♪ announcer: from our studios in new york city, this is "charlie rose." charlie: how is it to be back at this house? lin-manuel: very normal. i only live a few blocks away. so, it's -- i have been here since i was one year old. charlie: this is a house of memories. lin-manuel: this is a house of memories, of ghosts. but it's also -- it was a laboratory for me. i have filmed so many action movies where we are sitting. i have filmed so many animated

movies with my "g.i. joe" characters. i was a kid carrying around a camera. my dad had those big over-the-shoulder camcorders and brought one home. we never shot family videos, it was just me recording. charlie: did you think you might be a director? lin-manuel: i did. steven spielberg doesn't get you far in school. i kind of figured out who i was socially by doing a school play. i got cast in the sixth grade play. i played a lot of people. charlie: does that just happen? how is it that one kid wants to do those things? what was it in you that made you want to do those things? because those are the things you do. lin-manuel: isn't that incredible that we get to do what we love?

you have to think about how you lucked into this. i grew up in a house where cast albums were almost always playing. we'll go up and take a look at them later. charlie: all the great albums of all the musical theater. lin-manuel: yes. "south pacific," "sound of music," "king and i." it was latin music at the party because we are puerto rican. then when we would clean up the house after the party, we would put on the cast album. charlie: were you shy or like you are now? lin-manuel: i still think i'm shy. i do. i fell in love with -- i like applause. i wasn't the kind of person who would take over a room to take over it, but if i had something i was good at, i was eager to share it. my mother's favorite story is our first piano recital.

i'd only practiced well enough to play one song. i learned four, but there was only one i could reliably do well. practice aidn't lot. i played my song. i go up the scale and back down. and they clapped and i looked up and looked around and said "i know another one." if this is going to be the reaction. and i played four songs. the piano teacher gently lifted me off the piano bench so the other kids could play. charlie: that reminds me ted williams once told me -- i said why baseball? he said "i was pretty good and i got applause and i wanted to hear more applause so i got better." it was an incentive to do it better.

lin-manuel: i don't think i'm cut out to be a novelist. sitting alone and not getting the payoff. i'm fine with sitting alone. writing "hamilton" was six years of sitting alone, but the payoff is i get to play it for someone and they have ideas on how to make it better and someone knows how to stage i there is this show and tell. the gratification of theater vs. film and television. the audience lets you know in the moment how they are feeling about what you are doing. you don't act once, it's in the can, and you hope they like it a year from now. charlie: and it changes night to night. lin-manuel: and it changes night to night. we have a front row of people who literally won a lottery to be there and they give us everything. they are there and they didn't even know they would be there that night. they are experiencing it for the first time and i experience it for the first time because they are. charlie: growing up here, you make your way down to manhattan. lin-manuel: we're in manhattan. charlie: but down from here. to hunter college. lin-manuel: hunter college high school and elementary school. charlie: why hunter?

lin-manuel: you have to ask my parents. i took the test when i was five. but i won the lottery. i won the lottery when i was five when i passed the battery of mysterious tests that get you into hunter college elementary school because i got a great free public school education. i was learning about matisse and jackson pollock in kindergarten. i remember making jackson pollock drip paintings when i was six years old and getting my early appreciation for art even then. and a school that really valued the arts and put them on the same level as math and social studies and history. the culmination of our elementary school was to do the sixth grade play. we did 28 versions of six seix minute versions of

-- six musicals. that's a lethal dosage of musical theater. i seem to be the only one who got stuck and coulddn' -- couldn't let go. i played conrad birdie in "bye bye birdie." my nanny made my gold leather jacket and every girl had to pretend to fall in love with me and faint when i snapped. i was 12 years old, three feet tall. i was shorter than all of the girls in my grade. when i played conrad, i was the sex symbol of the grade. which did not happen in real life. charlie: you knew early on you wanted to be an artist. lin-manuel: i didn't know whether it would be movies, theater, animation. i was always gravitating towards that. charlie: but you are doing this without any formal musical training. lin-manuel: just high school music class and piano lessons. we had a great ninth-grade music teacher. i learned my major and minor chords. augmented from diminished. i remember calling my friend

alex and saying "i'm playing in f sharp -- an 'a' and a 'c,' what is that?" he says, "you're playing an f sharp diminished chord." i didn't know the names but i knew i needed them for the songs. charlie: did you have a good ear? lin-manuel: i have a good ear. charlie: they say you are a fantastic mimic. you could do that. you could hear something and repeat it. a song. lin-manuel: i got very impatient with piano lessons because the reading was slow. if i could hear it on the radio, i could figure out the chords and play it. it was a faster system between my ears and my hands than my eyes. charlie: that served you for the rest of your life. what music did you listen to beyond showtunes, beyond famous musicals? lin-manuel: i listen to hip-hop.

