Paul Taswell

When you think about West Side Story, let's say, or even in Hamilton where you have the winner's ball and because the turntable is turning and the women are moving in a circular manner, the skirts then sweep around in a way that becomes very romantic.

And the ensemble of ladies in those skirts, so they've gone from being soldiers into being these women in this ball.

And when they're lifted up and they're swirling around, it creates this really magical, romantic moment that you are swept into.

And that's in support of the three primary women that we're looking at, which is the Schuyler sisters, and then experiencing Eliza's

You know, her transformation.

And then we go into Angelica and how she remembers that moment.

You know, so all those things are very visceral for me.

And I become very emotional about it.

I know my life is full of that.

But it's, you know, you have to have trial and error.

And so I build into the process a period of R&D to fail, to make bad choices.

There were probably seven different versions of the Elphaba hat that I created.

One, because I wanted to figure it out.

I wanted for it to be able to collapse.

I wanted for it to live within the design rules that we had created for the film to somehow be a very original version of a hat.

Was it going to be straight and pointed up, you know, in a symmetrical way, or was it going to curve?

And, you know, just a little blip is, as John M. Chu would describe how he was planning on starting the film, it was going to be a close-up of the hat that you really couldn't see what it was.

You really didn't know if it was a mountain or a building or, you know, like what that structure was.

So that defined why it spirals around.

But then the spiral became definitive of everything around.