they've done in the past.

• 49:40Kara Swisher?

  No, you don't know.

• 49:41Speaker 04

  No computer could create the moments that happened. Her wink at her when she ties the thing up. These are all things that happened in the moment. And that's what we mine in the movie. Our editor, Myron Kirstein, is very good at mining the things that you could not have thought of in your bedroom. You could not have thought of in a meeting. And that is actually the power of movies. And those things will always be sacred. And I don't know how to even.

• 50:02Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 50:03Speaker 04

  Measure that.

• 50:05Kara Swisher?

  We'll be back in a minute.

• 50:13Kara Swisher?

  Support for this show comes from Shopify. If you have a great idea for business, don't let another year go by without acting on it. Shopify can get you up and running fast. If you move quickly, you could even have your business launched in time to take advantage of Black Friday. Shopify helps launch a store and start selling in a few simple steps without needing to be an e-commerce expert. And sidekick Shopify's AI assistant can help with business tasks along the way, from store setup to planning promotions. Shopify's pre-built themes and AI site builder can make it easier to create a professional storefront. And Shopify's mobile app lets you manage key parts of your store from anywhere, including inventory, customer support, and payments. Shopify powers millions of businesses worldwide,

• 50:57Kara Swisher?

  from household names to small businesses just getting started. Launch before Black Friday, a time of year when more people are already shopping and ready to buy. If you're ready to launch your business before Black Friday, go to Shopify.com/KaraSwisher to start your free trial. That's Shopify.com/KaraSwisher. Go to Shopify.com/KaraSwisher today to hear your first.

• 51:24Speaker 05

  Hey y'all, it's a stud from AmericaActually at Vox.com. We know that you have big questions about the world, and so do we. At Vox, we focus on covering the things that matter in your life and the things that make you curious. Whether that's the big politics questions of the day, climate solutions that might actually work, or hopeful news in cancer or. Alzheimer's research. We believe that journalism made for the everyday curious person can make a difference in making a better world. And if that sounds like something you want to be a part of, Vox now has a brand new app, and it brings all of our journalism together in one place. Go to vox.com/app to download today.

• 52:06Speaker 05

  We're just days away from the midterm elections, which means I only really have one question.

• 52:14Speaker 05

  Hi, it's Jessica. Yeah, and I'm Al. We're from the Culinary Union. How are the issues that we've been tracking all year actually playing out on the ground?

• 52:23Speaker 04

  The reason why we're out here, we're actually out here canvassing for Aaron Ford and Mr. Horstberg. I'm not sure if you've heard of them. Oh, yeah. I'm about to go to him. Amen.

• 52:32Speaker 05

  A few weeks ago, I headed west to Nevada, where the entire midterms can basically be summed up in just three words: the Trump slump.

• 52:43Kara Swisher?

  Even with our great union jobs that we had, we struggled. That never happened before. And it's because of these politicians what they're doing to us. The Trump slump.

• 52:55Speaker 05

  This week on America Actually, midterms canvassing with the Las Vegas Culinary Union.

• 53:01Kara Swisher?

  How many more days until election day?

• 53:03Speaker 05

  Catch us every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 53:08Kara Swisher?

  I want to talk about the moment we're in. Obviously, this is premiering after the election. Unusual timing for you, but Wicked has deeply political messages, and they actually dovetail with today. She's obviously pushing back against technocrats who want to spy and control us. We're right in the middle of a surveillance economy. There's a huge misinformation campaign, and you make that rather explicit. There were also, by the way, Dreamers protests in the Heights, but we're obviously in pretty fraught political times for immigrants, for women. The day after the election, you know, everyone was like, are you scared of Elon Musk doesn't like Kara Swisher, but they said, are you scared of him? And I wrote, no wizard that there is or was is ever going to bring us down. And I said, and if you want to call us wicked witches, so be it. We look good and green.

• 53:53Kara Swisher?

  And I really did feel that. It was an important movie to see for me at the time because what do you think the messages are? Because they do dovetail. You know, you can see Elon Musk. Is the wizard, someone who who became mutated and toxic when starting off delightful, perhaps, and he was never delightful, but yeah, Steve Jobs was delightful. May I just tell you, Steve Jobs would have hated Elon Musk today. Thank you. I'm just, I keep putting 100 fucking percent. Thank you. Okay.

• 54:22Speaker 04

  I love you. I love you.

• 54:26Speaker 04

  I think it's all of us. First of all, a old man gaslighting a whole nation that this woman is wicked because she's confronting him about alienating a whole group of people in the society like.