i don't -- i was born in 1980, so there wasn't ever a time where hip-hop wasn't part of my life. charlie: was it your music from the time you heard it? lin-manuel: it was mine and my sisters. my parent wasn't -- weren't bringing records home. my sister was bringing home the fat boys and she took me to see "beat street." hip-hop moviearly 1980's. charlie: it resonated with you. lin-manuel: it was just our music. the album that really unlocked it for me, that gave me permission to start writing, it was an album called "bizarre ride to the far side." i was 14. the lead single was about these guys who couldn't get girls, called "passin' me by," and so much hip-hop is about bluster

and how much jewelry i have and how great a rapper i am, and this was about people writing love notes and the note coming back "return to sender." i had a crush on my teacher. i had a crush on this girl, but she likes this other guy. and i was like i could get into that. [laughter] the great hook that has sampled by a million artists since is ♪ my dear, my dear, my dear, you do not know me but i know you very well and let me tell you about the feelings i have for you when i try or make some sort of attempt, i symp i wish i wasn't such a wimp beause then i would let you know that i love you so and if i was your man, then i would be true the only lying i would do is in the bed with you ♪ it was so angsty and great. i memorized that album quickly. i then started absorbing everything. i absorbed hip-hop by making mix tapes with my friends. i got into all these different genres. charlie: the interesting thing about "hamilton" was the mix tape. lin-manuel: i think of mix tapes as sonic love letters. i think a lot of my creative energy in high school was spent

literally making mix tapes to girls i liked, for friends of mine who i wanted them to get to know who i was. it was easier for me to say this 90 minutes on this cassette tape defines who i am. and the difference between a mix tape or what they have now is that you have to listen to it consecutively. and i put it in into a funny interlude. my fourth song was always the most important. that's the one that tells you who i really am. it was that and cleanup. lineup.y fourth in the i think i still build scores the way we built mix tape for girls. now we can afford to sit for a little while.

when i approached -- read ron's book and started thinking about it, i thought of it the way i thought of making mix tapes for my friends. it is i will take you on the ride. the ride will tell the story of this man's life. charlie: the first step is to draw you in? lin-manuel: the first song is everything. if you fast-forward through the first song, you messed up. [laughter] lin-manuel: you're not going to press play. remember, you are listening to it consecutively. and that is what it shares with musical theature. theatre. i set it as a challenge to encapsulate hamilton's entire life until the moment he reaches new york in one song. and so it forced me to think in a hamiltonian way. i was telling you before the thing about hamilton is he spoke in paragraphs. the opening sentence of our show is a run-on show.

how does a -- dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in the caribbean by providence, impoverished in squalor, grow up to be a hero and a scholar. it is a very hamiltonian sentence. charlie: ron has said you put in that song 20 years of living. for him. right? when you began to think about things and at the same time occasionally going once a year or more with your parents to the theater, what were you thinking? what was that like? lin-manuel: it was life-changing. it was life-changing in a couple ways. one, the first show i remember seeing is "les miserables." i remember a few things from the night. i remember crying when fantine died. i remember falling asleep for a little while because i was 7-years-old. i remember javert's suicide, the master of the house and laughing

really hard. after thelaughter death of fontine. the thing i remember most was seeing -- my parents brought home the two disc cast album and my mother would play "bring him home" on a loop and burst into tears, and it really moved me -- the effect music had on her. ♪ >> ♪ lord on high hear my prayer ♪ lin-manuel: seeing how this story and this man wanting this kid to live moved my mother to tears every time it was sung. i think that is as much of reason i'm in musical theater as anything else. charlie: because of the emotional connection with your mother? lin-manuel: because of the power musical theater has in terms of emotional connection.

musical theater is not one art form. it is 14 art forms together. music, dancing, the lighting, the costumes have to be right. charlie: the set has to be right. lin-manuel: the set has to be right. but when it all conspires to create those moments, there is nothing like it. charlie: and to say there is nothing like it means it has -- delivers more of an emotional punch than any other kind of visual or musical influence. lin-manuel: i think so, because it's happening to you live. there is no distance of the screen. you're seeing it yet you can't believe you are seeing it. i'm thinking of the final moment of america in "west side story," i'm thinking of the bottle dance on "fiddler on the roof." when you think it can't possibly go any further, and it does. there are these moments when you stand agape, outside yourself, like how am i really a person watching this?

