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“Wicked” in 65 mm with ALEXA 65

Alice Brooks ASC gives a detailed interview on how emotional cues dictated technical choices for Jon M. Chu’s movie adaptation of the hit musical.

Jan. 6, 2025

Director Jon M. Chu first met cinematographer Alice Brooks ASC at USC Film School, where he asked her to shoot his short film, a musical called “When the Kids Are Away.” Since then, they have cemented their working relationship, friendship, and mutual love of musicals on projects including “The Legion of Extraordinary Dancers” for Hulu, as well as “In the Heights.” Their latest collaboration “Wicked” is a towering achievement of musical cinema, with incredible live singing performances by Ariana Grande as Glinda and Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba. After testing multiple large-format cameras, Brooks opted for the even larger 65 mm format and the ALEXA 65 camera, coupled with Panavision lenses. She sat down with ARRI Rental to share the story of her journey on the film.

“Wicked” is set in a fantasy world that was first seen by movie audiences in Technicolor back in 1939. How did you set about defining your own visual approach, 85 years later?

When Jon began talking to me about the project and we started breaking down the script, we spoke about creating a version of Oz that no one had ever seen before. The look was going to be completely our own, but we did want to make an old-style Hollywood movie with massive sets. We shot on 17 sound stages where our sets went from fire lane to fire lane, and from the floor all the way to the ceiling. Some of our sets were almost 200 feet wide and two of our backlots were each the size of four American football fields. There was always this desire to reference the golden era of cinema and have real, tangible spaces to shoot in, and not just do it in a bluescreen world.

I read the original L. Frank Baum books and color is so important; practically every paragraph has a color description, because color is symbolism in Oz. And the poetic way Baum describes color is just magnificent. So, I let that marinate in me as Jon and I started to figure out what our own version of Technicolor would be here in 2024 instead of 1939. We wanted something old Hollywood, but also completely contemporary as well.

What was behind your decision to shoot with ALEXA 65 and how did the 65 mm format feed into your look?

As soon as I knew I was doing this movie, Jon and I created a shared photo album that we kept populating with ideas. Eventually it grew to include the production designer Nathan Crowley, costume designer Paul Tazewell, and choreographer Christopher Scott, but at the beginning it was just Jon and I creating a look book of our favorite references for lighting, color, mood, and emotion. Jon is a completely emotional storyteller and that is the first thing we start with. We don't start with technical stuff at all; we talk about humanity and emotions and we break down a script by giving each scene a one-word emotional description, like yearning, loneliness, power, friendship, or love. Or if not one word, then an emotional idea, like what does it feel like to be seen? Every single technical decision we make comes out of those descriptions.

Initially we were going to shoot on large format and Dan Sasaki at Panavision was developing some special anamorphic lenses for us. At one point we were testing all these different large-format cameras next to each other: a Sony Venice, a Red camera, the ALEXA Mini LF, and I can’t remember what else. At the last minute I said let’s test the ALEXA 65, too. When Jon and I projected the tests, the anamorphic lenses didn't even cover the 65 mm sensor, but we still looked at each other and said, okay, we're shooting ALEXA 65. We wanted to capture the vastness of Oz, but really the heart of this movie is the close-ups between these two women, and we knew we could get that with the ALEXA 65. Luckily, the movie got pushed by six months, which gave Dan time to make the lenses work for 65 mm.

Balancing skin tones is one thing, but how did you harmonize Elphaba’s green skin tone with that of Glinda’s more iridescent look?

I mean, it was a huge challenge. We had 18 weeks of prep in London and I started working with Frances Hannon, the makeup, hair and prosthectic designer, on week two. The problem was that I couldn't light the green skin in every scenario. It looked great under cool lights, but not under warm lights because she looked gray. And then how do you balance that with someone on the opposite color spectrum, who is pink all the time?

We were at the point of deciding whether to do the green skin with VFX or makeup when Frances found a green paint that is only made in Canada and contains neon. It changed the world for me because the green worked like skin tone, it reacted like real skin and suddenly it wasn't makeup. It took the light in beautiful ways and I could use any color temperature on her, shaping the light the way I normally would. I still had to practice and learn how to balance these two women together, but somehow the combination of the ALEXA 65 and this neon paint just worked perfectly. Frances also gave Glinda’s skin a reflective quality, which helped me balance the color and the lighting as well.

Beyond makeup, how closely were you working with other departments like production design and costumes?

We were testing with every department, every week of prep. Another challenge was that not only is Elphaba green, but she’s also wearing black and has a black hat. Costume designer Paul Tazewell was working so hard, taking hundreds of hours to pleat her dresses, so you don't want that to just fall into complete blackness. You want to see all the detail these craftspeople are creating. There’s a line in the movie “In the Heights” that Jon and I did that says, “Little details that tell the world we are not invisible,” and that’s what this movie is. All these tiny details create the world of Oz when you put them together. It’s Paul's costume design, it's production designer Nathan Crowley’s detailed sets and the hand painting and hand carving on the set walls. It’s the lighting team doing thousands and thousands of lighting cues to carve out the space and create this undulating light that you can't necessarily see, but you feel.

