Today, AD welcomes production designer Nathan Crowley to explain how he designed the sets for ‘Wicked’. Through his extensive use of practical effects, Crowley designed sets where Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo could shine and come alive as Glinda and Elphaba. From planting nine million tulips for Munchkinland to Shiz’s 52-foot high set, Crowley’s designs for ‘Wicked’ are truly immersive and nothing short of impressive.
WICKED is in theaters November 22, https://www.wickedmovie.com/
WICKED is in theaters November 22, https://www.wickedmovie.com/
Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
00:00Hi, I'm Nathan Crowley. I'm a production designer.
00:02You might have seen my work on films like Interstellar, Dark Knight, Westwold.
00:08And today we're going to talk about Wicked and the design of Oz.
00:15Let's talk about Munchinland.
00:16The first thing for me is like, okay, who are they?
00:19How can that influence the design?
00:21If they're farmers, what do they farm?
00:23And I proposed that we grow nine million tulips in eastern England.
00:30And when you see a person run through them across a diagonal
00:33and you've got a camera up here, it's all real. It's all in camera.
00:37When I came to this project, my methodology is to try and do as much practically as possible.
00:43And the reason I was attracted to this is because it's pure fantasy,
00:48which has traditionally recently been done with CGI.
00:52It's very difficult to talk to the studio and a room of producers
00:56about going into the farming business.
00:59Naturally, they want to do them with CGI,
01:01but they really wanted to know if I could guarantee the flowers would succeed,
01:07which of course you can't do.
01:08But on Interstellar, I grew 500 acres of corn far north in Canada,
01:15where the weather wasn't necessarily correct for corn growing,
01:18but it grew, it worked, so I knew it could be done.
01:21And I knew if I found the right farmer like we had on Interstellar, we could make this work.
01:26So we, along with the help of a farmer called Mark and our location manager Adam,
01:31we planted nine million tulips.
01:33When I talk about practical filmmaking,
01:36the kind of things you learn can benefit and influence you.
01:39The journey to here is they plant tulips of this size,
01:44and then after the first harvest, they get to that size,
01:47and they actually chop the heads off the tulips
01:50and let the energy go into the bulb,
01:53and the flower grows, and then they harvest the bulbs, not the flowers.
01:57So that's why you get tulip festivals,
01:59because the first round, you get all these tulip heads.
02:02So to me, learning this process with the farmers, with the locals,
02:08means that it's like, oh great, I can then use them in Munchkinland.
02:11The other things you learn when you do things practically
02:13is these bulbs don't bloom at the same time as these ones.
02:18So you have to time out when you shoot it perfectly.
02:22So, but it's an adventure.
02:25Here's where CGI and visual effects come in.
02:28It's like, we've got to put a village into this space.
02:32How do we do that?
02:33And John actually was the one who came with the idea
02:35that you actually sink the village into this landscape.
02:38Maybe you just see a few little roofs poking up.
02:41That's the CGI element.
02:43And then as they run towards this village, it suddenly sinks into the ground.
02:48So as they run from this landscape here, they appear here.
02:56And we can continue on running through the tulips.
02:58Here's a yellow-ribbed road, which they can join and run into the village.
03:01And that is the link.
03:02I've got a great mixture here of imagery, both real CGI,
03:08and that's where we started.
03:11So this is the concept illustration for Shiz.
03:16I needed to put it near enough that when Elphaba stands on a cliff edge
03:23and sings The Wizard and I,
03:25we can look out over this vast, impassable desert.
03:29So we went down to the south of England.
03:32This is actually near Bournemouth.
03:34This is actually in Sussex.
03:36So we found all these cliff edges and material
03:39and then really had to sort of decide how Shiz would sit.
03:43The arrival at Shiz, let's talk about that for a second.
03:46We can't use cars because Oz doesn't have cars.
03:50We can't use hot air balloons to arrive there because that belongs to The Wizard.
03:54We can't use the train because that belongs to The Wizard also.
03:58We can't use horse and cart because the animals are free.
04:02Really, we're left with waterways and boats.
04:04So that's fine.
04:06We know in the south of England, near these cliffs,
04:08there's a beautiful winding river called the Seven Sisters.
04:12And it's landlocked, so it means we could put boats on it
04:15and it doesn't have current and it doesn't flow.
