Kiara Alegría Hudes

could have been a little louder.

I thought I had been loud enough and I hadn't been.

I tried and at moments I failed.

By the same token, part of me as a writer anticipated that casting this movie is going to be hard.

And so I can see in my screenplay I was already guarding myself against certain things happening.

So I wrote in

to Nina's dialogue in my screenplay for In the Heights, I was worried that it would be cast as all light-skinned actors.

And so I was like, let me make sure that part of what Nina's experiencing is some anti-blackness.

So I actually wrote that into the dialogue because I didn't contractually have, say, overcasting, but they can't change my dialogue.

Well, for one thing, I was a young writer writing In the Heights.

It was 2004.

I moved to New York in August.

And by October, I was working with another unknown writer.

I was one.

Lynn was the other.

And here we are working on this thing called In the Heights.

And he is such an effervescent spirit, and that spirit was really baked in.

It's a celebration of a community, right?

In the Heights doesn't have a lead character, per se.

There's Usnavi, who's our lead storyteller.