An example is the Ozdust Ballroom set, which was made out of clear resin so we could backlight it any color we wanted. The decision of how to light it was critical because the Ozdust Ballroom is the heart of the movie. When Jon asked me what my goal was for this film, I said that it would be the greatest, most beautiful love story ever told between these two women, these two best friends. All of my technical decisions came from asking myself, how do we tell this love story? How do we make them feel connected? When Elphaba goes into the Ozdust I wanted Cynthia to pop out of the space in a different light than we had ever seen her in, because it's the first time Glinda and Elphaba actually connect, so that dictated the color choice for the walls. 

How did you ensure that the choreography of camerawork and dancing worked together seamlessly in that ballroom?

I pressed production to let me have the Steadicam operator Karsten Jacobsen for 10 weeks of prep. The way choreographer Christopher Scott, Jon M. Chu and I usually work on a musical shoot is we each go into the dance rehearsals to watch and film with our iPhones, and then Jon cuts all the footage together. I realized that because “Wicked” was such a long schedule, 155 shooting days, our camera operator needed to be part of that process too. He needed to learn the choreography so that on the day, everything would work seamlessly, and the Ozdust Ballroom was one of those days. Shooting Elphaba coming down the stairs and swirling around her ended up being about a 10-minute take, with this beautiful choreography between camera, lighting, focus, dancing and Cynthia Erivo. Karsten being in rehearsals was essential, especially because Jon wanted to start with a take in close-up, so we’d see Cynthia feeling the emotion of everyone watching her the first time she enters the space.

The complexity of the sets meant that we had to think about camera placement long in advance. The “Dancing Through Life” sequence in the spinning wheel in the library took weeks and weeks of R&D figuring out how to get our camera through that space. People have asked me if that was VFX, but it wasn’t; it was a complete practical working set with three spinning wheels. I had to work with the production designer Nathan Crowley to build windows into the set because there was originally just one at the back of the wheel and no place for me to light from. We created gaps in the wheels with windows in them, which also gave me camera positions—little ports to be able to capture side angles of the wheel. 

Other than making technical decisions based on the emotional core of each sequence, did you have any guiding principles that helped shape your lighting scheme?

All of the departments talked a lot about grounding this movie in nature and Elphaba's relationship with nature and with gravity. I started to think about my lighting cues coming from nature instead of being theatrical, and I realized that the sun could become our spotlight and define our lighting cues. I had this idea that the sun would always set for Elphaba and rise for Glinda. When you see Glinda for the first time she’s in her bubble, backlit with beautiful early morning sunlight in the tulip fields of Munchkinland. And then the performance of Glinda’s song “Popular” is a 20-minute sunrise from pre-dawn while the women are sitting on a bed talking, all the way through to the end of the song when she walks up the staircase and a pink sunrise is all around her.

With Elphaba, we had a very long sunset sequence where she and Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey) come to the forest after they've rescued the cub. The forest studio set was massive, with real plants and sunlight that kept them alive for months and months. It was so deep that I was able to put two huge Dinos in the back on a lift and we added smoke and the light drops in the background throughout the number as if the sun is setting. The color temperature also shifts all through the scene and the ALEXA 65 did a brilliant job of tracking that. And then in some shots, visual effects didn't even need to paint out any of the light to put the sun there. It all just worked with our light there in the background behind smoke as the sun is setting. 

The Wizomania sequence was another long sunset scene for Elphaba. That Emerald City backlot set was built outside and was also huge. The only way to film it was to shoot night-for-evening because we were outside, so I needed darkness to create the light. We had Aquabat LED fixtures in 40-by-40 frames on construction cranes, creating this beautiful ambient light that I think ended up at a color temperature of around 4500 K. Then we had Dinos and Studio T12s placed all over, even in shot, because I wanted the sun to be reflecting off different surfaces as it was setting around Emerald City.

It would have been great if we’d had the much smaller ALEXA 265 available in time for this film, given all of your dynamic camerawork.

I know—I haven’t been able to see the 265 yet, but I’m sure it would have helped. We had one particular crane shot where the camera is spinning and you don't know which way is up or down. A parkour dancer flips out of a spinning library wheel and the camera has to land the move with the dancer in frame the whole time and then start pushing into Jonathan Bailey dancing on a cart. We only had four chances because the parkour dancer would hurt himself if he did it more than four times. It was pretty hard to go upside down and then land a perfect horizon without any bump, because of the weight of the ALEXA 65 and the M7 head, but we got it on the fourth take, luckily.