‘Wicked’ Editor Myron Kerstein On The “Human Moments” Between Elphaba And Glinda In New Editing Featurette

Ryan Fleming
·2-min read
‘Wicked’ Editor Myron Kerstein On The “Human Moments” Between Elphaba And Glinda In New Editing Featurette

EXCLUSIVE: When editing a musical film, editor Myron Kerstein puts himself in the audience’s shoes to find the driving emotional force of the film. “With Wicked, even though we have these giant set pieces, this epic canvas, ultimately it’s the human moments between these two characters that will move the audience,” he says in a new Wicked editing featurette.

Based on the long-running Broadway musical, Wicked follows the relationship between Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) and Glinda (Ariana Grande) as they meet at Shiz University to study magic. Since the focus of the story was so heavily driven by that relationship, Kerstein says he made the bulk of his choices based on how the audience would react to the two characters.

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“As an editor, you have all the scope and scale and world building and CG animals and musical numbers, but at the end of the day you have to really care about this relationship between Elphaba and Glinda,” he says in a follow-up interview with Deadline. “The most important part was to establish their relationship and to do that quickly. In the beginning, they’re enemies who are at each other’s throats at Shiz, and then we have to see them bond and we have to root for them as two people that really see each other.”

The story is separated into two parts, with the second part premiering in 2025, and Kerstein says the biggest challenge for the first film was making sure to hit every milestone in their relationship in a way that made the audience root for them. “If you don’t root for them as characters, if you don’t believe their relationship, if you don’t feel something when they’re torn apart at the end… none of the rest of it matters.”

The most important scene for this was the Ozdust Ballroom, where the relationship between Glinda and Elphaba makes a dramatic change. “We always felt like the Ozdust Ballroom was basically the set piece we had to get right, because if that didn’t work, the rest of the movie was going to fall apart.” Kerstein says he spent a lot of time figuring out how to make the scene as uncomfortable as possible at first, which is not the usual job for an editor. “If we don’t make the audience feel really uncomfortable and feel the bullying with Elphaba, then this gesture from Glinda wasn’t going to work.”

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