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'Wicked' Director & Cinematographer Break Down the 'Dancing Through Life' Scene

'Wicked' director Jon M. Chu breaks down Jonathan Bailey's 'Dancing Through Life' scene alongside cinematographer Alice Brooks. Jon and Alice provide an elaborate explanation of the specific color plays throughout the scene, building in windows in the "tornado wheel" to get the perfect lighting, careful coordination to find the right timing with all of Jonathan's tricks and so much more.

WICKED is in theaters now, https://www.wickedmovie.com

Director: Funmi Sunmonu
Editor: Philip Anderson; Matthew Colby
Talent: Jon M. Chu and Alice Brooks
Coordinating Producer: Emebeit Beyene and Sydney Malone
Line Producer: Romeeka Powell
Production Manager: Andressa Pelachi
Production Coordinator: Elizabeth Hymes
Associate Director, Talent : Meredith Judkins
Production Assistant: Lily Starck
Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin
Post Production Coordinator: Ian Bryant
Supervising Editor: Doug Larsen
Assistant Editor: Justin Symonds
Special Thanks: Glass Engine

Released on 11/22/2024

Transcript

He jumps down here and he slides on a book.

[upbeat music]

And this again, all in one.

If he trips on this, he had to be so smooth on that.

Freaking amazing.

I love this guy.

And of course, she had to dance it all.

She had to be as good as all the dancers around her,

who were all professional dancers.

And you forget that Ariana Grande is an amazing dancer.

♪ So keep dancing through ♪

Hello, I am Alice Brooks, ASC,

and I am the director of photography for Wicked.

And I'm Jon M. Chu, the director of Wicked.

And this is Notes on a Scene.

[upbeat music]

So the scene we're about to see

is Prince Fierro singing Dancing Through Life.

And there's a moment where

he's just come into the new school.

He's been kicked out of other schools,

but today he's here to say, Hey, guys, loosen up.

You got to cause a little trouble here.

So in the beginning, the dancing is very stiff and there,

but he's gonna loosen their joints up,

and this is where he sort of starts that craziness.

[upbeat music]

So [laughs] that's a fake thing that doesn't actually work.

But this thing, we call this the tornado wheel.

And I don't know if you remember the nuttiness

of the tornado.

We had to convince a lot of people

that it was worth spending this money on a set that spun.

So all these things spin in different directions

and that it wouldn't be dangerous

because the weird thing about this one is

these things are locked in.

So if you get caught in between,

your head could get chopped off.

So try having that conversation with the insurance company.

And it was so much choreography to just figure out

how can the camera move through these ladders

and how can we get dynamic shots?

And we didn't have the entire tornado wheel

for a really long time.

We had to do a lot of research and development to figure out

how we were gonna make this work.

And shout out to many departments

that had to make this happen.

You had engineers in the back here behind these walls

trying to make sure that this thing worked right

and that they weren't going too fast or too slow

because gravity had played such a big role

on how these dancers could work on it.

Credit to costume designer Paul Tazewell,

of creating outfits and shoes

that they could actually work in this space

because he had to be able to move, and that's not easy.

And then when they're walking on all these books and stuff.

So these shoes had to be just right

and they're doing literally flips on this,

credit to Christopher Scott, our choreographer

who had to figure all this out.

My job's easy, I just get to say the ideas

and he figures it out.

And then Nathan Crowley designed this wheel

and electric team and I had to actually work with Nathan

to build in lighting all around here and here and here.

We built in actual windows so that we would be able to see

our dancers in up here and up here.

And then we decided to throw two huge lights,

224 light DENOs back there to illuminate the space.

[Jon] The Johnny Bailey, look at that hair.

♪ Dancing through life ♪

♪ Swaying and sweeping ♪

He's actually doing all of this.

And this was one of the trickiest shots to get,

just to get the timing of him landing.

And we had all these, all these wheels spinning

and we had to very carefully coordinate it.

So we worked over and over and over again

with Chris Scott to find the timing

of the camera with what Jonathan Bailey was gonna be doing.

And this is all, I mean you can see

how coordinated this has to be.

You can see those things moving.

This guy has to slide all the way down,

the camera's moving in coordination, so you don't know

where the center of gravity is.

That's something that we always played in the beginning

with this, relationship with gravity.

That Elphaba had a very specific relationship

with gravity.

So we want to sort of physicalize it in this

that he was sort of playing with that idea,

just not in a magical power way.

And of course these are moving

and Chris Scott had to have dancers

but also parkours who could actually do this

in the tornado wheel itself.

At some point they called this the hamster wheel.

Oh that's right, the hamster wheel.

