The Music of Wicked

We had spent so much time — and by ‘we’ I mean myself and [writer] Winnie Holtzman — when we were writing the screenplay, which of course includes the songs [and] going through everything very meticulously with [director] John Chu, that basically he came in knowing how he was going to shoot it… But then, of course, once you're actually there and working with bodies and working within the environment, things will change… This was an extremely collaborative process all along the way. It wasn't as if we did some music work, then went away, and came back and were surprised by what was done with it… Nobody sort of went off and did his thing by himself.