Lin-Manuel Miranda is ready to make audiences get up and dance again with Vivo. The animated musical centers on the titular talking kinkajou as he sets off on a journey from Havana, Cuba to Miami, Florida to deliver a song written by his owner Andrés. The song is expressing his love for his former music partner Marta after Andrés passes away whilst preparing to deliver it himself for her final performance. Miranda first pitched the project to DreamWorks in 2010 and after a decade of exchanging hands between studios, the film arrived on Netflix on August 6 to rave reviews from critics and audiences.
In time for the film’s streaming debut, Screen Rant caught up with Vivo‘s composer and executive music producer Alex Lacamoire to discuss the project’s long development, his reunion with Miranda, and how personal the film was for the Grammy, Emmy, and Tony winner.
Screen Rant: What was it like for you to see Lin-Manuel Miranda develop the project for all those years and then get the invite to be a part of it?
Alex Lacamoire: I’m always amazed at how long it takes, sometimes, for something to come to its full fruition. You wouldn’t think that a movie could take 12 years to hit a screen [chuckles] or that a musical would take six years to you know, go from The White House to Broadway.
But I love that the piece just kept getting stronger with time. I think that was actually truly the benefit of having this much time – is to see the piece just develop and get stronger, for the story to get more focused, for the songs to fit the story even better. For me, personally, it was an honor to be involved with something where I was brought in early enough into the process that I could make contributions and propose ideas that made their way into the movie. Because of all of us working together all this time, I think the music in the movie is really organic and the songs are built around the story and the story is built around the songs, you know, nothing feels shoehorned in, everything feels real like you don’t see the seams between things.
I do love that and, you know, getting a chance to work with Lin-Manuel on anything is a blessing, so I’m just glad that he called me about this back when he first told me about this in 2009. He said to me, “Hey, Alex, I’m doing this movie, and involves this furry animal from Cuba. I said to them, the only way I would work on this movie is if I could bring Alex Lacamoire to work on this music with me, because he is a Cuban-American musician, and I think it would be great.” So he brought me on board and I just love that he saw an opportunity for us to do something together.
This wasn’t your first venture into animation, given your work on Incredibles 2, but what was it like to explore animation through the lens of a musical for the first time in comparison to Broadway and live-action film?
Alex Lacamoire: I loved it. I found there to be a lot of similarities. Basically, I tried to storytell with music and I really feel that in a stage musical or a film musical, the music is there to help tell the story and that is what you are trying to serve. So at its root, the task is the same. But with an animated movie, I feel like it’s more akin to making a record where you got to make a good, fantastic recording of something, make sure it’s performed well, make sure it’s mixed well, make sure the orchestration works, etc, etc.
Whereas with a live stage musical, you’re trying to build something that can be replicated night after night after night and with whatever parameters those present. You’re still trying to tell a story, but the way you approach something that’s going to be coming live out of speakers being played by musicians in the moment, night after night, is a different mentality sometimes than what you’re trying to create on a recorded product.
So then what would you say were some of the biggest challenges creatively or practically for you coming into this project in comparison to the past?
Alex Lacamoire: COVID [chuckles], the fact that we finished this movie during a pandemic. When the pandemic hit the spring of last year, we had probably only recorded, I would say, 20 percent of the vocals for the movie. The rest of the 80 percent was done last year, either remotely or in studios with strict COVID protocols. Everything was done piecemeal, you had to do everything in bits and pieces.
When the pandemic hit, certain songs were even written yet, I don’t think “Keep the Beat” was written until the middle of the pandemic, I believe. So that presents its own challenges because you don’t get to be in the room creating things in real-time. You kind of have to work in separate silos, but that being said, I’m so proud of our team. I’m so proud of all the actors, I’m so proud of just the tenacity that this product had that no matter what, we’re like, “Hey, this is a piece that we really want to make, this is something we really believe in, and we’re gonna keep pushing forward and make it happen.” So we did.
Since a lot of it did have to be piecemeal, what would you say was the most challenging song to fully create in the midst of all that?