And I hated that.

I'm like, can we not call it a hamster wheel?

So I changed it to the tornado wheel,

but people keep calling it the hamster wheel.

And in these colors, these blue colors,

Alice worked very closely with Paul

to figure out is this blue or is this green

or is this sea green or what the heck is it?

So these were very delicate.

They, we didn't wanna step on Jonathan's blue

and it couldn't be green 'cause I would step on Elphaba.

So all the color plays very specific in here.

And color is a huge theme throughout

the original Wizard of Oz books.

And we made sure we infused that beautiful richness

in throughout our movie and made our own version

of what technicolor was.

And you think these are real books,

but they're actually not, it's just a facade.

Now that said, we did have some slots

that were real books so they could grab them

and do things like that.

And of course Nathan Crowley, production designer,

built this beautiful.

Now everything in,

sure we wanted to be circular and very flowy in that

because Elphaba will give the edges to the circles.

So he designed this library in this beautiful way

that let a lot of natural light

and that's what I love about Alice

is that it's all about natural light

and things that people would be scared of,

like backlighting is actually what I love about her stuff.

That it feels like we're in a place, we're not on a set.

And this set was actually fire lane to fire lane

or wall to wall of our sound stage.

And from floor to ceiling, 45 feet tall

to the top of the domes, the center dome is the highest.

That was almost 45 feet high.

The set is 185 feet long by 145 feet wide.

And we lit it with 495 lights.

So it is an incredibly large space

and it was really, really, really fun to do.

And I have no idea that that was happening.

I just show up and like, Cool, hamster wheel.

I mean tornado wheel.

One shot, the whole thing.

Everyone had to be right on for this.

Chris Scott was there this day

because I think I was having a baby at that moment.

You were having a baby.

♪ Those who don't try ♪

♪ Never look foolish ♪

This is one of the reasons I worked so closely

with Paul Tazewell figuring out the color of everything.

Because originally there were a couple of other

of our characters, Pfannee and Shenshen were also in pink.

And John and I realized we wanted Glinda

just to be in this sort of beautiful butterfly

of blue around her.

And she was the center of that butterfly

and she was in pink.

And look at this costume, I mean it's so fun,

it's so great.

These oranges pop and these things

and even the logo itself,

I mean how many logos that we went through

to end up on this Shiz logo that I love so much.

All these buttons. And all the buttons.

I mean buttons were a thing on this.

And knitting. Every detail.

Every detail, every detail on this movie,

there's a line in the heights

that actually says it's the little details

that tell the world who we are.

In this movie, we were creating the world of Oz.

And every single little detail

by every single craftsperson is so incredibly specific.

And all those details created the world of Oz.

[Jon] And look at this hair and makeup.

Oh yeah, of course Francis and hair and makeup.

Come on, come on.

Everyone had to be individual.

No one could just come in and you just roll into something.

Everything had to have individual personality.

And so yeah, it takes an army again to do this.

And every book had very specific Ozian titles.

That was incredible.

♪ Mindless and careless ♪

[Jon] We actually played a lot with this scene

with an iPhone to figure out how to move the camera.

It was probably one of the hardest shots

to get in the whole movie.

And right here you'll see parkour artists

doing flips and things like that.

Of course John and Bailey had to get in there.

And I love this part.

This was a moment that Chris and his team came up with.

But I love that moment just feels so...

Like what it feels like to be young and cool in Oz.

And you couldn't, I couldn't dictate that,

that just happened from the dancers.

Every dancer has their own personality.

So when they did that, I was like, yes.

And we shot this so many times

because I kind of just liked the moment

and I just wanted to live it over and over.

It was so joyous that moment, everyone on set,

the whole crew was just, we were charmed by Jonathan Bailey.

It was, he was charming not only the Shiz students

but everyone behind the camera as well.

And you can see their chemistry right there.

They're like having so much fun.

I mean you hear, there's a real laugh from Ari in a second

when he lifts her up, she's really scared

like where is he gonna put her?

'Cause he's sort of all over the place too

when he was lifting her.

These again, parkour beautiful artists.

And then this moment of course like everyone's on fire here.

This is one of our hardest shots, we'll see here.

This one was incredibly hard.

So that is one single take that pushes all the way in here.

If you go back and this dancer could do it four times.

It's an incredibly hard move.

And Chris Scott came up to me, he's like,

We have four shots at this.

We had an amazing, amazing steady cam operator

who was with us all through prep,

who went to the dance rehearsals,

learned every piece of choreography,

just incredibly dedicated to telling this story.

And this, he knew he had four takes

because the dancer could do this four times

without injuring themselves.

