WIZARD WHEEZES
By Iain Blair
This article originally appeared in Issue 24 of Cinematography World.
American cinematographer Alice Brooks ASC has been collaborating with director Jon M. Chu for well over two decades. They first met as film students at USC where she shot his musical short, and that led to In The Heights (2021), the acclaimed film adaptation of the Lin-Manuel Miranda musical.
So, when Brooks, an avid musical fan who grew-up watching “all the classic musicals on TV all the time”, got a call from Chu some three years ago asking her to shoot Wicked, she must have felt like she’d made a wish, clicked her heels three times and landed in Oz.
Wicked, the first of a two-part film adaptation of the hit stage musical, stars Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, and is one of the most eagerly-anticipated releases of the year.
“It was like entering a dream, I was so excited,” recalls Brooks whose last film was another musical, Tick, Tick…Boom! (2021, dir. Lin-Manuel Miranda). “It’s the biggest musical ever, and there’s just so much love for it in the world. So many people connect with it on so many different levels. It’s not for one specific age group or gender or background. The story transcends everything.”
“It was like entering a dream… I was so excited”
That story reimagines the original Wizard Of Oz, and instead focusses on the initial friendship – and then bitter rivalry – between two witches, Elphaba (Erivo), who becomes the Wicked Witch Of The West, and Galinda (Grande), who becomes Glinda The Good.
Bringing that titanic struggle between good and evil to life, a battle both intimate and epic, was also a filmmaking experience that embraced extremes.
“It was like making a small independent movie with your friends,” she recalls. “But then you’re in the middle of an enormous set that is the size of four American football fields, and you’ve got an army of people around you.”
Ethan Slater is Boq and Marissa Bode is Nessarose in WICKED, directed by Jon M. Chu
So how did Brooks and Chu approach the look of the ambitious film?
“When we first talked about our goals for the movie, I said I wanted it to be the greatest, most beautiful love story ever told between these two women, these two best friends,” she explains.
Ariana Granda is Glinda in WICKED, directed by Jon M. Chu
“But, visually, it’s this huge world that this very intimate story is told in. So how do we create the vastness and the smallness at the same time? We realised it was going to be all about the close-ups, and how these women connected. The other thing we talked a lot about was the theme of light and shadow, that the light is not always the light, and the darkness is not always the darkness. Good is not always good, and evil is not always evil. What we perceive can be very different from what reality is.
“I asked Jon if I could go through the script and make time-of-day suggestions, because I had this idea where the sun would always rise for Glinda and set for Elphaba. So, throughout the movie there are several long sunrise and sunset sequences, and the last 40 minutes of the movie is all one long sunset. As Elphaba finds her power, she jumps off the Emerald City tower as the sun finally sets for her. Those are the broad strokes of ideas that we started with.”
Before official prep even began, Brooks started doing her own series of camera and lens tests at Panavision in Woodland Hills.
Cynthia Erivo is Elphaba in WICKED, directed by Jon M. Chu
“First, we tested every single camera, and initially I thought we were going to shoot on the ARRI Alexa LF, and Panavision’s lens guru Dan Sasaki had this idea for lenses. So we started developing this lens set together,” she reports.
“But after going to Company 3 and watching the test dailies projected, Jon and I realised we wanted to shoot on the ARRI Alexa 65 as we needed that scope for this movie, but then Dan said he couldn’t make the lenses to cover that sensor in time.”
As fate would have it, the schedule was pushed back and Brooks called Sasaki on the same day, and I enquired, “Can you develop those lenses now for the Alexa 65? To which he replied, ‘Let’s go for it,’” she recalls.
“We ended-up shooting on Panavision Prototype Ultra Panatar IIs, which we called ‘Unlimiteds’ because they didn’t even have a name when we started using them. We’re the only film that’s ever shot on those prototypes and they’re still locked in a closet in London. We didn’t even have a full set of lenses when we started the movie because Dan was still making them. It was wonderful to have him starting from scratch, looking at my lookbook, discussing the emotion of the movie, and then to have him developing lenses specifically for Wicked, with us picking the colour of the lens flare. Instead of Panavision blue we picked an amber.”
Ariana Granda is Glinda in WICKED, directed by Jon M. Chu
Brooks notes that embracing such an untried lens package wasn’t the big risk it might have been on another production.
“Jon said very early-on that he wanted to develop and create a world with a group of craftsmen and artisans that looked like no other movie. He also asked us not to make the obvious choices. So I think if we had just gone with a set of established lenses we wouldn’t have had those wonderful imperfections.”
To build their LUTs for the film, Brooks worked with Company 3 and dailies colourist Lucie Barber.
“Finding the right dailies colourist is really important,” Brooks stresses, “and I kept interviewing dailies colourists, but no one was clicking. Although Lucie actually wasn’t in-house at Company 3, they asked me, ‘Do you want to try her?’. We met and I saw that she ‘got’ the movie. She understood what we were trying to do, and she became incredibly instrumental to making this movie.”
“Jon wanted to create a world that looked like no other movie”
The shoot was based at the newly-renovated Sky Studios Elstree outside London. Brooks had 18 weeks of prep and started tests during week two.
“Those were make-up and lighting tests to begin with,” she reports. “They were crucial, because the green make-up for Elphaba’s skin was going to change based on how it would be lit. So I worked really closely with Frances Hannon, our make-up artist, to figure-out how we were going to light Elphaba and Glinda. We then started phasing-in lens tests, and then started doing specific lens tests on Cynthia and Ariana. We did a camera test almost once a week and ended-up shooting two different lenses for their close ups – Cynthia with a 65mm and Ariana with a 75mm.”
