Lin-Manuel Miranda on why Tick, Tick... Boom! subject Jonathan Larson would probably hate him
Miranda: "I feel a little Aaron Burr like, I don't know why I got to live and Jonathan isn't 61 years old and sitting next to me and maybe yelling at me"
Lin-Manuel Miranda always knew what he would direct if he was ever given the chance. He dreamt of how he’d adapt Tick, Tick… Boom!, a series of autobiographical monologues written and performed by the late Jonathan Larson. He would go on to create Rent, but tragically died on its opening night.
Miranda had both seen and performed Tick, Tick… Boom!, and it was an intensely personal production for him. On the carpet at the movie’s premiere in LA, he told reporters that the play “felt like a message in a bottle just for me,” a sentiment that’s not uncommon with much of Larson’s work.
The A.V. Club sat down with Miranda to talk Tick, Tick… Boom! You can check out that interview in the video above, or read the transcript below.
The A.V. Club: I was in high school in the mid-’90s, and I was one of those people that drove around in their friend’s car listening to Rent over and over and over.
I was reading some of what you said at AFI Fest, and you mentioned that first seeing Tick, Tick… Boom! felt like “a message in a bottle, just for you.” I think a lot of people feel that way about Jonathan Larson’s work, and I’m wondering: Why do you think people connect with Larson and his work so deeply?
Lin-Manuel Miranda: I can tell you what I connected with about Rent when I saw it at 17: It felt messy and homemade and personal in a way that musicals don’t always feel. A lot of the Broadway musicals I’d seen, I loved. I was a fan of musical theater from doing shows in high school, but they just feel like they came from some other place. It didn’t feel like you could write one at home.
But Rent was very clearly someone writing about his friends and his community. It was the most diverse cast I’d ever seen in a Broadway show, and that opened things up in me that I didn’t know were possible.
At the end of the day, it’s all about artists living and dying and trying to figure out how to do what they love. I was definitely a high school kid who walked around with a camcorder, and it was easier for me to film my friends than hang out with my friends. So when Roger calls out Mark saying, “You pretend to create and observe, but you really detach,” I felt personally attacked in the back of the Peter Landau theater.