When Lin-Manuel Miranda decided to make the life of Alexander Hamilton into a musical, he initially had trouble figuring out how to structure the story, what to include and what to leave out. He was given the advice, include the musical parts and leave out the rest. That got him to focus on what drew him to the biography and allowed for Miranda’s artistic interpretation of the story. Relationships are like that. Look back over them and you jump around to all the best and worst times. You remember how you met and the moment it ended and all the important points in between, while the rest fades away. That’s what this film does.
This presented a unique challenge for Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel to connect the emotional highlights we see on screen into the full arc of a relationship. Some scenes are depicted with flourishes of fantasy, enhancing the idea that we are looking back rather than living in the moment. This was also a challenge for the Crew, especially Script Supervisor Renetta G. Amador (Promising Young Woman, Carry-On). While the script would sometimes say what specific day we are in, that only covered about 40 days, and there are montage sequences. It was Amador’s job to place everything within a master timeline so Crew and Cast always knew what day it was, even if it’s never mentioned on screen.
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