Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC, good morning again, everyone and what a treat. Lin-Manuel Miranda is here along with Argentinian filmmaker, a Agustina San Martin, who Lin-Manuel has paired with for an appearance at BAM this weekend as part of the Rolex Mentor and Protege Arts Initiative. They will appear together tonight at 6:00 PM at BAM, following a screening of a work by Agustina, that's not just a film, but a film in installation, we'll explain.

Tomorrow Lin-Manuel will appear in conversation with his fellow mentors in the program, Spike Lee, Phyllida Lloyd, Carrie Mae Weems. Ticket proceeds will go to support BAMS, Brooklyn interns for arts and culture program, so it should be an exciting weekend in Brooklyn and for a good cause. Before we bring in our guests, a little musical prelude, not from Hamilton or in the Heights or Tick, Tick... Boom, or even Moana or Encanto, it's from the White House in 2016. Back in those innocent times when Barack Obama was President, Merrick Garland was a Supreme court nominee, and Lin-Manuel was invited to freestyle with POTUS himself, holding up the cue card prompts, so imagine that scene, and I guess one of the prompts must have been the word Mars or the word NASA.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: NASA, I want to see if we can get over to Mars and wrap more bars, let spit bars and leave a carbon footprint on it and lower my emissions and this is Lin-Man 2000 in Congress. This is transmissions. I hope that Congress works to our agenda. Innovation's important. You really got to send, take yourself and create something. We need a new justice for the Supreme Court, in short. Oh my gosh, this is my book were born and immigrants, we get the job done. This is so fun. POTUS is holding up the signs. I'm not done-

Brian Lehrer: There's that one line from Hamilton, immigrants, we get the job done. Lin-Manuel Miranda at the White House, March 15th, 2016 just because we deal in the intersection of arts and politics here, and many of you have probably never heard that clip. Now, Lin-Manuel Miranda and a Augustine San Martin, thanks so much for coming on WNYC today. It's an honor, good morning.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Thank you. Thank you for having us. I haven't heard that clip since it came out of my mouth six years ago.

Agustina San Martín: Hello, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Hi, Augustine, and Lin-Manuel, if you don't mind me starting briefly with that clip, it gave me chills re-listening to that this morning and realizing it was at that exact moment when Merrick Garland was a Supreme Court nominee, before Mitch McConnell pulled his stunt and never let the nominee get to a vote and look where we all are now. What was it like doing freestyle with President Obama holding up the cards?

Lin-Manuel Miranda: It was terrifying. It was terrifying when you do it in front of 100 people in an auditorium, so imagine the leader of the free world who also was like, I'll put whatever cards I want, I want you to be surprised. It was high stakes. I'm glad the words came out in order and made reasonable sense. That's really all you can ask for.

Brian Lehrer: It was so much fun and also poignant to listen to. We'll bring in Agustina in a second, but will you talk about the mentor and Protege Arts Initiative in advance of your appearances in Brooklyn this weekend and why you and she became a pair?

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Absolutely. Rolex runs this wonderful program and they're really thoughtful on how they enact it. They ask artists to mentor with up and coming artists and I was delighted to be a part of it. They're really thoughtful in the search and making sure that pair is a good fit. My friend, Tommy Kail and collaborator, Tommy Kail was on the committee to find me a mentee and all I can tell you is that when I met Agustina for the first time I realized, oh, I'm going to learn a lot more from her than she's going to learn from me.

We met a few years ago and we have survived a pandemic and several films together and navigating making art through that pandemic. It's been a really eventful use for us.

Brian Lehrer: Wow. This isn't like a 10-day crash course?

Lin-Manuel Miranda: No, gosh. When we first met, I was gearing up to direct my first film, Tick, Tick...Boom and she had already directed films in her Homeland. I was like, I'm going to be asking you a lot more questions than you ask as we start out and that collaboration was really fruitful over the next few years.

Brian Lehrer: Agustina, welcome. I guess the term film screening doesn't do justice to what you're presenting tonight, described as a hybrid of documentary film and magical apparition. Could you explain to everyone what that means, that the experience will be like?

Agustina San Martín: Yes. Very specific the description. What we're doing, we're asking people about their favorite songs from their childhoods and they tell us a memory related to that song, What we're realizing a certain point is that memories, they are so different. Everyone remembers the things different, people do remember the things different in different moments of their lives. The projection is going to have a hologram-ish feel to it with an infinity, and depending on where you're sitting in the theater, is the experience you're going to get. It was a little bit of that exploration, wanting to transcend the screen moreover because we are in the open category with Lin. We're not bounded to anything specific, so I thought that being playful was maybe the best thing for the show.

Brian Lehrer: It's called Childhood Echoes. I didn't give the title, but it's what you were describing, I guess, interviewing people about their memories of music in childhood and the memories invoked by those favorite songs today. Do you have one yourself?

Agustina San Martín: Yes, I do have many of them, many of them. But you have to be honest with yourself because sometimes you want to say the coolest song or the nicest one, but the importance is that they are the ones that trigger, that you hear them now and suddenly your whole body's in a different place. I think lullabies always do the trick with people generally.

Brian Lehrer: Did you ask Lin-Manuel since he was your mentor for this his?

Agustina San Martín: I did and he does appear with his song, don't you Lin?

Lin-Manuel Miranda: I do and it was considerably less stressful than free styling for the President of the United States, and it's true. It's a very sneaky way to interview a subject because when you start talking about what your mother or your father sang you at bedtime, you go to a different place in your brain and in your heart. I haven't seen the film yet. I'm really looking forward to--

Brian Lehrer: Is it too much of a spoiler to say what song you referenced?

