Netflix - The Prom : Ryan Murphy’s interview

By Mulder, 02 december 2020

The Prom is an American musical romantic comedy film directed by Ryan Murphy and adapted to the screen by Chad Beguelin and Bob Martin, from their and Matthew Sklar's 2018 Broadway musical of the same name. The film stars Meryl Streep, James Corden, Nicole Kidman, Keegan-Michael Key, Andrew Rannells, Ariana DeBose, Kerry Washington, and Jo Ellen Pellman. The Prom is scheduled for a December 11, 2020 release on Netflix, coinciding with a theatrical run in select theaters in December.

Q : Let’s talk about your journey with this musical. when you saw it on broadway, what made you think, “not only am i going to produce this, but i’m going to direct it as a movie?

Ryan Murphy : It was an interesting experience because I went to see it in January of 2019 and I’d heard of it, but didn’t really know anything about it other than the one-liner. It was a dark, snowy night and I was by myself, and there were two things I took away: First of all, I had a great time at the show. I thought it was funny and stylish and it felt like a relief in the middle of a very dark time in our country. I also loved that when I looked around, there were families there. There were parents with their kids. There were gay people there. There were straight women there who had come in groups. It played for everybody. I just loved that people were laughing and crying. There was a great humanity and spirit to it. Also, unexpectedly for me, was the idea that the girl who was denied going to the prom because of her sexuality was from Indiana. Which is something that happened to me, and
I’m from Indiana. There was a personal element there. I remember walking out of there thinking, Wow, I wish there had been something like this for me to see or watch with my parents when I was younger. But there wasn’t. So, I thought, Well, then maybe I should make it. So that’s what I did. It was just a very strange experience because — I’ve never done this before — but on the plane ride back to LA I wrote out a list of who I’ve always wanted to work with, who’s on my bucket list. Number one on everyone’s bucket list is Meryl Streep, who I knew a little bit socially, but I was always so shy around her…and James Corden, and Nicole Kidman, and Kerry Washington, and Keegan-Michael Key. I called all their agents and I said, I’m doing this, I know it’s farfetched, but will you see if your client will go to the show? Crazily enough, I think within a week, Meryl went, then Nicole went, and James went, and they all said yes. It happened literally within three weeks, from me seeing it, to it being greenlit by Netflix. I think for all of us it came from a real place of knowing this is what the world needs now and wanting to put this out there.

Q : Talking about the casting of the young actors jo ellen pellman and ariana debose. what did you see in them that convinced you they were right for this?

Ryan Murphy : We did a six month casting call for the two young ladies to play Emma Nolan and Alyssa Greene. That was a different layer of fun. We already had all these stars and we were going for unknowns in the rest of the cast. I wanted the audience to discover someone new playing Emma, and I wanted someone with a lot of strength and steel to play Alyssa. It was an open casting call and I had tapes of literally every young person in the world. Ultimately, I narrowed it down to two people, which was Ariana and Jo Ellen. I said to my casting director, I’m flying to New York and I only want to meet these two people and I want them to meet each other in the room, which was kind of a strange way of doing it and nobody really thought that was a good idea except me. I just walked into the room and I asked them to talk to me about their lives before they did anything. Jo Ellen’s story was: She was a young queer woman from a small town, who had been raised by a single gay mom. She had just graduated from school and had seen The Prom with her mother and it had really touched a chord in them as two gay women. Her story was just very powerful and then she opened her mouth and she could sing and act! Ariana did the same. She was a young girl with a dream who had been on Broadway — she’d been in Hamilton and had just finished doing West Side Story with Steven Spielberg — so she had a lot of experience. What I loved about Ariana is that she had a lot of ideas about the character and knew how important this was. She knew that there was a responsibility in doing this movie for Netflix because you’re going to become a role model to nearly 200 million people whether you like it or not. They’re going to see hope. The story has a happy ending. Then they read together and as soon as they did it, I was like, well, that’s it. That was the easiest thing I ever did. It took an hour, but it was just meant to be. They were the only two that I loved and they had an immediate rapport and chemistry. They both knew how important representation is, for young people to see themselves and to get happy endings. In so many gay stories — and I’ve certainly told so many of them — the endings are sad or tragic, but this is uplifting. There’s a line in the movie where they say, “Build a prom for everyone,” and that’s the world that I wish we lived in. It was a very joyful process.

