Inside ‘In the Heights’ Epic Pool Scene: Choreographer Chris Scott Breaks Down “96,000″

It’s hard to pick a stand-out number from In The Heights—the film adaption of Lin-Manuel Miranda‘s Tony-winning musical that opened in theaters and on HBO Max today—because every number from In the Heights feels like a stand-out. From press-on nails clacking out a beat on the salon table in “No Me Diga” to Corey Hawkins and Leslie Grace singing and dancing on the sides of buildings in “When the Sun Goes Down,” each song comes with its own unique show-stopping spectacle.

But it’s fair to say that the film’s splashiest number—pun intended—is “96,000,” a song in which the entire cast imagines what life might be like if they won the lottery. Bodega owner Usnavi (Anthony Ramos) has apparently sold the winning ticket to someone in the area, and, in the Broadway show, the block takes turns fantasizing about the $96,000 cash prize from the sidewalk. For the movie, director Jon M. Chu relocated the number to Highbridge Pool, a huge public pool in the Washington Heights neighborhood in New York City. With the help of 500 background extras and 90 dancers, the song is transformed into something massive—a sprawling ode to an entire community.

If it looks spectacular on screen, you can bet it took obscene hours of planning, labor, love, and maybe a few tears, behind the scenes. In an interview with Decider, Emmy-winning choreographer Christopher Scott—a long-time collaborator with Chu, including the series The LXD: The Legion of Extraordinary Dancers—walked me through it all, from finding the venue, nearly changing the venue, choreographing the moves, rehearsing downtown, and shivering in freezing cold water.

The pool:

“We didn’t have the idea of a pool right away,” Scott said. “It was just kind of like, ‘Alright, 96,000—we don’t know yet.’  This is what I love about Jon. He leaves that space for us to find things.”

When the idea of filming at Highbridge Pool—located at 173rd St and Amsterdam as a part of Highbridge Park—did come up through location scouting, Scott said his first visual of the venue was via Google Maps. He and Chu scrolled through on Street View, brainstorming.

“We just start building a whiteboard of ideas,” Scott recalled. “Maybe we get b-boys underwater. Maybe we just see the feet of the ballerinas underwater, and what it looks like when they hit a few entrechat quatres. Ballet for Vanessa’s part, because it has that feeling of the dream. The struggle of a ballerina just seems to kind of sum up her verse. Then, the salon ladies—we’re looking at that part on the Google Maps of the steps. I’ve never seen that in a pool. Well, we gotta use that! Salon ladies, tanning. That’s perfect.”

But Scott says the filmmakers almost changed their minds when they saw the size of the pool in person.

“The first time we walked into the space, it was overwhelming,” Scott admitted. “Are our ideas even going to work? The pool is so massive! How do you even get that much background? The concept is everybody’s at the pool, but we can’t afford 1000s of people to fill up this pool. There was a point where when it was like this might go away—we just can’t handle it. Not cutting the number, but removing it from the pool, so that we didn’t set ourselves up for failure. But Jon was like, ‘No, this is it, it’s screaming for it. We’ve got to figure out a way to make it work.'”

It wasn’t easy, but Scott said everyone on the production stepped up. “You got the production designer designing dividers and walls that can cut off some of the space, but still feel natural. You have [cinematographer] Alice Brooks designing camera angles that won’t expose how empty the pool is. You’ve got [producer] David Nicksay budgeting for 90 dancers. Because 50 dancers may sound like a lot, but when you see on camera, it goes like that. So it just became this giant collaboration.”

The choreography:

“I had an amazing team of associate choreographers, so there was a lot of divide and conquer,” Scott said. “Ebony Williams, Dana Wilson. Eddie Torres Jr., Princess Serrano—it was a huge team. It was a lot of experimenting. I have hours of videos underwater, on top of the water, with a little GoPro, just kind of trying stuff. I would say about 10 percent of the stuff makes it into the movie.”

Originally, Scott said, the plan was for it to be a more traditional synchronized swimming number. “I’d always had that in my mind,” he said. “There was a time when were even looking for synchronized swimmers. But it was hard to find synchronized swimming that represented the Latinx community. We were like, ‘We’re not going to sacrifice the representation for a style.'”

