Unless you’ve just emerged from a two-year coma or completely block out anything dealing with musical theater, you’re probably well aware of Justin Paul and Benj Pasek, aka Pasek and Paul. The songwriting duo have taken Broadway by storm with their Tony-Award winning phenomenon “Dear Evan Hansen” and won the Best Original Song Oscar for “City of Stars” from “La La Land,” the hit musical for which they wrote almost every song. Accolades have continued to rain down on the New York City based pair this year as they landed yet another Best Original Song nomination for “This Is Me” from Michael Gracey’s “The Greatest Showman,” a word of mouth wonder for 20th Century Fox and the no. #1 album on Billboard’s top 200 chart for an impressive two weeks in a row.
In theory, Pasek and Paul’s empowerment anthem is this year’s frontrunner, but many believe they face stiff competition from “Coco’s” “Remember Me.” Will they go back-to-back or just take solace that they are one future Emmy win away from EGOT? With Academy members with a pressing deadline to get their ballots in by Tuesday, they both took the time from their busy schedules to jump on the phone yesterday to talk about “The Greatest Showman,” how “This Is Us” came to be, the potential for a “Showman” stage musical and Justin’s memorable Governors Ball emergency last year, among other things.
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Gregory Ellwood: Hello are Justin and Benj there?
Justin Paul: Yes! How are you?
Gregory Ellwood: Pretty good. Just wrapping up for the Oscar’s, thank God.
Justin Paul: One more week.
Gregory Ellwood: Well, it gets good because once voting stops, nobody cares. At least for what I do, so they don’t bug you anymore to do stories. But, more importantly for transcription purposes, can you both say your names?
Benj Pasek: I’m walking in New York so it’s loud, I’m just going to put myself on mute so you don’t all hear me and then I’ll chime in.
Gregory Ellwood: Got it.
Justin Paul: Yes, and this is Justin, I’m the one who has the tiny scheduling snafu and I didn’t overlap with my wife the way I thought I would so I’ve got a two-year-old here who is hopefully going to stay quiet, but if you hear the absent murmurings, that’s what that is.
Benj Pasek: I’m happy to be mistaken for his two-year-old too.
Justin Paul: Yeah, exactly, that could be him. Just little “ba-ba, da-da’s”.
Benj Pasek: Totally.
Justin Paul: It might be smarter than what he would otherwise say.
Benj Pasek: Exactly, exactly (Laughs.)
Gregory Ellwood: So, guys you have had an incredible 18 months. Do you ever pinch yourselves over the back to back to back successes you’ve experienced?
Benj Pasek: Oh, well, it definitely feels very surreal. The funny thing about this is that so many of these projects are things that we worked on or finished up a few years ago. So, to then be in this amazing position of getting to celebrate with the cast and crew and getting to reunite with all the people that helped inspire and make these films, or these musicals, or these songs together, that’s the most surreal and exciting element of it. There’s this saying that projects, musicals in particular, are never finished, they’re just abandoned. And you feel at a certain point it’s penciled down and you have to wrap the movie or you have to freeze the show and what’s so great about this is that we then get to reunite all of the people we got to make it with. It feels like a wonderful way to prolong reuniting with all of the families that we made, in all of these different shows and different works that we’ve done. So, that’s been pretty cool and it’s definitely like a family reunion that’s lasted a lot longer than we expected it to.
Justin Paul: I think, honestly, [when] we think about a moment like this and we’re very grateful for all of our colleagues who do what we do and came before us. We speak a lot about Lin-Manuel Miranda and “Hamilton,” “Moana.” We speak about the Lopez’s, “Frozen” and some of those big musicals of the last three to five years that really became a part of mainstream culture and I think paved the way just like the early 90’s animated musicals of [Alan Menken and Howard Ashman] did the same thing, which sort of made it okay to really like a musical and for audiences to get on board with the musical. We really credit all those people of paving the way for us to be, for the musical to be having a moment again.
Gregory Ellwood: So let’s talk about “The Greatest Showman” then. How long ago did you guys start working on these songs?
Justin Paul: We first met [“Greatest Showman” director] Michael Gracey in February or March of 2013. He had a working draft of the script and a song brief for every song that he thought should be in the film. We auditioned basically to write a couple songs for the film and we started working on the song then from a brief that he gave us and that was when we started. And then it sort of was a process that was spread over a number of years all the way up until the fall of 2016. So it was over the course of many years, and there were workshops and a lot of cut songs, a lot of songs that didn’t make the grade along the way.
Gregory Ellwood: Were there any significant changes to the songs themselves from when you guys first started? You talk about cut songs, but maybe like a song like, “This Is Me” did it go through different iterations until you guys were finally happy with it before production started?
Justin Paul: So “This Is Me” for instance, with the song, there really was an evolution. “This Is Me” was probably the second to last song that was written, but with a song like “This Is Me” there were probably three or four workshops for this project between when we started working on it and before it was a film. So, for those four workshops the song “This Is Me” was not part of the show at all. There was a different song. It was not a song that we had written. This song was a little bit of a face off [and] they went out to different songwriters for it. We had to audition for each one. So, [again] it was a different number at that time, it was called “Oddities” and it was sung by Tom Thumb [played by Sam Humphrey] and it was a completely different song. And Michael kept saying, “I really want to find a different song, I want an anthem that everyone, as it’s really a moment for these oddities to claim their identity and to really sort of be a [defining] moment in the film.” And so it wasn’t until the last workshop that we tried writing something and it was really because we were inspired by Keala [Settle] who was playing the role [of the Bearded Lady] and Michael who was pitching to us. And then we sort of had to retrofit some of the script to lead the characters up to that moment. But things really were changing throughout, the opening number wasn’t written until late, the summer before we started shooting in the fall. So it’s definitely one of those classic stories of developing a musical and things are constantly changing up until the point where we want to be shooting.
Gregory Ellwood: When you compare “Greatest Showman” to “La La Land” it has had a really interesting box office history and it’s sort of become a phenomenon in its own unexpected way. I’m sure you’ve heard these stories, but I have friends who have seen this movie five times or more and let me tell you, I don’t have any friends who have seen “La La Land” five times. They loved it, but they didn’t see it that often. “Showman’s” box office initially did okay over the holidays but it wasn’t this monster hit. Then it just kept going and going which many people attribute to the songs. When did you each realize “Oh Wow, this has turned into something, maybe more than we expected”?
Justin Paul: You know, I think for us, we’re not has conscious of the box office, we’re being more on the creative end. But some of our colleagues would tell us, “Oh this is happening! This is having a bigger moment than we initially anticipated it would” but I think for us, the moment when we began to realize that the film was having a greater impact was getting to see all of the people who are fans of the movie, are fans of the actors in the film, begin to claim these songs of as their own songs. They begin to do covers of them on YouTube, or dance routines that they would put online. And I think for us seeing those begin to crop up was the sort of initial indication to us that the movie no longer belonged to us or belonged to the actors playing these roles, but the movie and the songs specifically began to be owned by this amazing group of people who really identified with these numbers. [That’s the] reason why the film has done so well in terms of the box office because they really championed it and it was a favorite of theirs. Obviously it’s word of mouth and people telling their friends and being excited about it organically. So getting to see the Japanese girls in Tokyo dancing to it or the girl in Iowa in her bedroom singing “This Is Me” I think was the biggest indicator to us that something was changing about how people were perceiving the movie.