RadioTimes.com<\/a> and other press, Miranda said that he wouldn\u2019t have it any other way.<\/p>\n\u201cI think that the innate Jonathan Larson-ness in me always feels like maybe they\u2019ll only ever let me direct one movie in my life,\u201d he explained. \u201cAnd I felt like if it would be any movie, it was this one \u2013 because Jonathan Larson was the artist who made me feel like I had permission to write a musical one day.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel I owe him a great debt,\u201d he added. \u201cThe work he did spoke to me in a really arresting and human way. And when the possibility showed up of possibly directing Tick, Tick\u2026Boom!, which was the portrait of a musical theatre composer trying to make it, I was like, I understand that story; I understand that story on a bone-deep level and if they only let me make one, let it be this one. \u201d<\/p>
Larson is best known as the writer of hit stage musical Rent, and Miranda revealed that he can remember the experience of seeing that show for the first in high school \u201clike it was yesterday\u201d.<\/p>\n
He explained that, while he had always been a fan of musicals, they always felt like things that other people wrote \u2013 \u201chanded down from stone tablets to rich white guys on the Upper East Side\u201d as he put it.<\/p>\n
But watching Rent changed all that, with Miranda describing it as the most contemporary musical he\u2019d ever seen at that point in his life.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was the most diverse cast I\u2019d ever seen on a Broadway stage, \u201d he said. \u201cAnd it felt homemade. Like there were references to Caf\u00e9 Bustelo and Kurosawa and Sondheim in the musical itself, and the other thing that really kind of hit me on a deep level was, you know, in addition to it just being about the thing I wanted to do, it was about artists trying to be artists in New York City and trying to survive amidst the AIDS crisis we were all going through.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a character named Mark in that show, and he is filming everyone, he\u2019s always working on his movie about his friends. And at a certain point in Act 2, he gets called out for it. He says it\u2019s easier for you to film us than to actually be here and live with us. And, as someone who carried around a VHS camcorder through much of high school, I felt personally attacked in the back row of the mezzanine! And that\u2019s the day I went from just loving musicals and admiring them to thinking I could write one someday: I never felt something so personal from a piece of musical theatre.\u201d<\/p>\n