How ‘Wicked’ Built Immersive Real-Life Sets, From Shiz To Emerald City

Hi, I'm Nathan Crowley, I'm a production designer.

You might have seen my work on films like Interstellar,

Dark Knight, Westworld.

And today, we're gonna talk about Wicked,

and the design of Oz.

[bright orchestral music]

Let's talk about Munchkinland.

The first thing for me is like, okay, who are they?

How can that influence the design?

If they're farmers, what do they farm?

And I proposed that we grow 9 million tulips

in Eastern England.

And when you see a person run through them across a diagonal

and you've got a camera up here, it's all real,

it's all in camera.

When I came to this project, my methodology is to try

and do as much practically as possible.

And the reason I was attracted to this

is because it's pure fantasy,

and which has traditionally recently been done with CGI.

It's very difficult to talk to the studio

in a room of producers

about going into the farming business.

Naturally, they wanted to do them with CGI.

But they really wanted to know

if I could guarantee the flowers would succeed,

which of course you can't do.

But on Interstellar, I grew 500 acres of corn

far north in Canada,

where the weather wasn't necessarily correct

for corn growing, but it grew, it worked.

So, I knew it could be done,

and I knew if I found the right farmer,

like we had on Interstellar, we could make this work.

So we, along with the help of a farmer called Mark

and our location manager, Adam, we planted 9 million tulips.

When I talk about practical filmmaking,

the kind of things you learn can benefit and influence you.

The journey to here is, they plant tulips at this size

and then after the first harvest, they get to that size,

and they actually chop the heads off the tulips

and let the energy go into the bulb and the flower grows,

and then they harvest the bulbs, not the flowers.

So, that's why you get tulip festivals

because the first round you get all these tulip heads.

So, to me, learning this process with the farmers,

with the locals, means that it's like,

Oh great, I can then use them in 'Munchkinland.'

The other things you learn when you do things practically

is these bulbs don't bloom at the same time as these ones.

So, you have to time out when you shoot it, perfectly.

So, but it's an adventure.

Here's where the CGI and visual face come in.

It's like we've gotta put a village into this space.

How do we do that?

And, Jon, actually was the one who came with the idea

that you actually sink the village into this landscape.

Maybe you just see a few little roofs poking up,

that's the CGI element.

And then as they run towards this village,

it suddenly sinks into the ground.

So, as they run from this landscape here, they appear here,

and we can continue on running through the tulips.

Here's a yellow brick road, which they can join,

and run into the village.

And that is the link.

I've got a great mixture here of imagery, both real CGI,

and that's where we started.

So, this is the concept illustration for Shiz.

I needed to put it near enough

that when Elphaba stands on a cliff edge

and sings The Wizard and I,

we can look out over this vast impossible desert.

So, we went down to the south of England.

This is actually near Bournemouth,

this is actually in Sussex.

So, we found all these cliff edges and material,

and then really had to sort of decide how Shiz would sit,

the arrival at Shiz.

Let's talk about that for a second.

We can't use cars because Oz doesn't have cars.

We can't use hot air balloons to arrive there

because that belongs to the wizard.

Can't use the train because that belongs to the wizard also.

We can't use horse and cart because the animals are free.

Really, we left with waterways and boats, so that's fine.

We know in the south of England, near these cliffs,

there's a beautiful winding river

called the Seven Sisters, and it's landlocked,

so it means we could put boats on it

and it doesn't have current and it doesn't flow.

So, this is great news for filming.

But the problem it raised was,

I needed to put the set in a huge water tank

with enough tank that I could take the boat through the arch

and introduce Shiz to the audience.

This is a plan of the backlot build.

This area here, all of this is a huge water tank.

The weight of water pushing against those tank walls

is immense.

We actually built more water tank

as the water tank went through here

to the other side of the arch here,

and then we built a sort of reservoir over here.

So, when you're in a boat coming this way,

you would sail in.

So, you put the camera boat behind them

and you follow them in, push through that arch

and introduce Shiz, which was key for me.

And then this is all physical.

Here's the problem.

I've got Glinda arriving here, full of luggage.

I had five other boats and they've all got sails.

So, I've gotta sail into here, land at the dock seamlessly,

and get off.

And we went to Prague to a boat builder,

to build us the big boats.

We originally thought we'd put them on cables and pull them

because they were pretty stable.

We then needed to change the angle,

so we ended up putting men in green suits,

which visual effects will take out, pushing those boats.

And once again, here's the joy of it.

With CGI, that's what we should be doing, in my opinion.

