In The Heights: How The Fire Escape Dance Scene Was Filmed

One of the most magical moments of In The Heights is the dance scene between Benny and Nina on the side of a New York fire escape — but how did director Jon M. Chu do it? The gravity-defying sequence seems computer-generated, but in reality, Chu tried to keep filming as practical as possible. It took months of collaboration between choreographers, cinematographers, and special effects gurus to create a scene that would enchant audiences and remain believable.

The three-minute dance sequence that accompanies Benny and Nina’s romantic duet “When The Sun Goes Down” was the product of a long-time collaboration between Chu, cinematographer Alice Brooks, and choreographer Christopher Scott. The trio’s work includes Step Up and more recently, TV series The LXD: The Legion of Extraordinary Dancers. After 10 years, however, there was still one scene the trio had never gotten the chance to shoot — an anti-gravity dance number. As the team thought about how to portray Benny and Nina’s feelings for each other onscreen, they realized In The Heights was the perfect place to fulfill a career-long creative dream. “We kept going back to that Warner Brothers cartoon idea of flying, of lifting up, when you see those characters float up off the ground when they kiss somebody,” Chu said in an interview with IndieWire. “We kept thinking, “Do they lose gravity?”

Related: In The Heights: Why Nina’s Mom Was Cut From The Movie

In order to create an actual shift in gravity, Chu took a page out of Christopher Nolan’s playbook and built a massive brick wall that could rotate 90 degrees, in the same vein as Nolan’s rotating hallway in Inception. As Benny (Corey Hawkins) and Nina (Leslie Grace) begin to dance, the wall slowly lowers from a vertical to a horizontal position, giving them the ability to twirl atop it. At the same time, the camera slowly moves, making it seem as if Benny and Nina are defying gravity instead of gravity being changed to suit them, according to cinematographer Brooks. The entire scene was shot in a sound studio against a green screen so the horizon, George Washington Bridge and sky, could be filled in during post-production.

In order to sell the idea that Benny and Nina are truly defying gravity, the first minute-and-a-half of the scene had to be shot in one take, choreographer Scott said to IndieWire. “There’s no way around it,” he said. “As soon as you cut, there’s a subliminal switch that goes off in your brain that’s like, ‘It’s a movie. They cut.'” To get the right effect, Brooks also had to ensure the camera, set and light sources were perfectly in sync, she said to IndieWire. As the brick platform moves, the sun and sky have to move at the same rate so the magic trick isn’t given away by mismatched shadows or backgrounds.

Perhaps one of the most impressive aspects of the scene is that it is not performed by stunt doubles. Hawkins and Grace performed the dance themselves, sans safety cables or harnesses. Despite the steep learning curve, Hawkins and Grace gradually mastered shifting their weight to match the shift in gravity, according to Scott. They also had to learn to relax their muscles so their body language wouldn’t give away the fact the platform was tilting, Scott said. With the danger to the actors, expense of the set and complexity of filming, explaining the need for a spinning building to the studio was a hard sell, according to Chu. But as everyone who’s seen In The Heights can agree, it’s worth it.

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Jasmine Gallup
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Jasmine Gallup is a writer for ScreenRant, covering fantasy, science fiction and superheroes. She’s worked as a freelance reporter since 2018.

By day, Jasmine writes for a small North Carolina newspaper near her hometown of Cary. By night, she explores the depths of film and television alongside her twin sister.

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