'All the fears you should have as a New Yorker': Lin-Manuel Miranda on rebooting cult movie The Warriors

WHats the most cherished movie from your childhood? Probably not The Warriors, Walter Hill's gritty thriller about New York gang warfare. But as Lin-Manuel Miranda says with a smile: “Our friend's older brother had a VHS …” That's how the four-year-old Miranda found himself watching the film that, 40 years later, turned into a musical concept by the composer Hamilton album with playwright Issa Davis.

He describes the bad mood in the room as the video plays. “Here's something you can't see. But its the watch. This is New York really Like Night.” The cult 1979 film follows a Coney Island gang on a hair-raising journey home from the Bronx after being falsely accused of murdering the leader of the city's biggest gang. They face “all the fears you're supposed to have as a New Yorker,” says Miranda. “Falling off the train tracks. Wrong cop at the wrong time. When some shit that has nothing to do with you pops off.”

The film is driven by a rock soundtrack with suspenseful synths, as well as songs like Nowhere to Run – played “for all you boppers” by a mysterious DJ. It's from Sol Urick's 1965 novel (itself inspired by Xenophon's ancient epic Anabasis, about a Greek army's homeward odyssey) and Urick references rock'n'roll, the Beatles and pop music throughout his story.

The album was in the same mold as Jesus Christ Superstar and The Who's Tommy, both of which were released as LPs before becoming stage music. The former was “the north star for us,” says Miranda. “You listen and create stories in your head. Word letters are so specific. Mary Magdalene is in 5/4 and sounds like a dream folk song you hear, and then King Herod is like a burlesque. You got this rock Jesus. And Judas gets all the funny bass lines.”

Davis and Miranda have compiled a playlist of what a Warriors musical might sound like. When I ask which song they chose, they each reach for their phones. We're in a three-way zoom call, and the elegantly dressed Davis's minimalist decor contrasts with the cluttered shelves behind Miranda, whose baseball cap quotes Hamlet (“Word, word, word”). They played off their original ideas: Roy Ayers, The Strokes, Cardi B, Ruben Blades, Beyoncé's All Night. “Ms. Lauryn Hill is with Ready or Not,” Davis said. Hill was one of their coups when casting the roles, and this is where the concept album format trumped a stage production: “We invited all these incredible artists that we would never have had for eight shows a week,” Davis explains. “So we got to have Marc Anthony and Shencia and Kim Dracula and all our legendary MCs in the opening number.”

The album opens with Thunderous Survive the Night, where dancehall star Shensia serves as a DJ introducing the five boroughs of New York, each represented by top rappers. “Writing verse for some of our best writers is very, very, very, very, very [put five “very”s, he insists] Scary,” Miranda admits. With Staten Island, there was “no Plan B,” he says. It would have to be RZA and Ghostface Killah of the Wu-Tang Clan, who nicknamed their home borough Shaolin and even referenced The Warriors on their debut album.

The album was executive-produced by Nas, who hails from Queens. “It's also Nas' favorite movie,” Miranda said. The pair were discussing a different project when Miranda mentioned what she and Davis were doing, “and his eyes popped out of his head!” Miranda felt the pressure: “Do I have a Queens metaphor? What hasn't he tried in his long and amazing career?” He came up with a queen's gambit chess metaphor, then “played him his verse, I'm doing the vocals and he's listening to what I'm telling him to recite”. Nas agreed. “That's my proudest songwriter. One of those moments!”

In his novel, Yurik's all-male, “battle-ready” Coney Island gang The Dominators (dubbed the Warriors in the film) form both families and armies, their exaggerated tactics leading to an actual pissing contest. The film, released amid a wave of other gang movies, including The Wanderers and The Outsiders (now a hit Broadway musical), went halfway to sympatheticizing the gang — and omitted a gang-rape scene that's in the novel.

Miranda's main change was to make all the Warriors female, a decision inspired by the Gamergate incident in 2014, which she added as “at least online doxing women who dared to like video games”. That antisocial behavior reminds Miranda of the film's “malignant chaos” caused by Luther's shooting of Cyrus, the town's all-powerful gang leader who proposed a truce between the tribes; Luther then blames the Warriors. Miranda and Davis' gang share a sisterly solidarity as they essentially reclaim the night. Cyrus is now a woman too, played by Lauryn Hill.

