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do that. If I thought we were in trouble and we didn't get something out of a par- ticular day, I could approach Jon or Alice Brooks, the cinematographer. For the most part, I just took my time. I really approached every musical number like a scene, every scene like a musical number. What is the best performance? What are the best moments that are going to tell our story dramatically? The lyrics were my dialogue. Q Like "West Side Story" (1961), the movie has a showstopper right at the beginning with the title sequence. Jon said we really need to create our visual grammar right now. We're going to have touches of surrealism and mag- ical realism, so why don't we spin that manhole cover. With musicals, people naturally think, once the song starts, you have to keep going. We said, "No, we're going to jolt you out of that every once in a while." We're going to hit the alarm clock or stop the music on the manhole cover. We're going to have moments where we are going to sit on a reflection of Usnavi at the bodega and you can see the dancers all in one shot. Q This is not a Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly musical. The frame is dense and packed with bodies and objects. What were the particular challeng- es of shaping the numbers? I think a really good example of that is the club scene. The room was so crowded, but there was also a real consistency to the choreography if you looked at it very closely. Every dancer is doing an incred- ible movement that is synchronized, and you have other dancers who are freestyling. My trick was to show both without it feeling too frenetic. There were parts where I could sit back and watch two people together, and I could also cut to somebody in a closeup who is freestyling. As long as I don't make it too quick, I think there is permission to dance around the room a little bit. Q The "96,000" number is the other tour de force musical number. Did you talk with the choreogra- phers and the cinematographer Alice Brooks? Did you work off the storyboards? It just depended on certain pieces. The beginning of "In the Heights" had a lot of storyboards and rehearsal footage [from which] I could get an idea of some of the construction. With "96,000," it was more about best laid plans and perfect weather. It was raining almost every day they shot there. They had to think on their feet a little bit. When I started to understand the song a little bit more, that it was each of these characters talking about what they'd do with this money, it became easier to tackle. I knew we were going to have sections. I knew we had to do the handoffs elegantly. I had to build that number the way that the song is built. I needed to isolate vocals and understand how each of these characters overlap. In some ways, the visuals did some of the work in telling me what to do. It was really about the song as well. The water imagery, the stylization, the animation, there is a great deal to pull off there. I asked my first assistant, Andrew Pang, to provide split-outs of the pre-re- cord isolated vocals. These were helpful to track each of the characters' stories in the song. I began the process of selecting footage based on each different charac- ter's story. As the song built in energy and layers, Jon and I built the edit to match. In the first section of the musical number, Usnavi, Benny, Sonny, and Graffiti Pete sing live on the street as they head to the pool. With the exception of Corey Hawkins, who played Benny, I used the actors' live performance in the assembly, and we tried to keep as much of that as possible. I treated their rap and performance like I was cutting any dialog scene. My main focus wasn't the song, but how each actor made fun of the other, as they expressed how they would spend their lottery earn- ings. Then as we entered the pool, I again constructed each individual story like a mini-scene in the same way. As the choreography and storytelling built, we intercut Graffiti Pete spraying t h e l o tte r y t i c ke t n u m b e rs, a n d t h e community chorus singing about their own dreams. The final reveal that no one at the pool had the winning ticket was a funny juxtaposition to the high energy spectacle that we just finished. ■ Patrick Z. McGavin is a Chicago-based writer and cultural critic. 55 F A L L Q 3 I S S U E in 2018 for a story about Hal Ashby in the DGA Quarterly — Jewison deserves the sympathetic and fair hearing given to him in this fine biography, one likely to stand as the last word on its subject. Looking back on "In the Heat of the Night," "A Soldier's Story," and "The Hurricane," we can say that Jewison J U M P S Book Review CONTINUED FROM PAGE 51 agreed to take in the animal." Almost universally described as a decent, honorable man — an impression I had when I interviewed him by phone caught up with Hollywood — and then eclipsed it. ■ "Norman Jewison: A Director's Life" By Ira Wells 495 pages Sutherland House 2021 Dance CONTINUED FROM PAGE 25