Alice Brooks, ASC on the cinematography of Wicked

The highly anticipated feature-film adaptation of the Broadway sensation Wicked has arrived. Directed by Jon M. Chu, the musical fantasy is set in the magical kingdom of Oz and follows the unlikely friendship between the misunderstood Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) and the popular Glinda (Ariana Grande). However, their friendship takes a turn after a fateful encounter with the powerful Wizard of Oz, setting them on opposing paths. 

Cinematographer Alice Brooks, ASC reteamed with Chu — her longtime collaborator going back to their student days at the University of Southern California — to help craft a unique look befitting the story and its themes. With support from Panavision’s offices in Woodland Hills and London, Wicked became the first feature to go into production with the prototypes of what would become Ultra Panatar II 1.3x anamorphic lenses. Brooks also carried Ultra Panatar lenses for additional focal lengths; the second unit also used Ultra Panatars. 

In this interview, Brooks discusses journeying across the U.K. to capture the essence of Oz and shares how the careful use of color, combined with the interplay of light and shadow, helped create a stunning and emotional cinematic experience.

Panavision: When did you and Jon M. Chu start talking about Wicked?

Alice Brooks, ASC: It must have been fall 2020 or early 2021 when Jon called me and said, ‘I think our next project's going to be Wicked.’ It was then March 2021 when I spoke to Marc Platt, the movie’s producer, and I knew I had the job — I've been on this movie for over three and a half years at this point. As soon as I got it, Dan Sasaki [Panavision’s senior vice president of optical engineering and lens strategy] was my first phone call.

As you and Jon began discussing the visual style you wanted for the movie, what were your initial ideas?

Brooks: We always start with emotion. Jon is an emotional storyteller, which is important to us. Even within this epic, vast world of Oz, the movie is, at its core, a love story between Elphaba and Glinda. We talked about different themes, including the idea that light and darkness, good and evil, are not as straightforward as they seem. I created a spreadsheet of these themes, visual motifs, and our goals. Jon asked me what my goal was for the movie, and I responded, ‘It would be the greatest love story ever told between these two best friends.’ In thinking of it that way, close-ups became very important.

We definitely wanted Wicked to be our own version of Oz. Alongside all the craftspeople and all his collaborators, Jon kept saying, ‘I want this movie, this world, to look like something no one has ever seen before. I want to create a world that is ours and for it to be a unique experience. So, let’s avoid the obvious choices and make bold ones.’

As the sets started being drawn, the production designer, Nathan Crowley, had the idea of making nature a huge part of the movie’s visual style. Initially, our inspiration came from looking at all these fields of flowers and wheat, standing in a wheat or a barley field in the south of England with big, white, puffy clouds and the sun just streaming in, and saying, ‘Oh, this is so Americana.’ Considering The Wizard of Oz is one of the only American fairy tales, having that sense of Americana was important to us.

How did color play into those conversations during preproduction?

Brooks: I started reading the L. Frank Baum original books, and there's an incredibly rich language of color in almost every paragraph. Color means something throughout. With that in mind, I decided to light different scenes in both movies, parts one and two, with different colors of the rainbow. I used every color of the rainbow, and I picked them very specifically. For example, we use blue in the Ozdust Ballroom, which I consider the heart of the entire movie. It's where these two women fall in love with each other and where their friendship begins — where they finally see each other for the first time.

Jon and I were discussing light, darkness, shadow, and good and evil, and I asked if I could suggest a time of day in the script. He said, 'Of course.' My idea was that the sun would always set for Elphaba and always rise for Glinda. Glinda's the good witch, so the sun is always rising. We meet her in Munchkinland in her bubble as it's landing, and the sun is right behind her early in the morning. She also meets Prince Fiyero [Jonathan Bailey] in the morning. In [the song] 'Popular,' there's a long sunrise following the dark after the Ozdust Ballroom. I think the sunrise is 22 minutes long. It starts with the girls talking in their dorm room and ends when Glinda walks up to her luggage and the morning light encompasses her in pink.