Everything is real

and we take out the people in green suits.

So, we take things out rather than add them.

So, now we're into the problem of,

we got plus four feet of water,

we need to land here at the dock side.

So, you're at plus five.

Then I need to go up to the steps of the courtyard,

which means I've got another 10 feet here.

And then I need to build the courtyard here,

which is 35 feet.

So, you start adding up this and you're into 50 plus feet,

which is pretty high for a set.

It's why you might ask, why did I build that

as part of this?

Is because I don't wanna cut from here to here.

In practical filmmaking terms,

I wanna come in with characters into the inner courtyard

because this is the transition space to Dr. Dillamond's,

to the dining room.

And this over here is the library.

So, it's extremely important to try and put these together.

So, when we do scenes looking this way,

this acts as the backing, and it's practical and it's real.

I don't need CGI 'cause I've got real physical backings

to a certain height.

So, that means I can do transition shots,

which in cinema is essential.

If you want to feel the size of the world

or the size of the space,

you need to spend a moment showing some journeys.

But let's talk about the architecture.

This place was a seat of learning,

it was an ancient establishment for Oz.

And there's lots of pitfalls in designing an ancient school.

And we've seen them, you've got Hogwarts,

you've got Oxford Cambridge, you know, Harvard,

all these dark stone sort of gothicky, medieval type places.

And this place, you know, Jon Chu was very,

he was very important

that this is where everyone wants to go,

and it's a joyous place.

And when you go into it,

it has to be one of the most amazing places in Oz.

So, I knew I had to be light,

I knew I had to be colorful again,

I knew I had to be wondrous.

So, it was early on that I decided

I'd take all my favorite old architecture.

So, Venetian staircases, onion domes, gothic rooftops,

balconies from Venice.

I mean there's Moorish architecture from Granada in here.

There's, you know, it's this Indian stuff that, you know,

the Pink Palace in India, blue tiles from Portugal.

I wanted to combine these all, and it was like,

can I actually combine them in a way

that you believe they should all fit?

Roxy, my great art director, spent many months

trying to fit this all together to create this image.

So, she started to come up with ideas.

We should take the Italianesque towers

and make them out of wood, change the materialities.

They're familiar but yet new.

And in that way, the idea that we could put the audience

into a place that was sort of familiar but yet magical,

was the task.

If you watch films and you have a sort of nostalgia

to something you see, then you accept it.

So, it allows the audience to be part of it.

And I was really, really trying to push that idea

into this set.

And let's talk about what the build was,

because here is the build on the backlot,

which is by far the largest set I've ever built.

I challenged my construction team of 20 years

who I knew were up for the job because they are amazing.

So, you can see the work,

you can see where the tank is here, and you can see,

you know, we have to tank it, we have to concrete it,

we have to then put liners in.

You know, we've got heavy equipment running,

you know, this is the only access.

So, once I put the tank liners in,

I couldn't come in this way,

so we would then leave this set part out

and we'd use huge grains to lift machinery into this area

so we could finish this facade.

And this is why we've got this immense scaffolding ring,

to protect it.

I haven't come across any other construction team

that can do this.

So here, I'm going up to 50 foot,

actually, I think it was like 52 feet at this point.

And the higher I got, the more in camera we could get.

And you know what happens,

as the sun comes onto this front facade,

you get all the colors and the detail,

and so you understand what the light is doing,

so you're not making it up.

So, when you go up here with CGI,

the information is already down here

'cause I've gone high enough

that this is a repeat of detail.

So, this is the interior of the library that we designed.

This set introduces Fiyero, dances through life.

And so, he is this sort of,

the coolest character, everyone wants to meet him.

So we thought, well, maybe we should give him

something wondrous to do in his first introduction.

So, if you've seen the Royal Wedding with Fred Astaire,

you've seen the room that rotates,

and he dances on the walls and the ceiling,

and it's just wondrous.

I've said to Jon, why don't we make circular bookshelves?

What if they rotated all in different directions?

So, we could have him introduce dancing through life

on these rotating circular bookcases,

and then the ladders would work independently.

So, at some point, when you look this way,

they would line up and create a Z, which is Oz.

So, this is a shot that Jon Chu sent me

of the dancers with the backlit window,

preparing to do a rehearsal on the ladders

and the three rotating drums.

So, the way we've done things in the past is,

I give a phone call model to what the set is

and how I'd like the drums to work, to Paul Cobalt,

who ran special effects.

And with his engineers, he'd go away and make a mockup,

which is a, you know, 11 times smaller

than the full size one, with spinning drums and ladders.

