BTS: Wicked

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In the second shot of return to Oz musical Wicked children run through fields of tulips. These are real plants, about 9 million of them, grown on a real field in Norfolk. Each row has a specific colour and all are oriented to a specific sunlight pattern that could only exist in a studio.

“The way the farmer would normally line up the tulip bulbs wouldn’t work for the sun pass we were going to need for Munchkinland,” explains cinematographer Alice Brooks ASC who visited the Norfolk farm to explain what they needed. “We planned the shot in Unreal Engine in August for the tulips to bloom in April.”

Come April and the production got a call from the farmer that the plants were going to bloom early. “I mean, it’s like having a baby,” says Brooks, who quickly arranged for drone shots of the fields that they would later match with footage shot on a giant backlot at Sky Studios Elstree.

That extraordinary attention to detail marks Wicked as one of Hollywood’s latest hurrahs to the golden days of epic studio filmmaking. Gladiator II being epic of spectacular sets.

Brooks likens the attempt that she and director Jon Chu (Crazy Rich Asians) were making to the likes of Cleopatra (1963) and Spartacus (1960).

Production was doubly complex because of Universal Picture’s decision to split the story into two and maximise its $145m budget. Wicked: Part Two is due out next year having been photographed over a mammoth 155-day shoot alongside Part One.

“We shot it as if it were one film in many ways,” says Brooks. “None of us had done anything of this scale before. Hollywood rarely does anything on this scale anymore.  Jon asked me what my goal for the movie was and I said it would be the greatest love story ever told between two women. I wanted it to be Casablanca or The English Patient where two true friends fall in love and are then ripped apart. It’s such a strong tale of female friendship that I don't think any film has ever had before.”

Wicked is an adaptation of the hit stage musical which in turn was based on the 1995 novel of the same name derived characters from L. Frank Baum's classic novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.  The film stars Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba, a misunderstood young woman born with green skin who later becomes the Wicked Witch of the West. The all-star cast includes Ariana Grande as Glinda the Good Witch and Michelle Yeoh, Jeff Goldblum, Jonathan Bailey and Peter Dinklage.

Prep began four years ago during the pandemic when key heads of department were communicating via zoom. Principal photography began in June 2022 preceded by a mammoth 18 weeks of tests.

Alice Brooks had known Chu since their days at film school together including on musical feature In The Heights. She also photographed the musical Tick, Tick, Boom! The first thing that she did after landing in London for the shoot was to go see the musical theater production in the West End along with Chu, choreographer Nathan Crowley, VFX supervisor Pablo Helman and production designer Chris Scott.

“What really struck me while watching the musical was that here we all, finally after Covid, sitting together in the dark and feeling like we are linked to arm and arm about to walk down the yellow brick road. The whole ensemble was such an incredible camaraderie.”

MGM’s 1939 version of Wizard of Oz famously burst into Technicolor but the Wicked filmmakers chose to refer back to Baum’s books. “Every single paragraph has such rich colour descriptions and each colour means something. They tell us about character,” Brooks says.

Sets for the centrepiece Ozdust Ballroom were made of clear resin allowing Brooks to light it with any colour of the rainbow. They backlit the walls to mix the palette and during tests she noticed that anytime Erivo in green makeup was near a cyan blue backdrop her colour popped.

“When Elphaba walks down the stairs in the Ozdust Ballroom, Jon really wanted her to feel as if everyone was laughing at her and looking at her. I wanted her green to pop out more than anywhere else in the movie so then I started exploring blue options for the world around her.”

Brooks used every colour of the rainbow for different scenes in the movie but a chief challenge throughout was lighting the two central characters, one of whom is a platinum blonde dressed in shades of pink and the other is green skinned, dressed in black with a huge black hat.

“That colour relationship between pink and green is so challenging because you've got two opposing colours in the same frame for most of the movie.”

Camera and lighting tests began in week two of prep with costume designer Paul Tazewell and hair/makeup/prosthetics designer Frances Hannon. “The green changed under every colour light but then Frances found this neon paint that allowed me to light Elphaba’s skin as if it were natural skin. It made the biggest difference in the world to me because suddenly I didn't need to light a certain colour temperature for the skin nor have to rely on power windows in the grade. Instead, we were able to light both women within the same frame.”

Early on they considered shooting as a virtual production and toured the Manhattan Beach stages where Avatar was shot. After lengthy discussions Chu decided he wanted a practical set build.

“John is a very tangible director. He likes to be able to touch real things and when we stood on the set at Manhattan Beach it just didn’t work for him that he couldn't touch or walk around objects [displayed virtually]

“We considered blue screen but then sets started to be built. And they got bigger and bigger and bigger going from the floor to the rafters. It's a dream as a cinematographer. I had real practical sets and huge spaces to light.”

The production ended up shooting 17 sound stages; 2 at Warner Leavesden, 2 at Platinum in Pinewood and 10 at Sky Studios Elstree including exterior sets for Emerald City which were the size of four American football fields.

“With the stage show you have your proscenium and you never get to have your beautiful close-ups. What we wanted to do was shoot many scenes in 360 degrees which is a part of the story you can’t see in the stage show.