04:16So this is great news for filming.
04:19But the problem it raised was I needed to put the set in a huge water tank
04:24with enough tank that I could take the boat through the arch
04:28and introduce Shiz to the audience.
04:32This is a plan of the back lot build.
04:36This area here, all of this is a huge water tank.
04:41The weight of water pushing against those tank walls is immense.
04:45We actually built more water tank.
04:48The water tank went through here to the other side of the arch here.
04:52And then we built a sort of reservoir over here.
04:55So when you're in a boat coming this way, you would sail in.
04:58So you put the camera boat behind them and you follow them in,
05:02push through that arch and introduce Shiz, which was key for me.
05:06And then this is all physical.
05:07Here's the problem.
05:08I've got Galinda arriving here, full of luggage.
05:12I had five other boats and they've all got sails.
05:15So I've got to sail into here, land at the dock seamlessly and get off.
05:19We went to Prague to a boat builder to build us the big boats.
05:24We originally thought we'd put them on cables and pull them
05:27because they were pretty stable.
05:28We then needed to change the angle.
05:30So we ended up putting men in green suits,
05:33which visual effects will take out, pushing those boats.
05:35And once again, here's the joy of it.
05:38With CGI, that's what we should be doing, in my opinion.
05:42Everything is real and we take out the people in green suits.
05:46So we take things out rather than add them.
05:48So now we're into the problem of we got plus four feet of water.
05:55We need to land here at the dock side.
05:57So you're at plus five.
05:59Then I need to go up to the steps of the courtyard,
06:01which means I've got another 10 feet here.
06:04And then I need to build the courtyard here, which is 35 feet.
06:08So you start adding up this and you're into 50 plus feet,
06:11which is pretty high for a set.
06:14Why, you might ask, why did I build that as part of this?
06:17It's because I don't want to cut from here to here.
06:20In practical filmmaking terms,
06:22I want to come in with characters into the inner courtyard
06:26because this is the transition space to Dr. Dillerman's,
06:30to the dining room, and this over here is the library.
06:34So it's extremely important to try and put these together.
06:37So when we do scenes looking this way, this acts as the backing
06:41and it's practical and it's real.
06:42I don't need CGI because I've got real physical backings to a certain height.
06:47So that means I can do transition shots, which in cinema is essential.
06:51If you want to feel the size of the world or the size of the space,
06:55you need to spend a moment showing some journeys.
07:00But let's talk about the architecture.
07:01This place was a seat of learning.
07:03It was an ancient establishment for Oz.
07:06There's lots of pitfalls in designing an ancient school.
07:09And we've seen them, you've got Hogwarts, you've got Oxford, Cambridge,
07:12you know, Harvard, all these dark stones, sort of gothic-y, medieval-type places.
07:18And this place, you know, John Chu was very important.
07:22This is where everyone wants to go and it's a joyous place.
07:26And when you go into it, it has to be one of the most amazing places in Oz.
07:32So I knew I had to be light, I knew I had to be colourful again,
07:35I knew I had to be wondrous.
07:37So it was early on that I decided I'd take all my favourite old architecture.
07:43So Venetian staircases, onion domes, gothic rooftops, balconies from Venice.
07:50I mean, there's Moorish architecture from Granada in here.
07:53There's, you know, there's Indian stuff, you know, the Pink Palace in India,
07:58blue tiles from Portugal.
08:00I wanted to combine these all and it was like,
08:02can I actually combine them in a way that you believe they should all fit?
08:05Roxy, my great art director, spent many months trying to fit this all together
08:10to create this image.
08:12So she started to come up with ideas.
08:14We should take the Italianesque towers and make them out of wood,
08:18change the materialities.
08:20They're familiar, but yet new.
08:22And in that way, the idea that we could put the audience into a place
08:28that was sort of familiar, but yet magical was the task.
08:32If you watch films and you have a sort of nostalgia to something you see,
08:38then you accept it.
08:39So it allows the audience to be part of it.
08:42And I was really, really trying to push that idea into this set.
08:48Let's talk about what the build was,
08:50because here is the build on the back lot,
08:52which is by far the largest set I've ever built.
08:55I challenged my construction team of 20 years,
08:58who I knew were up for the job because they are amazing.
09:02So you can see the work.
