How and why Wicked expanded 'Defying Gravity' into a lengthy climax scene

Warning: This article contains spoilers from Wicked.

Everyone deserves the chance to fly...and director Jon M. Chu wanted to make sure that the version of "Defying Gravity" in his film adaptation of Wicked could soar to new heights.

The number, long considered one of the stage show's centerpieces, occurs at the climax and serves as the final button on Part 1 of the two-part film adaptation. But it also elongates the number, putting in a far greater deal of scene work and action sequences, including Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) and Glinda (Ariana Grande) attempting to escape the Emerald City by hot air balloon, Elphaba falling from the Wizard's tower, and a chase involving the newly winged flying monkeys.

Chu did originally intend to present "Defying Gravity" in much the same way it is depicted on stage. "If you just played it as the ending number — and we had versions of that in storyboard form and rehearsal form — it felt like a shortcut," the filmmaker tells Entertainment Weekly. "It felt too easy."

"The moment we actually looked at the words and read the words — 'something has changed within me' — we talked these lyrics out before we ever sang them. When you talk it, it feels better," he continues. "It feels more connected than when you sing it to a tempo that exists already. I said [to Cynthia], 'You express it the way you need to express it.' It feels like dialogue, and you're suddenly in a song you don't even know you're in yet. What I love about musicals is when I almost don't know I'm even in a song because it flows so seamlessly from an emotion that it's necessary to put it into a melody."

Chu wanted to be sure that so many of the moments within "Defying Gravity," particularly Elphaba fully assuming her independence and claiming her power, as well as the key beats in her friendship with Glinda, were given their full due. This became even more pertinent because it's the end of the film, not merely the conclusion of the first act.

"There are moments when she's tying the cape and everything, and you're trying to keep the intensity of the end of a movie," Chu explains. "She's saying, 'Come with me.' And [Glinda] has to say, 'I can't,' but she can't say those words. That takes time to express. You can't rush that. So we tried to give it as much room to do that. Every beat felt necessary. Emotionally, you have to fulfill the promise of what you want for Elphaba."

With so much pressure to get this number right, Chu declares it the hardest part of the film to shoot. "Almost everything in 'Defying Gravity' was difficult because it's all hands on deck," he says. "There's visual effects, stunts, acting, camera work, all the flying monkeys, it all had to work. Every turn was a trap that I knew our audience could despise us for. If I'm not on a close-up on those specific words, at the moment that they want to see it, I'm screwed. If I break it up so much that they cannot recognize it, that's a problem.'"

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Part of this was the inherent challenge that comes with taking something from the stage to the screen. When you have the wide proscenium of the theater, characters can fade into the background while still being visible, but in a movie, each shot must center on what audiences need and want to see. This was particularly challenging in figuring out the level of Glinda's presence in the song, even though it is Elphaba's moment in many ways.

"There's a fine line of what Glinda needs to be doing," Chu adds. "In a stage show, you can almost ignore Glinda. You could get her for one line, and she's in the back in the shadows. But in this, I had to go to a close-up. And what is Glinda thinking here? Ariana had to figure that out to walk that fine line. Is it her own ambition? Is she an a--hole? What is she doing? What are her feelings toward Elphaba flying away?"

To effectively answer all of those questions, Chu felt that he couldn't just let the song play out uninterrupted, but instead needed to build in vamps and pauses to give Grande and Erivo room to embody the complicated emotions of this transformative moment in the characters' lives.

If that weren't hard enough, filming the conclusion of the number also proved to be an extra-emotional experience. It was all that was left to finish filming when production paused during the dual Hollywood strikes last year. So it ended up being Grande and Erivo's last days on set when they returned to set in January of this year.

“That scene where she says, 'You're trembling, let me get something for you,'" Erivo revealed while joining the Sentimental Men podcast. "[We were] a mess. I'm looking at [Ariana], [she's] looking at me, we're supposed to say goodbye at this point. It's just a mess. The last moment before I fly up in the air. That was her last shot in the film and that was my second to last shot."

At that point, it was just time to close their eyes and leap.