When the film adaptation of the Broadway megahit Wicked finally hit theaters, a fascinating element got highlighted by critics and fans: the original score by Stephen Schwartz and John Powell. Despite the well-known songs from the musical, with both the music and lyrics by Schwartz, the film had a thrilling original score that fills the gaps from the Broadway show. A result of that was the Academy Award nomination for Best Original score, the second one for Powell, who received it fifteen years after the first with his work for How to Train Your Dragon.
The duo returns to the composing duty in Wicked: For Good. Arguably, they had more work with the second part of the musical, considering the most well-known songs are in the first film; hence, the score is essential to create the dramatic spine of the project. On November 5th, after Movies We Texted About attended the world premiere of the film in São Paulo, Brazil, we had the honor to talk with the director, Jon M. Chu, in an exclusive press conference for the international journalists and film critics invited for the premiere. We asked him about the score of the second project. A month later, we had the chance to talk to one of the composers, John Powell, in an exclusive Zoom interview.
Below, you can check our conversations with Jon M. Chu and John Powell about the original score of Wicked: For Good.
From the Press Conference with Jon M. Chu in São Paulo, Brazil.
Pedro Lima: You worked with John Powell for the original score, and Wicked is a musical that has a lot of recognisable melodies and a lot of music that are legendary. Could you tell me how was to work with John on discovering and creating new piece of music for this film?
Jon M. Chu: Yeah, I love that you asked that question because in the real nitty gritty, people like to say, oh, it’s a musical, so all the music’s there. No, no, no. It’s a whole mess of stuff. So first of all, there are themes that are built into Wicked. There’s underscore in the show that you could use. We didn’t use any of that stuff, but maybe there were hints of things. And obviously there’s a language. So if you have score that doesn’t sound like the language or totally different tunes, it’s going to feel disconnected. It’s going to feel like story/song/story/song. We just knew that’s not a great way to make a new school. So you had to find a composer who had no ego. Then you had to find a composer. Well, first of all, you had to find a composer that was cinematic and understood this language and had all the confidence in the world.
Jon M. Chu: Then you had to find one with no ego. Those are two very different things. Then you had to find someone because in order to have no ego, you have to sit with Schwartz, and you have to be there and listen to him for maybe a couple months of, here are the themes. This is why he wrote this, this is why he did that. So sitting down with John Powell for the first time, I had to lay that out real clear. You’re going to be working with Stephen Schwartz. He’s going to give you all this stuff, but what I need from you is I need you to then take those, and I need you to imagine bigger, and I need not bigger as in scope-wise, but expand the landscape and invent new ones to bring into this. And you have to understand (Stephen) Schwartz so much that he has to be able to accept the new things that you’re bringing in.
Jon M. Chu: So it’s going to be a little bit of teamwork here. Then you have to have somebody who has done a musical, or maybe they don’t have to have done a music, but understands that you can’t just have the job of score in a musical movie is not the same as a score in a movie that isn’t a musical because the music itself takes up so much space, takes a mental space, emotional space, and actual energy from the audience.
Jon M. Chu: And so the score that usually is guiding the audience or bringing them to a place, it has to be way more minimal or not. You just have to know the dance, the rhythmic dance that both are doing for each other. And that means every time you recut the movie, you might have to redo the thing. And so it was a lot of discovery together. Now, John Powell doesn’t listen to any of the temp score.
Jon M. Chu: So when I cut the movies together and showed them to the studio all at the same time, there’s all temp score. So you feel this difference in a weird thing, but you just try to smooth over it. He watched it with zero. He doesn’t like to listen to what you have in there. So for me as a filmmaker, that’s also really difficult because I’m like, oh, I know this moment works with this particular type of score. And so I had to use my words to describe how to get us there. And oftentimes he would do something that’s a little bit off than what I thought necessarily.
Jon M. Chu: And then we would have to find it together. And many times there were better discoveries than what we could have gotten from a temp score, but it gets difficult. So that was the process over and over and over again. It was probably the last thing we did up to the mix. I mean, even in the mix, we were receiving score, and we’re holding on recording our a hundred-piece orchestra in London all the way into the end. We actually had to do two sessions. We knew we could get the first session, and then maybe there’d be stragglers, and we went back and did another.
Jon M. Chu: You have two ways to get to the audience picture and sound. That’s 50% of your story going in their right. And in a weird way, it might be even a little bit more because score gets even deeper. So it was a long process, but you had to have the right people, and we had to be a team and understand that. And the map, emotional map that I would walk all the heads of departments from, I had to walk John from and with a new perspective because now with our edit, it changed a little bit. So as long as they knew our emotional destination, hopefully they use their skillset as storytellers in their craft to up it or meet it or whatever we need to do.
