LONDON - For his debut as a film director, Hamilton creator Lin Manuel Miranda turned to some unlikely source material - an unfinished one-man show by the late Jonathan Larson. The composer and lyricist of the groundbreaking 1990s musical Rent, Larson was a force of nature. Tall, gangly, with a mess of black hair and ambition to burn. “He wrote for eight hours almost every day,” his friend Victoria Leacock once recalled. “He refused to write jingles for companies whose politics or ethics he didn’t approve of, or to accept money for doing any sort of work for such companies. He chose, instead, to wait tables.” And that’s what he did for 10 years, scraping a meagre living in West Soho as he dreamt of becoming a Broadway composer. When his moment finally arrived, it couldn’t have been any bigger. Rent, billed as “the rock opera of the nineties,” won a Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award for best musical, eventually becoming the 11th longest-running show in Broadway history. But Larson never got to see it. He died of an aortic aneurysm on the morning of the show’s Off-Broadway preview, in January 1996, aged just 35. He didn’t leave much else to explore, save for an unproduced sci-fi musical, Superbia, and that one-man show, Boho Days, about his failure to get Superbia made. After his death, that rock soliloquy was repurposed as a three-actor piece and became a hit in its own right, under the title Tick, Tick... Boom! And that’s where Lin Manuel Miranda comes in. In 2001, the young composer saw Tick, Tick... Boom! in a tiny hotel theatre in New York, and it changed his life. “It really clarified whether I wanted to do this for a living or not,” he later recalled, adding: “It was like, ‘Here’s what your 20s are going to look like, dude.’” So when Netflix asked him to adapt the musical for the big screen, he jumped at the chance. “It was the fastest email response: ‘I’m the only person who can direct this movie.