The film is less violent than the novel but became embroiled in controversy after an outbreak of violence was linked to the screening in 1979. The Washington Post observed that “it's hard not to think of the film as socially irresponsible in some respects”. Davis had not seen the film when Miranda asked him to cooperate; He initially responded most to Cyrus' offer of a truce, which later faded as the action cranked up. “In 1971 there was a real-life meeting of all the gangs led by Benji Melendez of the Ghetto Brothers in the Bronx. And another famous gang truce after the riots in LA in 1992,” he says. “So there's something very real about that moment, Cyrus says, 'Can you dig it?' I was like, 'Me can Dig it!'

Davis — whose plays include the Angela mixtape, which featured her aunt, political activist Angela Davis, as a character — turned the truce into a dream of peace throughout the album. He noted the 1971 meeting “helped create the cultural conditions that officially created hip-hop in 1973. It changed from being a gang fighting other gangs to a crew going to war with other crews as MCs, as great dancers, As a graffiti writer, as a DJ.” He sees the album as a “love letter to the origins of hip-hop”.

The collaboration with Davies gave Miranda a welcome contrast to Hamilton, “which I basically wrote alone, in a sweat, chronologically”. Working with Encanto's soundtrack producer Mike Elizondo, they identified genres including ska, punk and R&B for each gang's song – and found a way to represent the Furies, who never speak. Skinhead Turnbull ACs from the Bronx are given the salsa sound. “As the warriors ran, [record label] Fania was revolutionizing salsa music around the world. And those artists primarily lived in Northern Manhattan and the South Bronx.

Several former Hamilton stars are playing Warriors, including Philippa Sue, who was invited to record the demo. “It was all very secretive,” he tells me. “And like a family reunion.” Hamilton alumni Sasha Hutchings and Jasmine Cephas Jones were there, as was Amber Gray who Sue met at her first professional gig after drama school. Their shared history helped bond between the seven-strong warriors and their new recruit, Mercy, portrayed by Julia Harriman, who, like Sue, played Eliza in Hamilton opposite Miranda. One of the main challenges was identifying so many different gang members. “A truly great writer,” Su says, “is able to encapsulate an idea, an important plot point or a character trait in a very short amount of time”.

In the movie, Luther was played by musical theater star David Patrick Kelly, who based his portrayal on the New York Dolls after meeting them while working at Max's Kansas City, the famous nightclub. Kelly has a cameo on the album, as a cop. Miranda tried to write rap verses for Luther “but the thinking was too disciplined”. He wanted more chaotic energy. Davies suggested they use a metal singer, and Atlantic Records took them to the operatic roar of Tasmania's Kim Dracula.

“I think everyone who hears it goes, 'What was that?'” laughs Miranda. Luthor's monstrous number Going Down compares the stations on New York's transport map to the dots in the Pac Man game, with the fighters as ghosts to hunt. (When Davis first saw The Warriors, he told Miranda: “This should be a video game.” As a superfan, he was one step ahead. “It is,” he replied. “I play it!”)

The Warriors have such a cult following that even a marathon is run by fans, tracing the gang's path through the city. Miranda and Davies made their own way through the parks, subway stations and streets featured in the film – but traveled during the day instead of the overnight trek.

“We got to Coney by sunset,” says Davis, who grew up in Berkeley, California: “I really romanticized New York as a kid. This is the place where you go, like in the movie Fame, and dance in a taxicab.” Miranda was born in New York a year after the film's release. He recalls a golden age of '70s films set on location there, including Dog Day Afternoon and The French Connection. “If you want love and peace for the Warriors, watch Godspell – you'll see hippies singing about Jesus where the Warriors fought.”

In the film, each gang has a signature outfit, from the Furies' baseball uniforms to the Warriors' leather vests worn bare-chested. When Miranda screened it at her film club, she wore the vest: “I had to go on a week-long diet!” The big question is: Will Miranda and Davis' fighters take the stage in full costume? Miranda remembers when Hamilton's ticket was gold dust. With The Warriors' album, he says, “You're not getting the soundtrack to a show you can't see. You're getting our stuff. It feels great.” But he admits that a theatrical version would be “awesome fun,” and that they're open to the idea. All you boppers out there: Warriors' journey definitely doesn't end here.