He would make that out metal and mechanize it

to figure out all the movements, all the joints,

all the dangers.

And so, once we ironed out all those movements

on the mockup, that had to be a working physical model.

Paul and his team could then

start to roll the giant steel bands

that would hold the bookshelves.

And beyond the set there,

are these sort of giant skateboard wheels

that sort of move this thing around and back and forth.

And so, here we have the soundstage set

of Elphaba's and Belinda's dorm room,

and we have a large number in here called, Popular.

And it's very difficult to stage and make interesting

a song number in one room.

So, the challenge of this set was to create enough movement

in the architecture to keep interest.

And I'd been scouting the Brighton Pavilion.

Brighton Pavilion was built in the early 1800s

before Queen Victoria took the throne.

So, by the prince regent, who was the son of George III,

he built this sort of Taj Mahal looking palace

down on the south coast, that is now a museum,

but it's remarkable piece of architecture

and it's still standing.

And so, I went down there

because it was probably one of the few places in England

that I felt was Ozian.

'Cause it wasn't just Indian,

it was a mix of Chinese architecture, Indian architecture,

that was a way into what Shiz was gonna become.

And I'd been into one of the giant onion domes

and I'd noticed these windows,

and it occurred to me these were very Shizzy and Ozian.

And so, we've built these windows all over the set,

and you'll see all these sort of

what looks like plaster moldings in the ceiling here,

'cause we had a full ceiling,

but everything would come apart to, for lighting and camera.

So, these actually hide all the seams.

So, it was a giant sort of orange slice of a ceiling.

So, you could pull out all of that bit,

leave this wall in here, you could pull out these windows

'cause the camera had to get into this space

to film the number.

So here, we have the concept illustration

of the Emerald City.

The Wizard of Oz is an American fairytale.

And so, I really needed to have a sort of slice of Americana

in the film.

And I was looking back at the White City in Chicago

has built the great exhibition.

And if we look back at the White City in Chicago,

it was a time of, you know, electricity,

it was the time of the future.

It was a palace, they built.

They built this incredible place, Burnham, Sullivan,

and all the architects that were involved.

Everyone wanted to go there,

millions of people wanted to go there.

But it was, ironically,

'cause they had to go so quickly with the White City,

they had to build it all with plaster and wood

and not in stone.

There were only a couple of buildings that were in stone.

So, it was an illusion as well,

which I think also relates to our character, the wizard.

Everything is an illusion.

Here's the backlog.

You can see the inspiration from the 1893 worlds exhibition.

And what I love about this is Sullivan's great arch

that he built, was actually the transportation building.

So, I love the fact we built an Ozian train

in the transportation arch.

By the time we got to Emerald City,

was beginning to run out of money.

So, I had to reuse everything I had.

And then you can see how we were doing it.

We were gonna sculpt and mold all these tiles

that we could then use on every surface of the backlot.

There's some here, the roof of this isn't just flat,

it's got texture.

And so, when the light hits it, it moves,

so you, it feels like it has depth.

So, it's very important to avoid flat walls in backlots.

So, this is the second part of the Emerald City backlot,

which is Wizomania, which is behind this arch.

And the front gates or doorway of the wizard's palace.

You can see the multi-use of Emerald City tiles

going on here.

So, every surface I really wanted to cover,

so there was interest everywhere.

But these columns, you'll see 'em in the Great Hall,

I really wanted to reuse every piece of architecture

I had made for the interior sets, on the palace.

Here, we have the great halls.

And really, this is a room of intimidation

before you meet the wizard.

I really wanted to play with scale here.

So, one of the first things I looked at

as these sort of giant, giant windows

that sort of, again, have enormous depth and step in.

And definitely I was influenced by people like Carlo Scarpa

with this kind of his sort of love of circles

in his concrete architecture.

Here's one of my window, this is a shot Jon Chu took on set,

and it really should just gives you the scale

of my Ozian windows, and here's our wonderful camera crew.

And so, you can see the distances and depth.

And here are the columns.

Now, the reason I added the columns,

and this is because I really wanted

to make the room feel enormous.

So, as you walk down here,

the columns force you into a longer perspective

even though the room is wider.

I need to talk about art direction.

So here, you have the building of this great hall,

and this is also why I like to do things practically.

There's art direction and art directors.

You have to manipulate the set and change it

so it becomes something better than the concept

to the finished product.

It's like a piece of sculpture,

you must see it and change it and analyze it.