Yeah, it's such a huge thing.

I mean the camera doesn't cut when he does that flip.

So he's jumping at extreme heights

And he's moving through this wheel that is spinning.

The dancer has to land his flip.

It's a steady cam shot where we rotate the camera fully.

This is not a cut, he's actually going

into a whole bunch of dancers on the other side over there.

Again, that lighting from here,

this back lighting is just so beautiful.

You get to see the tornado wheel here.

And I love when people, when they're sitting on here,

'cause their silhouettes actually feel like in, you know,

an old Broadway musical or something,

whether it's like a Newsies or something like that.

This is actually our first set that we built.

So I remember going into this in prep

and Nathan was already building

and we walked in there like, holy crap,

this is just the library we're building this for?

John is just so charming.

And Boq played by Ethan Slater.

Ari is so cute there.

So we have this very theatrical show that we want

to make sure we honor, which is the stage show of Wicked.

And throughout this movie, I had this idea

to incorporate the sun as our spotlight.

And so the sun becomes our lighting cues

throughout the movie.

We've got the sun coming through here

and we've got the sun coming from back here

that creates this beautiful light that just fills the space.

This whole space was very challenging to light

because it was so huge.

But luckily we had the Unreal Engine,

so we lit everything in the computer first

and then we lit it in reality.

But that Unreal Engine got to show me certain lights

that we were about to hang, weren't gonna work

for this sort of beautiful sunlit glow.

But what I love about this shot is it keeps going

and you're gonna see it grow bigger and bigger and bigger.

And you'll get the sense of why building

was something we really needed to do.

We needed to build and keep these sets physical,

otherwise we couldn't riff and find moments like this.

You'll see him in a second.

He jumps down here and he slides on a book.

Maybe I'll just slide right in the front.

And this again, all in one.

If he trips on this, he had to be so smooth on that.

This guy freaking amazing.

I love this guy.

And of course she had to dance at all.

She had to be as good as all the dancers around her

who were all professional dancers.

And you forget that Ariana Grande is an amazing dancer

and she can, she has such good muscle memory.

So all of this together was just one of those shots

that you're like, Oh, this is gonna be fun to shoot.

♪ Come on follow me ♪

♪ You'll be happy to be there ♪

Okay, so before we get back into it,

I just wanna draw your attention to this one dancer.

I mean they're all amazing,

but this one I'm just like fascinated by

and in the edit, I couldn't stop watching,

but if you watch over here, this guy,

he has to juggle three books so he can't mess up.

Everyone can be doing their job,

but if he messes up, we're all screwed.

So there he is, he's juggling books,

real books, that is not CG, he's really juggling.

Do you see that right over there?

And then watch his next move.

He has to run this way.

Here he goes, he has to run this way.

Jump on here, he has to hit this area.

This is the only way we're gonna see him

and he has to do this over and over again.

Let's see if he does it.

Whoa. Oh my g-

Amazing. I mean, that space,

that's insane.

He's so high in the air.

This guy doesn't have...

There's no like springboard back there.

There's no trampoline.

He's just doing it, and he'd do that over and over again.

He could never mess up

because if he messed up, then the whole shot was done.

This scene, I can't believe we started Wicked three

and a half years ago and now we are here

about to see our movie premiere.

That's crazy.

I'm about to have my fifth child,

but the third one just during Wicked.

I've had three kids just working on Wicked.

So that's a whole thing. It's a lot of babies.

And here's Bowen Yang and he's awesome in this.

And Bronwyn here, you can't see her here but there she is.

They all had to learn because he was going back and forth

from New York that they had to learn this choreography

on video and then we had to just throw them in.

They kill it.

♪ It's just life ♪

I hope that when people come see Wicked,

they get this giant cinematic experience.

Something when I used to watch movies as a kid,

that I felt something at the level of Cleopatra

and Ben-Hur where things are physical and real

and we have big musical numbers,

but at the end of the day that it's intimate

that you fall in love with these girls

'cause in the end of the day, it is about these girls.

Stupid is what we always said on the day.

And that you fall in love with this relationship

and you get encouraged that hard things aren't a bad thing.

That we're all good, we're all wicked,

and we all have to forgive each other

and give each other grace.

But the only way out is through.

I think that's a theme of our time and a moment

that I think that this movie shows.

John asked me very early on in prep

what my goal was for the movie,

and I said that it would be the greatest,

most beautiful love story between these two best friends.

And you watch the movie and the two women just fill

the space with joy and love and laughter and emotion

and friendship.

And I am so excited for people to get to see this.

♪ It's just life ♪

♪ So keep dancing through ♪

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