Brooks says she worked seven days a week during the five month shoot, using the weekends when she could have had time off to go onto sets and pre-light, rig and program with Gaffer David Smith. He ended up programming 6000 lightning cues across the two movies.

“I could take the script and walk around and feel what it would be like to be Elphaba or Glinda in that space and then create my lighting and lens and angle choices from there,” the DP says. “I am a very emotional storyteller and so is Jon. We don't talk about technical stuff for most of our prep process. It's all about themes, emotions and relationships. Jon would give me the intention of the scene in one word, like ‘yearning’ or ‘longing’ or ‘power’ and those words sort of seep into me.

“For instance, we talked a lot about the idea that in Wicked, good is not good and evil is not evil. The light is not the light. The darkness is not the darkness. One night, in the middle of prep, I suddenly woke up with this idea that the light from the sun should always set for Elphaba and always be rising for Glinda. I called Jon up and said, ‘do you mind if I make some time of day suggestions for the script?’ He agreed. So now the last 40 minutes of the movie is all one long sunset. The song ‘Popular’ is a 15-minute sequence that starts pre-dawn and leads into a pink sunrise.  These decisions didn’t stem from anything technical, they came from the concept of what we want light and darkness to mean for our characters.”

While they decided against a Volume for photography, Brooks leaned heavily into Epic’s Unreal Engine for shaping the lighting and adjusting the set design.

This helped for instance in filming the throne room. “People assume this was a set extension, but it's all real,” she says. “The set went all the way up to the ceiling in concentric circles that get smaller and smaller almost like a tornado. Originally, there was not enough space to put all the Skypanels in I wanted. We were able to worked this out with the art department after designing it in Unreal. Likewise, holes for the lighting rig at just the right angle were built into the construction of the library set after we had pre-lit it in Unreal.”

To film an establishing scene of Emerald City they had planned a long Steadicam shot in which the camera operator would step onto a crane and capture a big high and wide view. Unable to walk the set while it was still being constructed, Brooks flew a virtual camera in Unreal and found that that high wide angle wouldn’t work.

“What we needed to do was actually be low and look up at the height of the world around our characters to see the full scope of the scene and to hint at where the story will end. We start out in this incredibly joyous moment and we end the movie up on the highest tower of Emerald City in Elphaba's darkest moment as she starts walking up the staircase towards the setting sun. This would not have been possible without Unreal.”

Camera tests convinced Brooks to shoot on Alexa 65 with Panavision’s lens guru Dan Sasaki her first call when it came to the film’s optics. At that point, in 2021, Sasaki was developing a new set of anamorphics with a 1.3 squeeze.

“I knew that the Panavision anamorphic blue flare would not work with the green and the pink but Dan was able to custom make lenses with a beautiful soft amber flare.”

Wicked may be the only film ever to be shot on these prototype lenses since Panavision’s later release of the Ultra Panatar 2s were altered from Brooks’ unique specifications.

Instead of matching lenses for close-ups, a 65mm became Elphaba’s hero lens while used a 75mm for Glinda. The 2.40 aspect ratio was preferred for framing the central pair.

“For the Ozdust Ballroom Jon wanted Cynthia to walk down the stairs for the very first time and feel what it was like to be there. So we had no rehearsal. Our focus puller  (Lewis Hume) didn’t have a rehearsal, neither did our Steadicam operator or our dimmer board op who has 500 lighting changes to coordinate in this scene. This was really challenging for me. Elphaba is wearing this huge brim hat, the camera is spinning around her at 360 degrees for takes of 10 minutes at a time.

“It all worth it in the end because we got the tear dripping down Cynthia’s face and Ariana wiping it away – that wasn’t in the script. The focus pulling in that moment of the story is just so beautiful. He wasn’t checking the monitor, he was doing such a technical job but intuitively knew when to move in close.”

 Myron Kerstein ACE talks editing Wicked

In his sixth project with Chu, editor Myron Kerstein ACE read early drafts of the scripts having seen the stage production a number of times on Broadway.

“This was not only the biggest films in my career, but I wanted to deliver for Jon, the producer Marc Platt who optioned the book and produced the stage production, the studio who was betting big on us, and of course the fans,” he says.

“The script also had the lyrics written into the pages, so I really tried to absorb every vocal as dialogue in scenes. I had the songs on repeat in the car, which was pretty easy because my kids were fans of the music as well!”

About a year before production started he sat down with Wyatt Smith, editor of musicals including The Little Mermaid, to get a crash course on editing VFX heavy movies.

“Practically every shot was going to have VFX, and I had little to no experiences cutting a film with many, let alone the 2,500 we would end up in the film. He gave me as much info he thought I needed, and that was immensely helpful before I started production. It was a huge learning curve but I was excited to use my instincts in smaller films and apply it to this scale.”

Moving into production, Kerstein also took over the editing of additional storyboards and pre-vis sequences liaising with department heads including Brooks, VFX Supervisor Pablo Hellman, and music supervisor Maggie Rodford.

“Those key department heads would be operating as one unit, flowing back and forth between production and post.”