Partly because of the Hollywood strikes of 2023, the shoot ultimately took over a year to complete.
L to R: Cynthia Erivo (as Elphaba) and Ariana Grande (as Glinda) with Director Jon M. Chu on the set of WICKED.
“The plan was always that we’d shoot the two movies together as if they were one, and that we were going to shoot for nine months, starting December 2022 and wrapping August 2023,” Brooks reports. “We shot for 145 days and were almost done, but then the strike happened when we had just nine days to go. So we went back this last January for another five weeks, and finally finished.”
The filmmakers faced other challenges. “We were on the brand-new stages at Sky Studio that Universal had just built. We were the first production there, and it was still a construction zone,” she says. “But they’re beautiful stages now.
Jonathan Bailey is Prince Fiyero in WICKED, directed by Jon M. Chu
“The second big challenge was the sheer scale of the sets – they were so gigantic. I know 155 days seems like a long time, but for what we wanted to accomplish it felt like not enough time in some ways. Because of the schedule, some weeks we were shooting on four different stages. We had 16 total stages (ten at Sky, two at Platinum, four at Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden) and four huge backlot sets. We ended up pre-lighting both Saturdays and Sundays almost every weekend. Working like that that was really intense. But it also was so exciting and rewarding. Every morning I’d wake-up and pinch myself and go, ‘Is this really happening?’ And everyone was working to their highest potential.”
“The sets were gigantic”
Brooks’ core crew included gaffer David Smith, DIT Jay Patel, key grip Guy Micheletti, A-camera operator Karsten Jacobsen, and final colourist Jill Bogdanowicz. Lighting was provided by Universal Production Services, and illuminating the huge sets presented yet another big challenge for Brooks.
“The lighting was a lot more involved than any movie I’ve done before” she admits. “For example, to create the lighting cues for the idea of the sunrise and the sunset took weeks to develop, and for the scene in a forest featuring Elphaba and Fiyero and a cub, we had an eight-minute sunset, so the sky was constantly changing. We shot it on a double sound stage, and in the deep distance I had two Dinos on a lift that had to slowly lower.
“However, we needed to know where the sun would be and where in the lighting cue it needed to be, because we never started at the beginning and ran the full thing. So we were dealing with the colour of the lights, the ambient shifts, and the warmth of the sun as it was drifting. And then, Jon also wanted to do all these 360-degree shots, which meant we were constantly chasing the light because I never wanted to be on the on the flat side of the light.”
Brooks had over 300 Cineo Quantum II LED lamps on Wicked, which she used on many sets including the forest set, “for the long sunset scene where the colour temperature of the sky was constantly changing,” she reports. “We also used them on the backlot for all the Shiz night work, because with the huge size of the set the Quantum IIs were a good choice for how much light they output and their weather resistance.”
L to R: Cynthia Erivo is Elphaba and Ariana Grande is Glinda in WICKED, directed by Jon M. Chu
Another key piece of gear for lighting such complex sequences was a Mini Desk, made by Anytronics.
“The lighting was a lot more involved than any movie I’ve done before”
“It’s a wireless dimmer-board that you can walk around with, and it enabled David Smith, my gaffer to constantly move the dimmers up and down as the camera was moved around,” she explains. “It was all carefully choreographed, but sometimes he didn’t have enough hands. So I also adjusted some of the dimmers, and sometimes my assistant or an AD would help out too, as we had so many lighting cues in this movie.”
All the musical numbers and performances were shot live, instead of being dubbed in post, notes Brooks.
“It’s demanding on the actors and on the crew because there’s only so many takes they can do, and you want to make sure everything’s technically perfect. It also was emotional. You’d see the grip team lined-up next to the crane, just crying as Cynthia or Ariana belted out a song. Doing it all live was pretty incredible.”
The hardest scene for Brooks to shoot was the Ozdust Ballroom sequence.
“I started those lighting tests very early, as the set was all made out of clear resin, because it’s supposed to be an underwater cave,” she explains. “The clear resin gave me complete control over what colour it was going to be, because I could backlight it, but finding the right colour took a long time. Whilst we were doing the make-up tests, we found that the cyan blue was the perfect colour to make Cynthia’s green skin pop.
“The ballroom scene is the heart of the movie, as it’s where Elphaba and Glinda become friends, falling in love with each other. It was important that we got this right, especially with the 360-degree shots during the eight-minute dance between the two women, which starts with Cynthia alone.
“Jon wanted the camera to constantly be circling them. So first we shot Cynthia, because it was emotional for her. She comes into the Ozdust Ballroom. Everyone’s making fun of her and laughing at her as she wears her witch’s hat for the first time.
“We circled around her on the 65mm lens for eight minutes with the Steadicam operator and the focus puller, Lewis Hume. We shot at a very shallow depth-of-field, and afterwards Lewis came up to me and said that was the hardest shot he ever pulled-focus on.
“Then we did Ariana’s close-up, before pulling back and doing 360-degree wide shots or medium shots. And while all that was happening, the gaffer was doing his dimming lighting cues on his Mini Desk. I think all those things combined – the technical and extremely specific choreography of lighting and camera – made it the biggest challenge of the whole shoot.”
