Raise your hand if you’re a theater girlie who’s been personally victimized by the final low note of “I’m Not That Girl.”

The Wicked song, a plaintive ballad that allows Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) to express her sense of being an outsider, is not one of the flashier numbers in the show. But it’s become something of an anthem for young women feeling romantically passed over in the 20-plus years since the show premiered on Broadway (no, I didn’t use to cry myself to sleep listening to it in high school, what are you talking about?).

Because of that, director Jon M. Chu wanted to give the song more room to breathe in his screen adaptation. It started with Erivo’s performance and eliminating the intro music to the song in favor of her beginning the number acapella.

“She’s starting in the forest, and it goes silent, and she’s the one who brings the music in,” Chu explains. “That takes a lot of collaboration with [composer] Stephen Schwartz to say, ‘Hey, what if we don’t have that intro music? Can we come in differently?’ It’s a little discussion, but I’m always looking for how to make it feel like you slipped into it rather than ‘Stop. Dance break. Come back into the movie.'”

As for slightly raising the song’s final note, which is notoriously difficult, Chu says he wasn’t present for that conversation between Schwartz and Erivo but that ultimately, all those musical decisions came down to the composer and the actor performing the number.

Chu’s main input was slowing down the song’s pacing overall, leaning into the melancholy of the moment. “It’s much slower,” he says. “We wanted to pace it down because it was a different type of song. In the show, it starts to feel like a groove. I love music when it has a groove. But in that moment, it didn’t feel like you wanted to shake your head and get down with, ‘I’m Not That Girl.’ You just wanted to hesitantly explore this question.”

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Fans will get to see Ariana Grande’s take on the number in a reprise in Wicked: For Good, which hits theaters on Nov. 21, but for now, fans can watch Erivo’s version on Peacock, where Wicked is currently streaming.