09:04You can see where the tank is here.
09:06And you can see, you know, we have to tank it.
09:08We have to concrete it.
09:09We have to then put liners in.
09:11You know, we've got heavy equipment running.
09:13You know, this is the only access.
09:15So once I put the tank liners in, I couldn't come in this way.
09:19So we would then leave this set part out
09:21and we'd use huge grains to lift machinery into this area
09:27so we could finish this facade.
09:28And this is why we've got this immense scaffolding rig to protect it.
09:33I haven't come across any other construction team that can do this.
09:35So here I'm going up to 50 foot.
09:38Actually, I think it was like 52 feet at this point.
09:40The higher I got, the more in camera we could get.
09:43And what happens as the sun comes onto this front facade,
09:47you get all the colors and the detail.
09:50And so you understand what the light is doing.
09:52So you're not making it up.
09:53So when you go up here with CGI,
09:56the information is already down here
09:58because I've gone high enough that this is a repeat of detail.
10:02So this is the interior of the library that we designed.
10:06This set introduces Fiero, dances through life.
10:09And so he is this sort of the coolest character.
10:12Everyone wants to meet him.
10:13So we thought, well, maybe we should give him something wondrous to do
10:19in his first introduction.
10:21So if you've seen the Royal Wedding with Fred Astaire,
10:23you've seen the room that rotates and he dances on the walls and the ceiling.
10:28And it's just wondrous.
10:29I said to John, why don't we make circular bookshelves?
10:33What if they rotated it all in different directions
10:36so we could have him introduce dancing through life
10:40on these rotating circular bookcases?
10:42And then the ladders would work independently.
10:46So at some point when you look this way,
10:49they would line up and create a Z, which is Oz.
10:54So this is a shot that John Chu sent me
10:57of the dancers with the backlit window
11:00preparing to do a rehearsal on the ladders and the three rotating drums.
11:05So the way we've done things in the past is
11:09I give a foam core model to what the set is
11:12and how I'd like the drums to work
11:14to Paul Corbett, who ran Special Effects.
11:17And with his engineers, he'd go away and make a mock-up,
11:20which is 11 times smaller than the full-size one,
11:23with spinning drums and ladders.
11:25He would make that out of metal and mechanise it
11:28to figure out all the movements, all the joints, all the dangers.
11:32And so once we ironed out all those movements on the mock-up,
11:35there had to be a working physical model.
11:38Paul and his team could then start to roll the giant steel bands
11:42that would hold the bookshelves.
11:43And beyond the set, there are these sort of giant skateboard wheels
11:47that sort of move this thing around and back and forth.
11:52So here we have the soundstage set of Elphaba's and Glinda's dorm room.
11:57And we have a large number in here called Popular,
12:01and it's very difficult to stage and make interesting a song number in one room.
12:07So the challenge of this set was to create enough movement
12:13in the architecture to keep interest.
12:16And I'd been scouting the Brighton Pavilion.
12:18Brighton Pavilion was built in the early 1800s
12:22before Queen Victoria took the throne,
12:24so by the Prince Regent, who was the son of George III.
12:28He built this sort of Taj Mahal-looking palace down on the south coast
12:33that is now a museum, but it's a remarkable piece of architecture,
12:37and it's still standing.
12:38And so I went down there because it was probably one of the few places
12:42in England that I felt was Aussian, because it wasn't just Indian.
12:47It was a mix of Chinese architecture, Indian architecture.
12:51That was a way into what Shiz was going to become.
12:54And I'd been into one of the giant onion domes,
12:57and I'd noticed these windows.
12:59And it occurred to me these were very Shiz-ian and Aussian.
13:02And so we built these windows all over the set.
13:05And you'll see all these sort of what looks like plaster moldings
13:08in the ceiling here.
13:10So we had a full ceiling, but everything would come apart
13:13for lighting and camera.
13:15So these actually hide all the seams.
13:17So it was a giant sort of orange slice of a ceiling,
13:20so you could pull out all of that bit, leave this wall in here.
13:24You could pull out these windows, because the camera
13:26had to get into this space to film the number.
13:30So here we have the concept illustration of the Emerald City.
13:35The Wizard of Oz is an American fairy tale,
13:38and so I really needed to have a sort of slice of Americana in the film.