charlie: and then you go see "rent." lin-manuel: "rent" did for me in musical theater what the far side did for me in hip-hop. it said, you can write this. we are not so different, you and i. it is about people living, dying, struggling as artists. it was the career i saw myself going into. charlie: underline struggling as an artist and living and dying. lin-manuel: yeah. it took place now and in a neighborhood just down town my sister grew up. my parents went to nyu together. so they were all in the village. that was before i was born.

but it tacitly gave me permission -- you are allowed to write musicals about what you know. i did not know that till i saw "rent." not in my bones. ♪

♪ charlie: you said it was a starter pistol for your career. lin-manuel: yeah, absolutely. charlie: you heard the starter

go off. and for you, it propelled you forward. lin-manuel: jonathan larson, who sadly died before his show even opened, did so many of the things i wanted to do. he made a contemporary sound relevant and work in the musical theater format. he ended the conversation as to whether rock had a place in musical theater. it started in "hair" and "jesus christ superstar." we would still have these

conversations. now it's just a part of language. we've absorbed it the way hip-hop absorbs different styles. it was huge. charlie: do you think it gave you any sense of mortality knowing jonathan's story? lin-manuel: i think jonathan's passing before his show opened scared the hell out of me. you could go at any time. and those ideas, those big ideas you have in your head will stay locked in your head. they go with you unless you get them out into the world. and that's still true. charlie: how so? lin-manuel: in that nothing is promised. tomorrow is not promised. i made plans to come talk to you today but my car could have gone over the highway on the way here. we never know what the next day will bring and yet we plan months and years, which is the vainglorious hope. that you finish the musical. it is both terrifying -- embarking on a show like this, on any creative endeavor is terrifying because you might not make it to the finish line. charlie: and the finish line is not tomorrow. lin-manuel: the finish line is getting the thing that was in your head into the world. when "in the heights" opened, it wasn't about having a career, it was get this thing out of my head so it can exist.

-- hitcould get out of tomorrow, and it exists. charlie: what was the thing to get out? lin-manuel: the thing to get out with "in the heights" was can we have a latino musical where we are not knife-wielding murderers from the 1950's. great musical "west side story." but it's such a peculiar subset and tiny slice of latino experience for only gangsters be -- to be represented in the musical theater canon. that is what we had. this businesse in and i wanted to see if we could write a musical about latinos that didn't have any drug deals or crime. because you will see that on the news. that's what they cover, crimes. i was interested in the hard-working people i grew up in this neighborhood than the guy on the corner. the guy on the corner is there

but it's also a guy inside the store on the corner. i wanted to tell his story. charlie: what did you have to get out with "hamilton?" lin-manuel: i had to get out this guy's life. it out-dickens dickens. it wasn't until i really want in and started researching that i was in the same theme i was with "in the heights." here's an immigrant, an outsider who writes his way in, right his -- who writes his way to prominence, charms his wife through letters, writes his way into his personal and professional life, but then he doesn't know when to shut up and he also self-destructs in his writing. i had a really good idea at the top of the book. and then so -- he writes this poem. hurricane destroys st. croix. he writes a poem about the carnage of a hurricane.

it is used for leaf efforts into -- for relief efforts and a scholarship is raised to send him to the mainland. i said that's the most hip-hop thing i ever heard. it's a story of creating something beautiful out of the ashes of something else. the south bronx was a mess in the 1970's. it was burnt down buildings, it was empty parking lots, graffiti rising up on those blocks. it was block parties happening. it was something beautiful being created out of the ashes of something old. that is what hamilton did when he wrote that poem, and then he wrote about his struggles and got out on the strength of his writing, and that is the trajectory of so many hip-hop artists i respect. charlie: the ability to express yourself in words. lin-manuel: not only that, but the ability to be a reporter on the frontlines of where you grew up in your struggle and that is what hamilton did.

