Wicked makes everyone cry. Hundreds of fans have shared weepy videos from the cinema as the final credits roll. Then there’s the cast who literally can’t stop crying in their interviews. It’s hardly surprising that the man responsible for putting the two films together in the first place can’t seem to stop tearing up either.
Myron Kerstein, editor of both Wicked films, first cried when he took his son to see the musical on Broadway in the early 2000s. Then, 20 years later, he found himself tearing up in the editing room once again, watching Elphaba and Glinda’s first emotional dance at the Ozdust Ballroom, and, later, when they sang their final goodbyes from a castle turret in For Good.
He really is just like us. And perhaps that’s what made him the perfect candidate for the job: From the beginning, he understood that Wicked’s emotional core was the friendship between the two witches. “I knew that whatever we’re going to make together needed to resonate in the same way that I had experienced in the theater,” he tells me at a hotel in London ahead of Wicked: For Good’s European premiere.
An adaptation of Stephen Schwartz’s Broadway musical from 2003, which is in turn an adaptation of Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel, the two Wicked films offer a retelling of the story of the Wicked Witch of the West from L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz. What if, the story asks us, this villain wasn’t as bad as she seemed? What if she and Glinda the Good had once been school friends? And what if it was the Wizard, pulling the strings from behind the curtain, who was the story’s real baddie?
It’s an epic tale, filled with magic, music, and a whole lot of plot. But at its core, it’s the story of two unlikely friends who are tragically torn apart by their own choices. Kerstein is the person who got to see all 250 hours of footage. “I’m the first audience member, and I take it very seriously.” And choosing the right moments to build the story? “It’s really about emotion—like, what gives me goosebumps?”
Although the decision to split the musical into two films may feel unnecessary for musical theater purists, it did give director Jon M. Chu and Kerstein the chance to flesh out the famously underbaked second act of the musical. “I knew the reasons why Jon wanted to do it: to give us more real estate, to develop these characters, to have more world building, to expand the plot lines,” Kerstein says. “I love the stage show, but it is sort of like warp speed. It’s almost like a Cliff Notes version compared to the movie.”
It also allowed them to really hone in on the tonal shift that happens in the intermission of Wicked. "It’s funny, after the first movie was released, I was terrified," he admits. “I just felt, ‘How are we going to do this again?’ The success of the first movie was really intimidating. At the same time, Jon kept saying, ‘Don’t go chasing waterfalls.’ Like, don’t go trying to chase the first movie. We’re making a different film.”
And Wicked: For Good is notably darker. “We had to actually drop into the second movie. And it’s pretty dystopic. We had to honor this darker tone.”
One of the major shifts that brings out this darkness is a new, deeper focus on Glinda’s arc in the second half of the musical. While the stage show plays out as a linear, singular story, the two films function more as companion pieces, each with their own perspective. While the first film charts Elphaba’s journey from naive, hopeful girl to disillusionment, Glinda goes through a parallel, equally painful journey of discovery in part two.
While this was Chu’s vision from the beginning, Kerstein admits he initially had his doubts that it could work. “The first script was green, the second was pink,” says Kerstein. “So, we did know that the first film was going to be the origin story of the Wicked Witch of the West. But it wasn’t so clear that the second story, to me, could be the origin story of Glinda the Good.”
But eventually, he found his way into Glinda’s story. For one thing, they created a similar structure to the first film, using flashbacks to Glinda’s childhood. As in the first film, Glinda faces an image of her younger self at the very moment she makes the decision to embrace a life spent fighting for the truth.
They also added a final scene for Glinda in Munckhinland when she puts down her wand and welcomes the Animals back. It’s a glimpse at the new Glinda who will be a force for real, palpable good.
“More and more as we sort of carved Ari’s incredible performance, it began to work [as Glinda’s film]. It made ‘Thank Goodness’ feel very vulnerable and beautiful. And that betrayal scene, when Elphaba and Fiyero leave, we have that shot of Glinda—it was just the best performance—we don’t cut away from her at all. The more we did that, the more we felt like, ‘Okay, this can be the origin story of Glinda.”
And the film expands on the stage show in other ways, too. On stage, the plot jolts forward from Elphaba’s decision to reject the Wizard’s offer all the way to her final goodbye with Glinda in “For Good.” In the film, however, we see what happens in between: We see the building of the Yellow Brick Road. We spend time with the persecuted Animals. We get to see how Elphaba actually lives as a social outcast. We also have room for two new songs that let us deeper into each of the two main characters.
“I was intimidated by having the new songs because that wasn’t from the original source material,” he confesses. “You know, I didn’t have anything to compare it to, but I knew that without those songs, we might not understand Elphaba’s journey, or we might not know that Glinda needs to literally reflect on where she’s at and how she’s handling herself with the Wizard.”
Elphaba’s new belter, “No Place Like Home,” is a desperate battle cry to the Animals—a plea to stay in Oz amid the Wizard’s ever-more aggressive repressive acts.
“I just knew it had to be a rallying cry for Elphaba,” he says. “The one thing I had to really compare it to is like Disney princess movies where they might be singing to animals.”