• 54:39Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 54:39Speaker 04

  It's pretty clear. The the issue is that didn't exactly happen when we were making this movie or when it was written. Wicked was made in 2002, where we're coming out of 9/11. And we're about to go into war. It's America in transition. Wizard of Oz came out of when America was in transition. Even the movie was made at a time where everything was in transition. And I think L. Frank Baum always wanted to make the American fairy tale with American parts, which I think he was saying it was like optimism, self reliance and resilience. And so for me, the real timelessness of it is that this is something that as a process that we go through and we get choices. Which road are we going to take? Do we rise or do we go along with it? Do we keep walking on that road?

• 55:23Speaker 04

  I I think we always rise, but we need, we need artists and we need people to then remind us of who we are. And I think, and I, because I grew up in this American fairy tale myself, I feel very, and having kids now, feel very defensive that these ideas are still on the table, that we do not have to go into fear mode in order to get something done. And I think that this movie hits on that.

• 55:50Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, it certainly does. I think it's going to be politicized. I'm sorry to tell you, but I think it is. But Trump's rallying of anti-Chinese sentiment. During COVID and before that, the lead attack on Asian Americans, for example, you wrote about that in your book. Are you concerned, and again, Elon Musk is anti-immigrant, but he has a special relationship with China, largely financial. Are you worried about that returning? Do you think about that? You're making Crazy Rich Asians 2, by the way. Or developing it, right?

• 56:17Speaker 04

  We're developing it, we're developing it.

• 56:18Kara Swisher?

  Elon's development of that movie. I know, I read the ups and downs. But is that something you're worried? You wrote about it in the book itself. Are you worried about that?

• 56:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I didn't think that would exist in my world until it did during COVID. I was, it was shocking.

• 56:35Speaker 04

  And in a weird way, my, I remember my sister calling me and, and she was like, do you remember when we were walking across the street from the restaurant and that car pulled over and told us to go back to our country? And it was just you and me and we were like really young. We're going to the Tower Records. And I was like, no. And she kept, she kept describing it. And suddenly I was like, oh yeah, I remember it. But I laughed at that. I didn't think it was that. I just thought it was, these people were ridiculous. And, and it hit me that there were all these moments that actually those things were happening all along that I just sort of ignored. And yeah, I'm, I'm worried that, that because it was just underneath the surface this whole time and seeing this election, you realize, oh yeah, it's all underneath the surface. No matter what we've tried to paint over, it's just underneath there. And in order to confront it, we actually have to deal with the ugly parts.

• 57:21Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 57:21Speaker 04

  That feels both scary and nobody wants to do this. Even in our movie, you know, we have this song, What Is This Feeling? And it's not loathing. We always decided it's not loathing. It is you, you resist the person that's going to change the rest of your life. Because nobody wants to change. And I think we have to get ready for the uncomfortable fight and the uncomfortable, and the yelling at each other. We are all roommates all of a sudden. Technology has made us roommates and we're like, you live here? Yeah, I live here. You put the dishes away. No, that's the one I, I leave dishes there. And I think we're growing up in a way that now we have to. Look at our roommate in the eye and figure out how the fuck we're gonna live with each other.

• 57:59Kara Swisher?

  Right, right, right. I wish they were as charming as Cynthia and Ariana. But Hollywood and Silicon Valley are now intertwined more than ever. I was talking to Ta-Nehisi Coates about the role of writers and journalists last week, and he said journalists need to remember that risk-taking is part of the job. At the end of your book, you write, "Considering what I've seen of Silicon Valley and Hollywood, I don't feel hugely optimistic about the future of that relationship. I can imagine the famous old studios ending up as minor divisions of tech companies. Movies would act as a little bit of sugar to get your data for the benefit of advertisers, not just your credit card number, but your taste, your sense of humor qualities that lie much closer to your soul. I don't like the look of that future, but if it comes to pass, it becomes more important,

• 58:42Kara Swisher?

  not less that we flood the system with our dreams and visions, that we keep telling news stories about who we are and who we want to be." This feels risky to me, calling out the tech pros. I like it. I don't dislike it. I do it all the time, but and they do not like criticism. Are you concerned as this moves, the kind of films you want to make? Many of the movies have required big cast, big sets, big money. Do you think filmmakers can continue to play the role of truth to power? And do you feel conflicted making sugar, like, for this data?

• 59:15Speaker 04

  Well, yes and no on all those things. I think that the storyteller has a role, 100%. We've always had it. It is what people need. Leadership. People need something to head toward. They need a horizon line. It's why people go to strong men. It's because when things are not known, they go to the person that's taking the lead. And we need visionaries.

