Steven Spielberg wraps production for ‘West Side Story’

It’s a wrap for Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story. To mark the end of production, the 72-year-old director has shared a heartfelt note for the film cast and crew.

The film in making is an adaptation of the classic Broadway production, that explores love and fight between rival gangs the Jets and the Sharks in 1957 New York.

It features Ansel Elgort, Rachel Zegler and Rita Moreno, the star of 1961 original film adaptation.

The film studio, 20th Century Fox has shared Spielberg’s photos with the film’s cast and the crew in a tweet, along with a letter that the veteran filmmaker has penned as production has wrapped up.

“We’ve just concluded filming our version of ‘West Side Story’. This has been a journey without precedence: a joyful, stunningly moving, an endlessly surprising encounter with the story and score of one of the world’s greatest musicals.

My brilliantly talented, fiercely committed, generous and apparently inexhaustible cast and crew of hundreds have given our film everything they’ve got, and already I can say that the film we’ll be releasing on December 18, 2020, owes everything to them, as does its immensely grateful director,” Spielberg wrote in the letter.

“For the light, they’ve shed on the world, for Stephen Sondheim’s insight, guidance, and support, and for the openhearted support of the Bernstein, Laurents, and Robbins estates, I owe more than I can possibly express,” he said. Spielberg also gave a shout out to the residents of New York City for lending the team “its beauty and its energy”.

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“Thanks not only for putting up with our trailers, tents, cranes and mid-street dance sequences; from the bottom of my heart, thanks for the warm welcome we encountered everywhere, from pedestrians and policemen and neighborhoods and kids. We couldn’t have made our musical without you,” he concluded.

Film cast includes features Ariana DeBose, Corey Stoll and Brian d’Arcy James, which has a release date set for December 18, 2020.