Alex Lacamoire: That’s a great question. I think the finale was kind of a tricky one. I mean, it wasn’t hard as in like, “Oh, no, we can’t accomplish this,” but there [were] so many people in it. We had to capture them all at separate times because that’s the big finale and that probably has the most number of voices in it. So Lin-Manuel is in it, Ynairaly [Simo], who plays Gaby, is in it, we have the two spoonbills played by Brian Tyree Henry and Nicole Byer. This finale just had a lot of voices in it and a lot of people so it wasn’t complete until we captured every voice. So that just took a while to make that happen, but in the end, it sounds joyous and it sounds fun and it sounds like a big rousing closing number for a musical.
Absolutely. Given the weight that “Inside You Heart” has for the story and for the characters, how much time did you and Lin-Manuel spend really crafting that piece before finally recording it?
Alex Lacamoire: That all happened really organically. Lin-Manuel wrote that song, I’m trying to remember I think that song was written in 2019, I believe. It came out really fully formed, Lin had written this beautiful song and we had it demoed by a wonderful friend of ours named Olga Merediz, who played Abuela Claudia in In the Heights. She recorded the first demo, actually, and that song just felt complete. Lin had this beautiful melody in this beautiful song, these amazing lyrics.
I refined the vocal harmonies a little bit and kind of fleshed out the instruments on the demo a little bit. Then from there, we presented the demo to Gloria Estefan and she signed on and I got to fly down to Miami to record it with Gloria. That was a highlight of my life to actually be at a piano with her sitting next to me rehearsing the song with her, that was like my dream to be able to do that. She just gave us a phenomenal performance of that song that is so heartfelt and so beautiful, and that was in February of 2020.
After that, I think the band came first and we recorded the band in January of 2021 before the vaccine had come out, so we were all in the studio being very careful and recording the instruments. Then the background vocals were recorded later that month and the same thing, you know, everybody got tested, everybody wore masks when they weren’t singing, etc, etc. Then I think the last piece of the puzzle was in February, where we recorded the orchestra on top of that, so we had strings and woodwinds and brass, all that stuff that got recorded in February, and then we mixed the song the same month.
Then we finished the movie in March, so that’s kind of the process of [how] our song happened. But as you can tell everything happened a little bit at a time, which is again par for the course and making something for a movie, right? You do everything in little stages, and you perfect it in stages, whereas [in] a Broadway musical, everything that I just described could have happened in the span of like a week, you know? [laughs]
It turned out to be an impressive effort given what’s in the film, so I commend that timeline. You mentioned it earlier when talking about Lin-Manuel bringing you on, this film really is such a culturally rich tale just as much as both of your previous collaborations together. What was it like, though, getting to explore the Cuban-American side of music and of these characters?
Alex Lacamoire: I loved it, this is to me probably one of the most personal things I’ve worked on. Now granted, In the Heights obviously celebrated Latin culture in all of its beauty and I love all the Caribbean love that it throws you know, because we got characters from Cuba, from the Dominican Republic, from PR. But Vivo is even more focused than that on the Cuban genre of music.
So, I love that I got to work on something that honors my heritage, something that makes my family proud, something that celebrates Cuba and the wonderful music that comes from it, and something that celebrates this area that means a lot to me. I grew up in Miami, so this movie takes place in Cuba, in Key West, in the Everglades in Miami, I mean this is basically my life. So it felt so wonderful to be able to tap into that part of my musical upbringing and to celebrate that in a way that I can’t imagine another project being this close to all these things that mean a lot to me.
It’s a beautiful project to have been able to bring that personal touch to and with the reviews coming out as positive as they are and the film coming to Netflix, how are you feeling going into its debut seeing this wave of acclaim?
Alex Lacamoire: I’m just really excited. I am very proud of this movie and this is something I’ve been very excited to show people. This movie has been gestating for a very long time, as you know, but it’s also not been on people’s radar in a public way until just recently. Like it wasn’t announced until this summer, or the top of the late spring, what have you. So, all of a sudden, it goes from, “Okay, we’re working on this movie not everyone knows about” to “Hey, now all of a sudden, everybody knows about this movie that we’re putting out.”
So I’ve just been very excited to let people in on what this is, I’ve been excited for people to see clips and hear music because I’ve been working on this and I’ve been very excited about this music for a long time, but haven’t been able to share it with folks. So here we are, and I just can’t wait.
Vivo is now available to stream on Netflix.
