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.