Exclusive Interview with Wicked Composer John Powell
Pedro Lima: It is an honour to talk to you, a big fan of your work. And firstly, it’s funny because I talked to John Chu in São Paulo in a press conference, and I asked him about you and your work for the film because Wicked has a lot of memorable melodies and very legendary songs. And how is it for you as a composer to fill the gap for an original score in a universe that has these songs that are well-known and popular?
John Powell: Yeah, it was a mixture of nerve-wracking because every use of a melody that people knew was quite potent. But also, thankfully, all of the material that we were playing around with was wonderful material in the first place. It was a treasure trove of tunes. In fact, that became an issue that the first difficult part of working on, number one, was for me to learn all of the tunes and try and imagine what I would need if I was just scoring a normal film.
John Powell: If this was a film, which wasn’t a musical, nothing to do with anybody else musically, I would have to sit down and try and create melodies that I would feel would perform very specific functions and allow for certain levels of development. And the way I’d done, I think, sorry, I think Wicked One was the 68th film I’d ever composed. So number one is 68 and number two is 70. Because in between I did (How to Train Your) Dragon.
John Powell: But so when I sat down to do it, I just treated it like any other film. But I already had these melodies to play with, and I looked at that for both films in one go because I watched the first time I saw the films was in the end of 2023, and I got to see them very roughly. The first one was in better shape, the second one was very rough, but I got to see the whole story, and I knew where it was all going. So I then sat with Stephen, and we went through his process of writing the original musical. I had to catch up with everybody who knew this stuff.
John Powell: But then there were also things, and much more so in the second film, we needed a lot more melodies that weren’t specifically from any of the original musical, simply because they needed to bypass an audience’s connection with the words. Because a lot of these tunes, no one warns the Wicked or For Good, they evoke lyrics when you use them. So that became an interesting thing was where can we use that? But also then another part of it was to develop those melodies into a way that they were recognisable on a more subconscious level than an unconscious level, so that they would flow underneath the story. So it was very interesting, very difficult, but it gave me a great deal of joy because Stephen’s melodies were always so beautiful.
Pedro Lima: Yeah, and when I talked to John, he also said that when you were to record the score, it was a massive scope and you recorded at legendary studios like Air and Abbey Road. So, as a composer and conductor of this course, how is the practical process of going to the studio? You have reading all the musical sheets, so you say, no, now I’m going to Abbey Road and record it with hundreds of musicians. How is this processed for this film in particular?
John Powell: Well, there was two parts to it. Obviously there was 55 minutes of songs in each film, and thankfully, so they had a week. I didn’t have to worry about many of the songs. There was a few ones that I did like, Wicked Witch of the East. I think we did that one because it was so integrated in the score, but a lot of them, I didn’t have to worry about those. Steven Rader, (Jack) Dolman, and John Michael Caldwell. These other people were worrying about those.
John Powell: So we kind of would do a week at the studio just to do the songs, and then about another 10 days to do the score. But yes, this one we did entirely at Air Studios. The first one we did split a little bit, but this one was all done at Air Studios. But we made the songs and the score, the recording technique and the styles and the musicians and the placements and everything very similar, so that there was never any kind of, so it was all very seamless to try and make it seamless.
John Powell: So that, I mean, part of the gig is to make sure that when the song begins, it doesn’t announce itself. That it seems to have come very naturally out of the action or the storytelling or the scene before it, the many scenes before it. So I’m always trying to build to a point at which a song is not expected, but it’s inevitable. It’s the only way for a character to be able to speak at the level of emotion they want to.
John Powell: And so that all of the score always was at least always 10 minutes before any song was prepared that way, and be able to do everything in the same studio in the same way, same engineer, same musicians, was very useful. But I mean, one of the things that we do is we mock it all up. You can’t see, but I sit here with my software here, which is on this screen. Well, it’s not on at the moment, and I have to make everything in a demo form in a model to show the filmmakers, because we can’t just put it on paper first.
John Powell: We have to make it work. We have to make it make sense to everybody, because I can’t expect the director to look at a piece of paper and say, this is, oh, I understand. He never will. So it’s always about making something here that sounds in this room, make it sound pretty good as best I can with samples and modelling it. And then once everybody’s happy with that, which normally happens about three days before we go to London, there’s a mad rush. Everything kind of gets approved, and then we know what we are. Also, the edit keeps changing as well, right?
John Powell: Until the end, even after we record sometimes. So we have to keep adjusting things. It’s an unusual way of doing it that’s developed in the last 25 years. Really. It didn’t used to be like that. You used to be able to do it on the piano, and then you would go to the scoring stage, and the orchestra would play, and everyone would be happy. But now we have to make sure that it works before the scoring stage. And then when we get to the scoring stage, the musicians just make it sound better. It sounds more elegant, it sounds more lush, it sounds bigger. It sounds more cinematic.
Wicked: For Good is now on digital and demand.
Learn more about the film at the IMDB site for the title.
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