Jon M. Chu is one of the hottest directors in the world right now thanks to his smash hit Wicked: Part One. The film is already one of the highest grossing films of the year, and it apparently has a big fan in one of the hottest directors of all time in Steven Spielberg.
Speaking with Jake Hamilton of our own Reelblend podcast, Chu says that Steven Spielberg has lived up to all of his expectations as one of the director's heroes. Spielberg helped launch Chu’s career and the two saw Wicked together recently, and then spent a lot of time talking about it after the fact. Chu explained…
They say don’t meet your heroes, but you actually do want to meet Steven Spielberg, it’s pretty nice…He actually asked me to see the movie, and wanted to see it in Dolby Atmos with me. We sat there for 30, 40 minutes after and he’s so interesting because he’s curious. He’s curious about how we shot certain sequences, why we did certain things, how we mixed physical effects with visual effects. And he loves the musical, so he knows how hard it is and he expressed that.
Oh to have been a fly on the wall during this conversation. Steven Spielberg recently made West Side Story, a project that he had long wanted to do because of his personal love of musicals. One can imagine these two had a lot to talk about when it came to the work involved in directing some complex films.
While Steven Spielberg is no stranger to musicals, or to movies with heavy use of visual effects, West Side Story didn’t necessarily have a lot of those, so Spielberg likely had a lot of questions for Jon M. Chu regarding how he brought it all together. One would think Steven Spielberg knows everything thee is to know about making movies, but perhaps it’s his endless curiosity that makes him so good at his job. Check out Chu’s full comments on Spielberg below.
If most of us ever met Steven Spielberg, we’d likely be the one asking him endless questions. Chu admits to being apprehensive about answering some of them for feat that his way of doing things might not meet with the Oscar winner’s approval, but there’s certainly no indication that was the case. At this point it seems likely Wicked will win its own Oscars, as it will likely be in contention in multiple categories.
The closest I’ve ever gotten to Steven Spielberg is seeing his introduction at the beginning of the E.T. Adventure at Universal Studios Florida, but this whole exchange tells me that if I ever did have a chance to meet him or interview him, it would be everything I could possibly hope for.
Both directors have a very exciting future, Chu, of course, has the upcoming Wicked: Part Two set for next year, while Spielberg has an upcoming project of his own, though it's one we know little about. One imagines these two will have plenty to discuss going forward.