he said my island is ruined. my island is in trouble. that's what lil wayne did after katrina. that is what jay-z writes about when he writes about the projects. it is writing your way out and that hope of a meritocracy, that if you can write and you are smart, you can get out. i had that good idea in the second chapter and the idea of him as a hip-hop artist, it just kept -- as i read the book, it kept proving me right. i felt like a mosquito that hit an artery. it just kept proving me right in a million different ways. charlie: the gift that keeps on giving. lin-manuel: he wrote under a pseudonym like so many rappers do, took up a moniker to write against a royalist.

then he becomes washington's aide de camp because he can write well and quickly in french. he is responsible for washington's correspondence during the revolutionary war. he has the front seat. he wanted to fight. that is the other fun thing. he has the plum job and he's like "give me a command." charlie: because heroes come from the battlefield. lin-manuel: and social mobility comes from the battlefield. i don't have connections. mother's gone, dad is lord knows where, and i have got to make my bones as a glorious fighter or i can die as a martyr, which would also be fine. charlie: a certification of "i belong." lin-manuel: i belong, i fought for this country. charlie: "i'm an american." lin-manuel: america doesn't even exist yet, and i'm an american. and the fact that it's an immigrant outsider who created the notion of one america more than anyone else through his financial system. we were all thinking of ourselves as colonies at that point. people would say to jefferson, will you vote for hamilton's plan or are you your country's man? by the country, they meant virginia.

hamilton's notion of tying us together economically is what tied us together as one nation. this is what began this thinking of ourselves as one nation. charlie: that's like the greatest day of your life when you discovered alexander hamilton. because of what you were able to do with it. lin-manuel: i saw a way into the story. i immediately went to google and said someone has done this. it's too good a story for there not to be three musicals about hamilton that i don't know about. no one had done it. so, i got to work because i wanted to get there first. charlie: the immigrant thing. is there a connection with your father because he made the decision to come here from puerto rico? lin-manuel: sure, yes. my father is technically not an

immigrant because puerto rico is part of the united states. charlie: from an island. lin-manuel: from the caribbean and not speaking a word of english. he learned english in school, came here at 18 to get an education, like hamilton did. he graduated college by 18 in puerto rico. he is the genius of the family. i'm the slacker. charlie: no. do you in any way have an immigrant's connection beyond your father? is there this idea of being an immigrant inside of your own psyche? lin-manuel: i grew up in an immigrant neighborhood. a historically immigrant neighborhood. it was all irish when we moved here, and then it became dominican and latino immigrants. i think i come at it from a different angle, which was i won the lottery. i began commuting to go to the richest zip code in the country for school. i learned to pronounce my name differently in english and spanish.

"lin" at school; i was "lin-manwell" at home. i was speaking spanish at home and speaking english at school. i was a little of myself in both places and it wasn't until i grew up i started bringing all of myself to the room. does that make sense? charlie: yes. lin-manuel: it's a great way to make a writer. to have him bifurcated early and often. a part of you is always observing because you are trying to figure out where you fit in. charlie: you had already written "in the heights" when this occurred. lin-manuel: yes. people were asking what is your next thing going to be. charlie: that was part of it. you had done something and weren't sure about in the next step. lin-manuel: i don't think it was a coincidence it was my first vacation. it was the first time i had any time off. charlie: having done what you had done and you were on the beach, not knowing where you might go, you bought this big 800-page book.

and hamilton speaks to you instantly. what do you do when you come back from your vacation? lin-manuel: start writing. i go back to eight shows a week in my show, but i start writing. i finished the book on vacation and i was like, this will be a beast. charlie: but you knew. lin-manuel: i was making lists of what the songs were. charlie: growing. not a moment of doubt this is something. lin-manuel: it was just can i do it? charlie: this is my opportunity, my story, i was born to tell alexander hamilton's story. lin-manuel: i don't know if i was born, but i have it. charlie: can you imagine anybody else better qualified to tell this story than you? lin-manuel: not in retrospect, but at the time, i just felt i had a huge thing by the tail. i said it's going to take everything i've got to wrestle this thing to the ground. and i went about chasing the experiences that would help me tell it. john wideman has wrestled history.

as well as anyone could have ever done. i sent him e-mails and said the more research i do, i started getting bogged down. what was excellent about ron's account was that it was a through-line. you can stay attached to the drama of the through-line. that would lead to differing accounts and jefferson said this. i e-mailed wideman and said "i'm getting really daunted." he said "just keep your head down and write." charlie: what seemed impossible? lin-manuel: getting it all into one show. charlie: all of the songs were there. lin-manuel: i could feel the song moments but really being able to get it into a form that was dist