13:44And I was looking back at the White City in Chicago,
13:47who's built the Great Exhibition.
13:49And if we look back at the White City in Chicago,
13:52it was a time of, you know, electricity.
13:55It was the time of the future.
13:56It was a palace they built.
13:58They built this incredible place, Burnham, Sullivan,
14:02and all the architects that were involved.
14:04Everyone wanted to go there.
14:05Millions of people wanted to go there.
14:06But it was ironically, because they had to go so quickly
14:10with the White City, they had to build it all with plaster and wood
14:13and not in stone.
14:14There were only a couple of buildings that were in stone.
14:17So it was an illusion as well, which I think also relates
14:21to our character, the Wizard.
14:23Everything is an illusion.
14:26Here's the back lot.
14:27You can see the inspiration from the 1893 Wald's Exhibition.
14:33And what I love about this is Sullivan's great arch that he built
14:38was actually the transportation building.
14:40So I love the fact we built an Aussie train in the transportation arch.
14:43By the time we got to Emerald City, it was beginning to run out of money.
14:46So I had to reuse everything I had.
14:49And then you can see how we were doing it.
14:51We were going to sculpt and mold all these tiles
14:54that we could then use on every surface of the back lot.
14:58There's some here.
14:59The roof of this isn't just flat.
15:01It's got texture.
15:03And so when the light hits it, it moves.
15:05So it feels like it has depth.
15:06So it's very important to avoid flat walls in back lots.
15:11So this is the second part of the Emerald City back lot,
15:15which is Wizard Mania, which is behind this arch
15:18and the front gates or doorway of the Wizard's Palace.
15:23You can see the multi-use of Emerald City tiles going on here.
15:27So every surface I really wanted to cover.
15:30So there was interest everywhere.
15:32But these columns, you'll see them in the Great Hall.
15:34I really wanted to reuse every piece of architecture
15:37I had made for the interior sets on the palace.
15:42Here we have the Great Halls.
15:44And really, this is a room of intimidation before you meet the wizard.
15:48I really wanted to play with scale here.
15:50So one of the first things I looked at
15:53is these sort of giant, giant windows
15:56that sort of, again, have enormous depth and step in.
15:59And definitely, I was influenced by people like Carlo Scarpa
16:02with his sort of love of circles in his concrete architecture.
16:09Here's one of my windows.
16:10This is a shot John Chu took on set.
16:13And it really just gives you the scale of my Ossian windows.
16:18And here's our wonderful camera crew.
16:21And so you can see the distances and depth.
16:23And here are the columns.
16:24Now, the reason I added the columns
16:27is because I really wanted to make the room feel enormous.
16:31So as you walk down here,
16:32the columns force you into a longer perspective,
16:35even though the room is wider.
16:38I need to talk about art direction.
16:39So here you have the building of this Great Hall.
16:42And this is also why I like to do things practically.
16:44There's art direction and art directors.
16:47You have to manipulate the set and change it
16:50so it becomes something better than the concept
16:54to the finished product.
16:55It's like a piece of sculpture.
16:56You must see it and change it and analyze it.
16:59We initially painted everything green.
17:01And I remember being with my head painter,
17:03saying, wow, this looks terrible.
17:06Now, one thing you'll note here is you're seeing navies.
17:09You're seeing orange gold.
17:11You're seeing bronze.
17:12You're seeing many colors.
17:13And so, again, I'm trying to create definition
17:16so you understand it.
17:17I needed to break it up.
17:18It couldn't just have green.
17:20So you'll see that although the overall image is green,
17:25there are many colors in the Emerald City.
17:28And now we've left the Great Hall
17:30and we've gone into the wizard's throne room.
17:34The main feature is the wizard's head,
17:36which is a theme in all the films and in Wicked.
17:39Firstly, I wanted to puppeteer a head mechanically.
17:41I knew Paul Caldwell and his special effects team
17:44could do it because he'd done flying miniatures,
17:47you know, Heinkels for me on Dunkirk.
17:49So I knew he was a talented group of people.
17:52And he had a puppeteer with him.
17:53And so this is a working practical puppeteered head up here.
17:58This is all in camera.
17:59There's no digital work here.
18:01This is actually behind the scenes here
18:03is this giant pivot arm attached to the ceiling.