Lin-Manuel Miranda: I'm not sure which one Agustina focused on in the film because there were several, but my mom's go-to bedtime song for me was April Showers, which was the biggest hit song of 1922 and so that's a song that lives in my cells in a different way as a result of when I heard it.

Brian Lehrer: You know Lin-Manuel-

Agustina San Martín: Yes, that's the one.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, go ahead Agustina. Go ahead.

Agustina San Martín: That's the one that actually appears on the video. It's very nice.

Brian Lehrer: You are not the first member of your immediate family, Lin-Manuel, to appear on this show. Our listeners may not realize that your father is Luis Miranda, the Democratic Party consultant, well known in political circles here in New York, and he was a guest on the show way back in those same innocent times of 2016 to talk about Hillary Clinton winning the Democratic primary in Puerto Rico. My question is, was he in that kind of work when you were a kid? We just heard about how your mother sang you April Showers. How much would you say you grew up hearing about politics a lot?

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Politics was the family business from the outside and then from the inside, my parents were community organizers. My mother worked at the Hispanic Women Business Center. She volunteered there. I remember that was my preschool afterschool place and then my father was hired by Mayor Koch to advise on Hispanic affairs when I turned seven. The way other kids had a paper route, I was going through buildings, asking, are you registered to vote? Are you registered to vote? That was very much the family business growing up. I have a that level of enthusiasm and fatigue with politics.

Brian Lehrer: That's a lot. How do you see your work in the context of contemporary politics, if at all, or maybe as an effort to stay out of the day to day fray and stay on some more bigger picture level, Hamilton and everything. I know you've done some activism in the past, around Puerto Rico debt relief, how do you see your work in that context in the arts and how involved are you in any issue oriented causes these days?

Lin-Manuel Miranda: I find it interesting that usually, whatever I'm working on creatively will reveal politics to itself. I never thought of myself as an inherently political person or not. When you write Hamilton and you are grappling with the questions of the founding of this country, you have to grapple with those issues. My main insight in writing Hamilton was it was ever thus, the contradictions that the founding are still there. We are fighting variations of the same things and we have been for the past 200 some odd years.

I always see my philanthropy or political activism or whatever you want to call it, as coming from the same place as my artistic impulses. You act on the things that don't leave you alone. If it's something that's keeping you up at night, whether that is an artistic impulse to write something or an injustice where you feel like you can be of service, that's what I try to act on.

Brian Lehrer: Do you feel like that in your work at all, Agustina.

Agustina San Martín: I think that sometimes you're speaking about it directly, but I think that your political beliefs, your ethical and moral beliefs are always translucent in whatever you're doing. It's also a responsibility we all have in evoking that things that we believe on and that world we trust to build for our future. It paints everything, sort of.

Brian Lehrer: We weren't going to take any callers on this segment because it's such a short segment. However, I can't resist because Sue Leica in Westchester is calling in with a question for Lin-Manuel, that I think we have to take, Sue Leica you're on WNYC. Hello?

Sue Leica: Say hello, say hello? What do you want to say? Okay.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Hi, Sue Leica.

Brian Lehrer: Am I saying your name right? Do you want to say it for us? Did we lose her? I think she went shy. Maybe mom, is the mom there?

Child: Hello.

Brian Lehrer: No?

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Oh, hello.

Brian Lehrer: That line dropped off. I'll frame her question, we tried. She said she's a big fan of Moana and wants to know how you write music.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Oh, my goodness. Thank you Sue Leica for that wonderful question. Honestly, it is as simple and as complicated as I pretend to be the character I need to write a song for. I talk to myself or I sing to myself until it feels honest. When it feels honest, I write it down. It is that simple and it's that hard. I will tell you that for Moana when I had to write her song, how far I'll go. I'd written several drafts and none of them felt right. The thing I did that finally unlocked it, was I went to my parent's house and I locked myself in my childhood bedroom. I reminded myself when I was 16 again, and felt both an incredible yearning to get out of my house and an incredible gratitude for the people I lived with and that unlocked it pretty quick, which is pretty tied to Agustina's childhood echoes. We'll see how that reverberates in her words tonight.

Brian Lehrer: With that as a segue way, Agustina, can I give you the last word in this segment on your experience as a protege with Lin-Manuel as a mentor, how do you think it might inform your own work going forward? He already talked about what he's learned from you.

Agustina San Martín: Everything is ridiculous. I live in a constant state of surprise with all of this experience. Lin-Manuel is amazing in so many different ways and everything is so relaxed. He always reminds me because I'm an overthinker, he reminds me all the time to just feel what I'm doing and always connect to the simplest sense of truth, which is in the end, the fuel that should drive us. I think that this is very important for a career and I really hope I take everything that he has been teaching me so far and haste myself because he has been a great mentor

Brian Lehrer: Filmmaker, Agustina San Martín and Lin-Manuel Miranda paired for an appearance at BAM this weekend, as part of the Rolex Mentor and Protege Arts Initiative, they will appear together tonight at 6:00 PM beginning with a presentation of Agustina's film installation, Childhood Echoes. Tomorrow, Lin-Manuel will appear in conversation with his fellow mentors in the program, Spike Lee, Phyllida Lloyd and Carrie Mae Weems. Ticket proceeds will go to support BAMS, Brooklyn Interns for Arts and Culture Program, they tell us. Hey, thank you both so much for sharing some of this with us. It was wonderful.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Thanks for having us.

Agustina San Martín: Thank you, Brian.

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