RadioTimes.com<\/a>: \u201cJonathan gave us several gifts in writing Tick, tick\u2026 Boom! Even in his original drafts, they were always semi-autobiographical. Susan\u2019s not really the name of his girlfriend, Michael is not really the name of his best friend. He even had a pseudonym for [composter Stephen] Sondheim in the original version. And in doing so, he gave us licence to play with that semi-autobiographical nature.<\/p>\n\u201cThere are many drafts of the rock monologue he performed in 1990. And in the early \u201990s, there\u2019s the Off Broadway version that I fell in love with when I saw it my senior year university, and [Tick, tick\u2026 Boom!] Steven Levenson and I worked really hard to create\u2026 alright, if Jonathan Larson ever had the chance to make this into a film, what would he pick and choose? What songs work better on screen? What don\u2019t? We really try to think of him as a collaborator in this and so we cut two songs from the Off Broadway version, we put back into that stuff he used to perform in the monologue, we grabbed some sections of Superbia that no one has ever heard, because he spent his twenties writing this musical and the guiding principle was sort of always\u2026 what would Jonathan Larson want to see up on that screen?\u201d<\/p>
Playing Larson, Andrew Garfield said his challenge was to channel the man\u2019s passion. \u201cWhat is the ticking? Is it about turning 30? Is it Susan\u2019s biological clock? Is it that \u2018I haven\u2019t achieved all this\u2019? Or is it the thing that Lin was saying about himself, which is, it\u2019s not about arbitrary goals, or the external success, for Jon, it\u2019s like.. I have all of this music to give. And I\u2019m pregnant with it. And it hurts to hold it in.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think there was an awareness that he had, for whatever mysterious reason, that he knew he wasn\u2019t going to be here for as long as he would like. There was an original line in the original version of Tick, tick\u2026 Boom! which they cut afterwards, because it felt too on the nose and maybe insensitive to Jon, which was \u2018sometimes I feel like my heart is going to explode\u2019. And then what we find out and what we know is that, you know, he did die of an aortic aneurysm. And he lived like his heart was going to explode \u2013 his heart was constantly exploding forth with art, music, love, longing, anger, revolutionary outrage.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think for whatever reason for me that ticking is that mysterious thing of the muses, the gods of theatre going \u2018get it out, get it out\u2019 because you really don\u2019t have a lot of time. And of course, he was witnessing his friends of his in his community getting sick and in lots of cases dying very young from AIDS, which of course was combined with his own inner anxiety, or all of these things just created this whirlwind of an elemental kind of human being that was having to be alive for this very brief kind of comet like moment in time. And thank God, he devoted himself so much in the face of all that rejection, in the face of all of that resistance. Because otherwise the world would be far less rich.\u201d<\/p>\n