18:06So we could lower and raise the head and push it in
18:09because it has to appear somehow.
18:11You can't just open the curtains.
18:13It has to be more dramatic than that.
18:21It's 15 foot of head puppeteered,
18:24but then you're eight feet off the ground here.
18:27And then the arm goes all the way up to 40 feet.
18:30So the mechanics of it were, you know, complicated.
18:34And then really this,
18:35I'd been to the Deer Beacon to see a lot of string art.
18:38And it occurred to me that we should,
18:41instead of making a traditional theater curtain,
18:43we should do it out of these layers of string,
18:46which would then become velvet curtain pieces.
18:49And we'd do this huge depth,
18:51about 20 feet worth of different colored greens,
18:55going from sort of green to yellows to blues.
18:58You know, there are all kinds of people behind the scenes
19:00pulling on little wires to open up the curtains
19:03so the puppeteer wouldn't,
19:04his face expressions wouldn't get stuck.
19:07And then the big movement of the head
19:09was done by the hydraulic guys in the back.
19:11It was like a stage show
19:12that we had to achieve every single take.
19:15Here we have the concept of the map room.
19:19Once we get past the wizard's puppeteer head
19:22and he comes out and he greets Elphaba and Glinda,
19:25he then shows them his map room.
19:27And originally it was just a separate set.
19:29And I thought, well,
19:31it'd be lovely to do a map room sort of mural
19:36or something that was part of the throne room.
19:38And then it was like, well,
19:39we could also do an illusion here
19:42because the wizard's an illusionist.
19:43So you walk up thinking it's a painting
19:45and then it lights up and he actually steps over into it.
19:49So it's a three-dimensional map of Oz.
19:52Well, John was in love with that
19:54and he just says, yeah, let's step into it.
19:57My sort of inspiration was when I was on Dunkirk,
19:59the film Dunkirk, we were filming in Dunkirk
20:01and we'd have Sundays off.
20:03There wasn't a ton to do in Dunkirk,
20:05so I used to go to the art museum.
20:06It was about the history of Dunkirk
20:08and the shipping and the ports.
20:10And someone had made these sort of historical vignettes in 3D.
20:15They're only four inches deep,
20:16but everything was forced down.
20:18So the perspectives were painted in force.
20:20So when you stood in front of them,
20:22it looked like they went off like a real model,
20:24but actually it was shallow.
20:25So that sort of fascinated me
20:27and that really gave me the inspiration for this,
20:30how we might achieve this.
20:31So it occurred to me that we could do
20:33a sort of forced perspective map,
20:36a real miniature with a sky in three dimensions.
20:41And this was quite an undertaking
20:43and you need a bit of optimism for it.
20:45But I've built lots of miniatures,
20:47so I knew we could get some great people
20:49to build the miniatures.
20:50But here, the horizon,
20:51I have a wonderful scenic painter
20:54called David Packard,
20:56who can pretty much paint anything.
20:58And so, you know, this is an egg shape.
21:00So, you know, the section of it is actually like that.
21:04There's the skyline
21:05and this would be a forced perspective.
21:07So the clouds would get bigger and bigger
21:08and it would collapse on itself.
21:10So the landscape would then be sculpted
21:12and get bigger and bigger to the Emerald City.
21:14And of course, John then wants to do
21:16a dance number inside the map.
21:18He loves to like amp it up
21:20and he wants it to go from day to night.
21:22So I was like, okay,
21:24so this is a solid egg shape for day
21:27that's painted and it's lit
21:29through a little trough behind here.
21:31And then it lifts
21:33and behind it is a scrim,
21:35a night scrim,
21:36which is a sort of a gauze that you paint on,
21:39which means you can backlight it.
21:40And when you backlight it,
21:41you can see the night sky.
21:44And Jeff Goldblum dances in front of the night sky.
21:47And then John wanted to get behind the backing
21:50and get him in silhouette
21:51and have a moon that floats across.
21:54So you end up again with a sort of
21:56a large stage show
21:58in a physical set.
22:01And you can start to see it here.
22:04There's our actors looking at it.
22:06So you can start to see
22:07and you can see the shadowing
22:08because, you know,
22:10where Jeff Goldblum has to enter and exit.
22:12And when you see it on film,
22:14I think it's quite magical.