Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes explain the reasons behind the musical's biggest tweaks from the stage to the screen.
is to stop working at the salon and move to the West Village, but narrative doesn’t really go into why. In the movie, Vanessa has a passion for fashion and believes she has to leave her community in Washington Heights in order to make her dream come true.
“It’s not that far, but her interest in moving downtown is more about cultural distance,” Hudes explained. “It’s about the models she’s seen of what makes a successful artist in, essentially, white industries that exist most visibly in very wealthy spaces. So to her, there’s no way she can have a legitimate path as an artist unless I inhabit those spaces.”
That’s why, in the movie, Vanessa “doesn’t even let Usnavi call her an ‘artist’ because she doesn’t feel that she looks like what an artist looks like,” Hudes said. It isn’t until she sees the spray-painted rags of Graffiti Pete that she has an epiphany. “She realizes, ‘Actually, I am an artist here’ — just a change of point of view that fuels the rest of her life.
To keep up the tension, the movie delays this reveal until the end, after Abuela Claudia has died. While packing up the last of her belongings, Usnavi finds a small box that holds the winning ticket. His onscreen reaction was not in the script. “That was Jon [M. Chu] pointing a camera at Anthony and saying, ‘Go.’ That was Anthony, as Usnavi, deeply reckoning with this woman’s legacy. It’s so beautiful.
“When I returned to write the screenplay of ‘In the Heights,’ that story had become a part of me in a more immediate way,” she said. At the same time,were “at the fever pitch of the national conversation, and being demonized over these immigration questions. I wanted to bring that back home to the human level in a strategic way, with the character who loves the United States and Washington Heights the most.”Initially, Usnavi wants to bring Sonny back to the D.R.
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