For Elphaba, as she's looking for her power, it's always dark. She meets Fiyero at night. There's a scene in the forest with a cub, which is an eight-minute sunset scene where she sings 'I'm Not That Girl.' In the last hour of the movie, from the end of Wizomania in the Emerald City Square to the beginning of 'Defying Gravity,' there's a long, continuous sunset. Elphaba finally jumps off the Emerald City Tower and finds her power. She discovers she can fly, sings 'Defying Gravity' and flies off into the darkness. I think those were our biggest overarching story visuals that guided a lot of the decisions for camera and lighting.

What were the conversations like during preproduction — with Nathan Crowley and Jon and others — that led to the decision to build the massive sets you ended up using?

Brooks: Early on, we talked about, ‘How do we create this world without relying heavily on bluescreens or virtual production while still having a huge scope?’ Nathan, VFX supervisor Pablo Helman, Jon, me and the whole team decided to try and capture as much as we could on camera. Pablo would take the lead from Nathan and me on set extension. The sets were giant; our Emerald City and Shiz University sets were each the size of four American football fields. Munchkinland wasn't much smaller, it just wasn't rectangular. We also built a barley field with a train station and a functioning train that ran through it.

No place in London could fit these sets, so we ended up renting a turf farm - a farm that grows grass - and installing our sets there. I used Unreal Engine to place the sets based on their height, knowing where the sun would be and where the shadows would fall. We'd start experimenting with different angles to find the ideal solution.

It was the same with the tulip fields. Those were planted in Norfolk, in eastern England. We picked the bulbs and the colors, and we planted nine million of them. We also didn't plant them in the way the tulip farmer would have. Instead, we planted according to the sun's position because we needed the fields to line up perfectly when Glinda's bubble landed. The sun had to be at the right angle because she always had to be backlit by the sun. That was in September [2022], and we weren't shooting until April [2023]. There was a lot of planning and stress around the weather, but it all worked out.

Nathan has designed huge movies, but studios aren’t building these kinds of sets anymore. We all approached it in an old Hollywood way, as if we were shooting Cleopatra or Spartacus. I watched Gone With the Wind the other day, and as I watched Scarlett O'Hara walk down that massive staircase, I thought, ‘Oh, that is a set!’

You mentioned Dan Sasaki was your first phone call when you got the project. What do you remember about your first conversations with him for Wicked?

Brooks: When I called Dan, I couldn't tell him what project I was working on. I just said, ‘We're building this incredible world, and I need to have scope, but there needs to be real intimacy.’ I showed him my look book, and of course, he's just this magical wizard. Even though he’s a scientist and a techie person, he’s also incredibly intuitive. As I started showing him the pictures, he started getting a feeling for the world we were building, even though he had no clue what movie it was.

I probably have 100,000 images on my computer at this point. A lot are color references, contrast references, and just feeling references. I think the words I used to describe the world to him were 'magical,' 'effervescent,' 'light,' 'unique,' and a little bit 'off' and 'weird.'

You ended up using the first prototypes of what would become the Ultra Panatar II lens series. What led you to that decision?

Brooks: We called them ‘Unlimiteds’ [as a nod to the musical’s famed ‘Unlimited’ theme] because they didn’t even have a name at the time, but Dan really developed them into something. The lenses are just so beautiful. They’re a complete dream, just stunning. We didn’t even have a full set of lenses when we made the decision, which was a little scary, but we were committing to these lenses and knew they were going to be amazing.

When I was sharing my look book, Dan said, 'Well, we can design these lenses with any flare color you want,' which was amazing because a blue flare with our green and pink [subjects] was not going to be the right choice for this movie. In the end, we went with an amber flare. We had a flare set and a non-flare set, and some of our lenses had a subtle flare. When we first entered the dorm room, we had two 40mm lenses. The dorm had light fixtures around the room that were the same height as the women, and Cynthia and Ari are also the same height. When they came into the room and circled one another, trying to get a vibe on each other, we'd sometimes move around the room and get this really strange flare. It created this emotional uncertainty in the scene that perfectly illustrated the characters' feelings of not wanting to live together and not being able to figure out what's happening.

I love the imperfections of the lenses, and they weren't obvious. They were very subtle, making our world feel a little different. The 85mm lens had this strange little imperfection on the right side that would appear when light would hit it. During our camera tests, we realized the 65mm lens looked amazing on Cynthia and the 75mm lens looked amazing on Ari. Our matching close-ups were shot on two different lenses, which again just gave us something a little different.