Instead, Scott says, they taught synchronized swimming moves to their dancers. “I didn’t even understand how hard it was—I was practicing, and it is not easy!” Scot said with a laugh. “Synchronized swimmers make it look so easy. But I think it was a blessing because it actually turned into our own version of synchronized swimming, which is more raw. It’s not as polished. It has a feeling of community. It has an energy around it that pays homage to the greats, the Busby Berkeleys, the era of the musical, but it also has a little wrongness. It’s not as clean as those things, because that’s not this pool.”

Beyond synchronized swimming, “96,000” incorporates ballet, jazz, mambo, as well as a slew of New York-specific dance styles, that some city-goers may recognize from subways showtimes.

“We had b-boy representing their style, which originated in New York in the Bronx,” Scott said, referring to a type of hip hop dance that became known as “breakdancing,” despite objections from the community. “We had flexing, which is a New York street style [characterized by contortionist moves, often done shirtless] that was originated in Brooklyn. We had Graffiti Pete—who’s actually from the Litefeet community—freestyling Litefeet steps [characterized by fast, floaty footsteps, sometimes involving hat tricks], which is originally from Spanish Harlem.”

“The mashup of styles was really important to me,” Scott concluded. “It’s really the number where you get to see that because it was centered around the variety of dreams that people have in a neighborhood like Washington Heights. We really worked hard to represent many different styles of dance to show these different dreams.”

The rehearsal:

Scott and his team dedicated a full week of eight-hour day rehearsals solely to “96,000.”

“It never feels like enough,” he said. “We rehearsed eight hours in a dance studio, with no water—just making up stuff hoping that it works in the water. Then we would take the train downtown. I would spend about four hours with the associate choreographers a skeleton crew, and we would put what we did in the studio in the water to see what would work, and what doesn’t work. They would create new stuff in the pool. Then that process would start all over again the next day.”

Even then, Scott said, routines worked out in the tiny rehearsal pool had to change to fit the massive Highbridge Pool. “The ending routine where they all jump out of the water? If you do that routine in two feet of water, for example, it looks amazing, but if you do it in two and a half feet—you can’t even do it. It looks terrible.”

Scott continued, “You would just find these challenges—just one after the next!”

The shoot:

The team was given four days to shoot the number at Highbridge Pool, with an extra day added when they got rained out. “We could have shot that over two weeks and still not have enough time,” Scott said.

“I’ll never forget how cold the water was. Let me tell you, that was the coldest water I’ve ever been in. Did I have to go in? No. Was I supposed to go in? Yes. You can’t ask dancers to be in that water and not know what it feels like,” Scott said with a laugh.

The temperature of the water soon became a serious problem on set. “The water was so cold that there was a point when the dancers were like, ‘We have to get out,'” he explained, adding that dancers would spend hours at a time in the pool while filming. “When you’re trying to move and dance, there’s a point where you can’t feel your body anymore. You need to feel your body if you’re going to do choreography! So it was like, ‘Okay, everybody out of the pool.’ You’d have to be on standby for when the dancers can get back in, when it’s safe. Nobody knew where that bar was.”

But, Scott added, the dancers pulled through the pain to deliver some stunning performances—like moments where every dancer in frame splashes the water at the exact same time, creating near-identical splashes.

“To be honest, I have no idea if they added any CG [to the final product],” Scott said. “But I’ll never forget the first take of that shot, that crane flew over top of them and on the monitor, it looked fake. It looked like CG from the monitors. That’s the level of discipline these dancers have and care that they put into these numbers. A splash is very visual—if one dancer doesn’t hit the water, your eye catches it and the whole thing is ruined. Every dancer, they hit that water like it was their duty. It was crazy. I’ll never forget it.”

In the end, Scott says, this number speaks to more than technical prowess, fancy camera angles, or splashy moves. “Dance is a universal language but in actuality, dance has so many languages within itself,” he said. “When you’re watching ‘96,000’, you can see the many languages being spoken.”

Where to watch In the Heights