We initially painted everything green,

and I remember being with my head painter saying,

wow, this looks terrible.

So, now one thing you'll note here is you are seeing navies,

you're seeing orange gold, you are seeing bronze,

you're seeing many colors.

And so, again, I'm trying to create definition

so you understand it, because I needed to break it up,

it couldn't just have green.

So, you'll see that although the overall image is green,

there are many colors in the Emerald City.

And now we've left the great hall

and we've gone into the wizard's throne room.

The main feature is the wizard's head,

which is a theme in all the films and in Wicked.

Firstly, I wanted to puppeteer ahead mechanically,

and I knew Paul Cobalt and his special effects team

could do it, 'cause he'd done flying miniatures,

you know, Heinkels for me on Dunkirk's.

I knew he was a talented group of people,

and he had a puppeteer with him.

And so, this is a working practical puppeteered head

up here.

This is all in camera, there's no digital work here.

This is actually behind the scenes here,

is this giant pivot arm attached to the ceiling,

so we could lower and raise the head and push it in

because it has to appear somehow.

You can't just open the curtains,

it has to be more dramatic than that.

[dramatic music] [indistinct]

It's 15 foot of head puppeteered,

but then you are eight feet off the ground here,

and then the arm goes all the way up to 40 feet.

So, the mechanics of it were, you know, complicated.

And then, really, this, I'd been to the deer beacon

to see a lot of string art.

And it occurred to me that we should,

instead of making a traditional theater curtain,

we should do it out of these layers of string,

which would then become velvet curtain pieces.

And we'd do this huge depth for about 20 feet

worth of different colored greens,

going from sort of green to yellows to blues.

You know, there are all kinds of people behind the scenes

pulling on little wires to open up the curtain,

so the puppeteer wouldn't,

his face expressions wouldn't get stuck.

So, and then the big movement of the head

was done by the hydraulic guys at the back.

It was like a stage show

that we had to achieve every single take.

Here, we have the concept of the map room.

Once we get past the wizard's puppeteer head

and he comes out and he greets Elphaba and Glinda,

he then shows them his map room.

And originally it was just a separate set, and I thought,

well, it'd be lovely to do a map room sort of mural

or something that was part of the throne room.

And then it was like,

well, we could also do an illusion here

'cause the wizard's an illusionist.

So, you walk up thinking it's a painting,

and then it lights up and he actually steps over into it.

So, it's a three dimensional map of Oz.

And Jon was in love with that and he just says,

Yeah, let's step into it.

My sort of inspiration is when I was on Dunkirk,

the film Dunkirk, we were filming in Dunkirk.

And we'd have Sundays off,

there wasn't a ton to do in Dunkirk,

so I used to go to the art museum.

It was about the history of Dunkirk

and the shipping and the ports.

And someone had made these sort of historical vignettes

in 3D, they were only four inches deep, deep,

but everything was forced down.

So, the perspectives were painted in force.

So, when you stood up in front of them,

it looked like they went off like a real model,

but actually they were shallow.

So, that sort of fascinated me

and that really gave me the inspiration for this,

how we might achieve this.

So, it occurred to me that we could do

a sort of forced perspective map,

a real miniature with a sky in three dimensions.

And now this was quite an undertaking,

and you need a bit of optimism for it.

But I've built lots of miniatures,

so I knew we could get some great people

to build the miniatures.

But here, the horizon, I have a wonderful scenic painter

called David Packard, who can pretty much paint anything.

And so, you know, this is an egg shape.

So, you know, the section of it is actually like that.

There's the skyline, and this would be a forced perspective.

So, the clouds would get bigger and bigger,

and it would collapse on itself to the landscape.

It would then be sculpted and get bigger and bigger

to the Emerald City.

And of course, Jon then wants to do a dance down,

but inside the map, he loves to like amp it up.

And he wants it to go from day to night.

So, it was like, okay, so this is a solid egg shape for day,

that's painted and it's lit through a little trough

behind here.

And then it lifts, and behind it is a scrim,

a night scrim, which is a sort of a gauze that you paint on,

which means you can backlight it.

And when you backlight it, you can see the night sky.

And Jeff Goldblum dances in front of the night sky.

And then Jon wanted to get behind the backing

and get him in silhouette

and have a moon that that floats across.

So, you end up again with a sort of a large stage show for,

in a physical set.

And you can start to see it here,

there's our actors looking at it.

So, you can start to see, and you can see the shadowing

because, you know, where Jeff Goldblum has to enter

and exit.

And when you see it on film, I think it's quite magical.