Meanwhile, Ariana Grande’s Glinda gets “The Girl in the Bubble,” a pensive song that preempts her bold decision to finally go against the Wizard and Madame Morrible and stand up for the truth.
Having extra runtime thanks to a second film didn’t just mean that Kerstein and Chu could flesh out some of the plot points and add a few musical numbers—it also gave them the chance to hone in on the emotional moments in the film’s quieter moments, too.
“We can’t do a scene like the Ozdust Ballroom and let that breathe, and let these characters connect to each other, if we have to condense everything into a two-minute scene,” he says as an example, citing Elphaba and Glinda’s first moment of connection in the first film.
And the second film has plenty of room for breath, too.
“One of my favorite scenes in the film is the betrayal scene between Elphaba and Fiyero,” he says. It’s the moment after Glinda and Fiyero’s almost-wedding when he decides to run off with Elphaba. “Half of that scene is just looks. I love the melodrama and the meatiness of that. And you can’t do that on the stage. You can’t feel the depth of how everything is unraveling without those looks and taking your time with it.”
Another scene that is stretched out to allow for breath was, of course, “For Good,” Glinda and Elphaba’s final emotional duet, which sees the friends saying goodbye before Glinda hides in a closet and looks on as Dorothy “kills” Elphaba with a bucket of water. “If I’m not allowed to let that scene breathe and then have the heartache of that closet scene resonate,” he says. “If I don’t have time to do that, it’s not going to work.”
But Kerstein also finds other ways of honing in on Wicked’s emotional center—namely, with a rather unorthodox use of flashbacks. “There is a lyricism to the flashbacks in the film that you obviously can’t do on the stage,” he says.
Throughout both films, we occasionally snap back to the memory of a picturesque picnic. In the first film, we see Glinda and Elphaba smiling in a field. In the second, the scene takes more shape, as we discover that Nessa, Fiyero, and Boq were all there too. In an unusual move from Kerstein, it’s a sequence we never see within the linear context of the story. As such, it takes on an almost mythic, symbolic quality and becomes a sort of visual reminder of the purity of the girls’ bond.
As Kerstein explains, the footage was actually pulled from a scene that was left on the cutting room floor—and if you look closely, you’ll even see the moment after the unseen scene. “In the Dillman classroom scene, Glinda brings in a poppy, but you’ve never seen where that poppy came from. I love that. We infer that these things happened in the first movie, but we’ve never seen it.”
Building up to that final moment—the moment Glinda and Elphaba are finally on the same page, but must also bid each other farewell forever—was the most important part of the job when it came to cutting together the second film. A key strategy Kerstein discovered? Keeping Glinda and Elphaba apart for as long as possible—even though seeing them together is the one thing we are all yearning for.
“It’s like the shark in Jaws‚" he laughs. “The longer you wait for it, the more you’re going to want it. We played a lot with structure and depriving the audience of what they wanted. That way, when they are together, it feels more delightful and warm.”
The pair are together for a few moments towards the start of the film when Elphaba effectively crashes Glinda’s wedding to Fiyero. For a brief moment, it seems that Elphaba is about to give in and join Glinda and the Wizard, but when she discovers that the Wizard is hiding caged, traumatized Animals, off she flies.“When they’re torn apart again at the wedding, you’re like, ‘They’re just not destined to be together.’”
Although Elphaba and Glinda share remarkably little screen time, Kerstein performs plenty of editing tricks to remind us of their bond.
Glinda’s wedding, for instance, is intercut with the parallel scene of Elphaba walking down her own “aisle” as she discovers the caged Animals. “That was never scripted that way. By intercutting it, you actually make them feel like they’re experiencing it together in some weird way,” he says.
At the end of it all, Elphaba and Fiyero leave Oz for good, while Glinda, believing them both to be dead, takes the first steps towards being a truly good leader. As in the stage show, we see Elphaba walking into her future with Fiyero, turning over her shoulder to bid one final, symbolic farewell to her friend.
But Kerstein made the powerful, bold choice to add one final button: He added one more flashback to that picnic scene. It’s a simple, quiet moment with Glinda and Elphaba smiling together. Then, Glinda leans over and whispers something into her friend’s ear. Suddenly, you see it: it’s the original Broadway poster come to life. For fans of the show, it’s a true chills moment.
“I often think about the power of an edit,” he says. “The great Ann Coates, she did this little movie called Lawrence of Arabia. In it, there’s one of the most powerful edits ever in the history of cinema: It’s of Lawrence pulling out a match, cutting to the sand, being in Arabia. I often think, ‘How can I evoke emotion through a single edit?’ And I think that having Elphaba and Fierro walk away, and you thinking that’s gonna be in the movie, and then you cut to this iconic moment, there’s real power there.”
“I was not expecting goose bumps up and down my arms,” he continues. “It’s servicing the fans in one way, but also whoever experiences it for the first time, even if they don’t know what that is, they’re like, ‘Oh yeah. It’s about the girls. It was always about the girls.”