Q : This is your first musical feature film. what was the most terrifying thing for you to conquer going into day one ?

Ryan Murphy : Well, number one was this was the first time I ever directed Meryl Streep. The idea that I had to suck it up and say, “Let’s try it again,” was terrifying. Then I found out she wants to be directed. She wants to try this and do that. But that was terrifying. I will say the most difficult thing for me was actually two things: The tone of it. The tone of the film is very unusual because you’re mixing these Broadway creatures with small town heart. I tried to always remember that this is an emotional story and I wanted to stay rooted to the heart of it. It would be very easy to say that these Broadway people are villains at the beginning, but I always felt that they’d been hurt by the world too, and that giving this girl a prom was a way for them to heal themselves. The other scary thing about this was that the opening is set on the streets of Broadway. There are two musical numbers that happen in the middle of the street and you need to shoot it that way. I’d done several things on Broadway and I thought, okay, well this will be great. We’ll block off a couple blocks, but we couldn’t get the permits to shoot on location. So we had to build it. We found an abandoned four acre lot in downtown Los Angeles and Jamie Walker McCall, our brilliant production designer, went to New York and studied the street where everything is set. We measured the streets. We measured how high the curbs were. We counted how many bulbs are in the marquees. We counted how many cabs would come down the street at 8 o’clock curtain call. We did a lot of research and then we just went to this lot and we built it. We built Broadway. It took six months and it was the most amazing thing to walk onto that set. Meryl Streep literally gasped in delight and surprise because she couldn’t believe it; it looked so real. Getting that right was the most important thing for the actors because you want them to feel like it’s real. The idea that Meryl, Nicole, James, and Andrew could walk down that street and feel like they really were on Broadway was an amazing thing. The hardest scene to shoot was the big dance number at the end. We shot 500 people dancing, and then, a week after that, with three days left to shoot, we were shut down for COVID. We had three days left to shoot and they were important scenes. We couldn’t finish the movie. We went into quarantine for two months, but we thought it was important for the movie to come out for the holidays. We worked with a group of epidemiologists and we came up with a back-toshooting production plan. They helped us come up with the protocols to finish The Prom. All of these things were incredibly difficult, but joyful and it was a showbiz tale. It reminded me of old classic musicals, like Singin’ In the Rain where part of that DNA of those musicals is to roll up your sleeves, figure it out, and put on a show. And that’s what we did.

Q : what were some of the changes that were made from the book on Broadway to the screenplay?

Ryan Murphy : What we were able to add is that you actually get to meet Emma’s grandmother (Mary Kay Place). She’s alluded to in the Broadway play and you get to know more about how her parents kicked her out. And you meet Barry’s mother, played by Tracey Ullman, who’s also alluded to in the play, but here we have a couple of great big scenes with her. We also worked a lot on the backstory between Dee Dee’s friendship with Barry. We wrote a big seven-page scene with the two of them in a hotel room talking about their loves and failures. We really worked on the relationship between Kerry Washington and Ariana, Mrs. Greene and Alyssa Greene, just to give it a little bit more depth and sorrow. When you hire actors like the ones in our film, they’re going to have opinions. For example, Meryl was interested in deconstructing the idea of here’s this woman who’s won two Tonys, has been very unsuccessful in love, but she’s just a small-town girl. She too is like Emma. She’s a young girl with a dream. She came from Zelienople, Pennsylvania and fought, single handedly, to become something — which is exactly what Emma did. So Meryl was very interested in fleshing out that idea, which then became part of the love story with Keegan. It’s just such a joy to work with actors like that, who have opinions and you workshop it. I’m very proud of everything we added. I wanted it to be a movie for everyone. I’ve never really done that in my career. My stuff tends to be somewhat edgier, darker. I just wanted something that I could watch with my 8-year-old, and my mother, and my gay best friend. I think there’s something here for everyone and the idea of bringing everybody under the tent was what the new material was all about.