These protoypes have our own special Wicked recipe, and Dan then made changes to the final production lenses. The [prototype lenses’] 1.3x squeeze is much more subtle than the 2x-squeeze anamorphic, like the G Series, which I've shot a lot on, or the C Series. But your edges are still strangely beautiful, which I really like.

What were some of the factors that led you to choose the 2.40:1 aspect ratio?

Brooks: I know shooting the IMAX aspect ratio has become very popular now, but we had these two women who are equals, they're the same height, and they look eye to eye. Putting them in a 2.40:1 frame where they are perfectly divided was really interesting to me. The song ‘What Is This Feeling?’ is a really fun split-screen number where the 2.40:1 frame worked incredibly well. I can't imagine having shot this movie in anything else. Plus, our sets were able to cover most of the 2.40:1 aspect ratio. If we had shot IMAX, we would've had so much VFX set extension at the top of the frame, so I'm glad we didn't have to do that. I'm glad we could get as much as we could in camera.

Wicked also reteamed you and Jon with choreographer Christopher Scott. How has the partnership between the three of you evolved over the years?

Brooks: It’s funny — one day, Jon looked at Chris and me and said, ‘We're standing in the exact same positions as we were on The LXD,’ which was our web series we made for almost no money. Jon said, ‘Even though we're making this big movie, it's kind of the same thing.’ The way we work together hasn’t really changed. Our camera operator, Karsten Jacobsen, was always at dance rehearsal so he could learn the moves, understand what tools we needed, and present ideas. It was the same thing on The LXD — our Steadicam operator would come to dance rehearsals in our little shoebox North Hollywood rehearsal space. So, we haven't really changed that much. It's just a bunch of friends making a movie.

We constantly push each other as artists and storytellers to do our best work. And it comes from all three of us. Chris is always questioning our decisions, which is amazing. As we've gotten older and more open with each other, we've learned to recognize when someone is truly passionate about something. We allow each other to think differently and truly listen to one another. Jon's the director, and obviously he gets to make the final decision, but when we say something, he understands where we're coming from. He loves that we don't always have to agree with each other. One time I questioned him about something, and he said, 'No, I love it.' I questioned him again, and he stuck by his decision. I watched it back and then understood why he loved it. It took a couple of beats to understand, but I was thinking from a different perspective than him, and he allows me to do that.

Even with our editor, Myron [Kerstein]. I'd call him every day after work or go up to editorial because we were shooting five hours of footage a day, and he was watching every single frame. I'd ask him what I could do better, what was and wasn't working. Jon has no ego about that. He wants us to all have that level of open communication.

Do you connect with the editor in that way on all your projects?

Brooks: Well, I do with Myron. Myron started working with Jon on Crazy Rich Asians, which I didn't do. Right after that, we did the series Home Before Dark, and that's when Myron and I started working together. He was editing in Los Angeles, and we were shooting in Vancouver. Then on In the Heights, we were all in New York working, and I'd call him from the cab on the way home and he'd go through everything with me. I think it may have started with him calling because he was excited about something, and then we just started this open dialogue. I asked Jon, ‘Is it okay if Myron and I download every day?’ And he had no problem with it. On Wicked, Myron was cutting on the lot, so I'd run into the edit room or watch some dailies at the end of the day, or we’d talk during my drive home.

What did it mean to you personally to be part of this project with this group of collaborators?

Brooks: Like I said earlier, none of us had ever worked on a movie of this scale before — we all walked into the unknown together. We watched [the stage production] Wicked together in the West End when we got to London. It felt like we were Dorothy, Tin Man, Scarecrow, and Lion with our arms linked together, saying, ‘We don't know what it's going to be. It's going to be scary. There's going to be a lot of risks we have to take, but we're taking these risks because we’re doing something no one else has done. And it's worth going for it.’ Sometimes you fail, and sometimes you succeed, but I think the fact that we were all linked arm-in-arm made all the difference because we had each other's backs.

It feels like a family. We're a unit, a team working hard toward the same goal. Watching each other succeed in each little detail we've chosen has been pretty cool.

Images courtesy of Universal Pictures.