• 59:39Kara Swisher?

  Like the wizard.

• 59:40Speaker 04

  Like the wizard. And we need those visionaries. Now, I'm selling a movie right now, so of course, it's like, oh, yeah, movies, movies, movies. But the reality is, between you and me and your listeners, it's like... I don't know where movies are gonna go, but the number one thing that I always learned was I'm a storyteller. And that storytelling can be done in sound. It can be done in the design of a font. It can be done in words. It can be done in many different things, in podcasts. And I think that the storyteller as someone who embraces these mediums and owns these mediums and is able to put in the dreams and hopes and the optimism of what we, I think, all want this world to stand for, the great experiment to still live. I think that's where we have to flood the gates on.

• 1:00:25Speaker 04

  It may not be movies. It may just be the other things. But we have to know that that's what we're doing. Be conscious that we are storytellers in all these mediums. And I believe that the human spirit will always live through those things. But we have to be clever.

• 1:00:42Kara Swisher?

  You sound like Steve Jobs.

• 1:00:45Speaker 04

  I am indoctrinated.

• 1:00:46Kara Swisher?

  He was always selling a phone, too, just so you know. So my very last question, then. You have part two of Wicked coming out in November 2025. We talked about the development of Crazy Rich Asians 2. You also have a musical adaptation of Crazy Rich Asians on stage. Another movie musical, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. A Dr. Seuss animated movie, a Britney Spears biopic memoir, The Woman in Me. I'm trying to figure how that fits in, but I kind of see it. How do these tie together? What do you want to make next? Because you're a maker, and so is Steve Jobs. And I really appreciated that about his life, because he was a maker. What do you want to make now, given all these different things? What is your mood right now?

• 1:01:31Speaker 04

  I really appreciate you saying that about Steve, because I feel that about him. I feel him whispering, "Make it, make it. Figure out what's next and make it." And also, you don't have to plan so far ahead either. Like, listen. I always say we can plan as much as we want in this movie. But at some point, the movie starts to speak back at us. And you better be listening, because when you hear it, then you can lean into those things. And I am not a destination person. There's not one movie that I dream of making, and that's it. Maybe Wicked was a piece of that, but it wasn't like, once I make that, I'm done. I love process, and I love starting with the idea, working with people, figuring it out,

• 1:02:15Speaker 04

  and trusting that where we're going, we're going to build the thing that we need and love. That it's precious to us and it will be precious to others. And so that's what I focus on. It's maybe why I have so much in development because I'm like, I don't know, it could be this, it could be this. I'm gonna work with these amazing people like Passick and Paul, who are amazing music writers, and Andrew Lloyd Webber, and we'll see what feels the right moment and what I'm supposed to be doing at that time.

• 1:02:38Kara Swisher?

  It's hard to do that.

• 1:02:39Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:02:40Kara Swisher?

  It's hard to be quiet.

• 1:02:41Speaker 04

  Well, my parents said to me was, you can do anything, John, because we have a restaurant, you'll never go hungry. We have a house, you'll never go homeless. So any decision you make, do it fearlessly, and you have the biggest advantage. You think you don't have any advantage because you don't know people in Hollywood, you have the biggest advantage. And I, that really is true. It really is true.

• 1:03:00Kara Swisher?

  Well, and getting back to your dad, when we started, what I think real artists are are chefs. Anyway, what you've done here is made a beautiful movie. I recommend. I have never liked a movie more recently than this one. It has a heart.

• 1:03:14Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 1:03:14Kara Swisher?

  It's really beautiful.

• 1:03:15Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 1:03:16Kara Swisher?

  Thank you so much. I really appreciate it, and I hope everyone goes and sees this movie, and you make a zebadillion dollars.

• 1:03:22Speaker 04

  Thank you. And it's an honor to be speaking with you.

• 1:03:25Kara Swisher?

  So you don't have to go home and stay at your parents' house.

• 1:03:28Speaker 04

  Pot stickers all day. Let's go.

• 1:03:30Kara Swisher?

  Hey, they're delicious. On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castor-Russell, Kateri Yokum, Jolie Myers, Megan Burney, and Kalen Lynch. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of audio. Special thanks to Kate Gallagher and Corinne Ruff. Our engineers are Rick Kwan and Fernando Aruda, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you want to be popular, and you are. If not, you are wicked. But what does that actually mean? You'll find out if you see the movie. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher, and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Monday with more.