Q : What was it like working with this fantastic cast and how did they bond together on set ?

Ryan Murphy : They were wonderful. They all went to Broadway bootcamp together, which was months of dance training and vocal lessons at a big dance studio in Paramount Pictures. Meryl, particularly, worked every day for four months, like an athlete. She started training in September and we were shooting in December and she was there every day dancing. She had to learn how to sing like Dee Dee Allen. The cast really bonded. When you’re making a movie, most of the time, what happens is you do a shot and everybody goes back to their trailer and then you set up the next camera angle, but that never happened here. They all were together in the corner either telling jokes or stretching or icing each other’s knees. They became like a Broadway troupe. Everybody cried at the end of it and people came to watch other people’s musical numbers and cheer each other on. There was just a real gypsy Broadway thing that they had. Ariana and Jo Ellen quickly got enveloped in their warm embrace and it was lovely to see. It’s kind of what you hope would always happen, but you can never tell how chemistry is or what’s going to happen. They loved each other and I think it’s because they also worked so hard on it together.

Q : The prom is going to be shown in some of the very places where emma might not be allowed to take her girlfriend to prom.

Ryan Murphy : For me, that was always one of the great things that I’ve loved about working at Netflix — the response we get from people in certain countries where they don’t often get to see characters they can relate to on screen. I’ve never had that in my career. That’s really only possible at Netflix because it’s a global unifier and an ambassador of sorts. That’s what I’ve loved about working there. I also love the idea that everyone knows what the prom is or has their own version of it, but not everyone is allowed to go and to express themselves freely. Through this film, I hope they have that experience of being a part of something and feeling a part of a community. It’s something I didn’t have growing up, and it’s something we were very conscious of when we were making it. I’m excited that it’s going to be released at the same time all over the world. It’s almost like everybody’s going to the dance together all over the world. A worldwide celebration of an idea and a hope of a different kind of world.

Synopsis
Dee Dee Allen (three-time Academy Award winner Meryl Streep) and Barry Glickman (Tony Award winnerJames Corden) are New York City stage stars with a crisis on their hands: their expensive new Broadway show is a major flop that has suddenly flatlined their careers. Meanwhile, in small-town Indiana, high school student Emma Nolan (newcomer Jo Ellen Pellman) is experiencing a very different kind of heartbreak: despite the support of the high school principal (Keegan-Michael Key), the head of the PTA (Kerry Washington) has banned her from attending the prom with her girlfriend, Alyssa (Ariana DeBose). When Dee Dee and Barry decide that Emma's predicament is the perfect cause to help resurrect their public images, they hit the road with Angie (Academy Award winner Nicole Kidman) and Trent (Andrew Rannells), another pair of cynical actors looking for a professional lift. But when their self-absorbed celebrity activism unexpectedly backfires, the foursome find their own lives upended as they rally to give Emma a night where she can truly celebrate who she is.

The Prom
Directed by Ryan Murphy
Produced by Adam Anders, Dori Berinstein, Chad Beguelin, Bill Damaschke, Bob Martin, Ryan Murphy, Scott Robertson, Matthew Sklar, Alexis Martin Woodall
Screenplay by Chad Beguelin, Bob Martin
Based on The Prom by Chad Beguelin, Bob Martin, Matthew Sklar
Starring Meryl Streep, James Corden, Nicole Kidman, Keegan-Michael Key, Andrew Rannells, Ariana DeBose, Kerry Washington, Jo Ellen Pellman
Music by Matthew Sklar
Cinematography : Matthew Libatique
Edited by Peggy Tachdjian, Danielle Wang
Production company : Ryan Murphy Productions
Distributed by Netflix
Release date : December 11, 2020
Running time : 131 minutes

Photos : Copyright Netflix

(Source : press notes)