Transcript: Art & Crafts Live: Making Movie Magic With 'Wicked'
Rob Legato, ASC, talks to the wizards behind Universal's epic musical: cinematographer Alice Brooks, ASC, editor Myron Kerstein, VFX supervisor Pablo Helman and supervising sound editor John Marquis
Elaine Low: Okay, we have a terrific panel now on Wicked, which so many of us are looking forward to seeing in theaters. Moderating this conversation is Rob Legato, ASC, best known for his work on Titanic, Apollo 13, Hugo, The Departed, and many more films. Come on up, Rob.
Rob Legato: I’d like to introduce some of the amazing talent that actually created that. If you haven’t seen the movie, it’s spectacular, so you’re in for a treat. So let’s bring up Alice Brooks, the cinematographer.
And there’s Myron Kerstein, who is the editor.
Pablo Helman, visual effects. And John Marquis, the sound mixer, sound person, sound — did a lot of sound stuff.
Because we only have a short period of time, I’ll just sort of cut to the chase and say that what so impressed me about the movie is — kind of the definition of cinema, maybe Alfred Hitchcock brought it up — is where all the art forms come together as one piece and it creates one art form, which is this movie.
So, if you don’t mind starting to talk about, since a lot of them are collaborators, there’s three people here who collaborated with [director] Jon Chu before, on musicals, and it seems like this is kind of like, you upped the game to the highest level. Do you wanna tell us about how that was done, the collaboration, and also how you all worked together with Pablo and John and Mark and the production designer and everybody else?
Because everybody did a phenomenal job in the direction of one place, which is this movie. So Alice, you mind starting?
Alice Brooks: I’ve known Jon Chu for almost 25 years. We went to USC film school together and I shot his short film, a musical, at USC. And we bonded over our love of musicals. And I think it is his incredible leadership and team-building that puts us all together.
And we did. We had the most amazing group of people I could ever imagine working with on this movie. Every single craftsperson, everyone cared so much about the movie. And, I remember, it was very hard to make this movie. We shot 155 days. We shot on — our sets were so massive. We shot on 17 stages.
And it was really hard on everyone, right? We knew we were making something special, but you’re in the middle of the mud — literally, we were in the middle of mud — and Myron was amazing. He started cutting together little sizzle reels and inviting anyone in the crew to come up to the editing room, so that they could get reinvigorated, seeing Cynthia Erivo sing or Ariana Grande. And his incredible team-building spirit, I mean, it just kept boosting us up in this really amazing way when we all were so exhausted.
Myron Kerstein: Jon was — the first thing he said to me was like, we want to make this film to be The Wizard of Oz meets Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings. And I was like, well, how hard is that going to be? And when I arrived in London, I saw the sets and went to the — we have this place called the War Room, which was basically all the drawings, [costume designer] Paul Tazewell’s drawings, and the models of sets.
And I was like, oh my God, this thing is so immense — I can’t, I’ve actually, this is gonna be the biggest thing anyone’s ever made. Right away, I was pretty intimidated by the sheer scale of it. But because I had experience working with Alice on In the Heights, and then, of course, working with Jon on Crazy Rich Asians and In the Heights, I had a bit of confidence, but I knew that I was going to have to lean on my team.
And the team, you know, Alice, and then, of course, Pablo — but I needed to lean on everyone to get to a place where we thought we could make something this big.
Pablo Helman: Yeah, and I think, from my point of view, Alice and Myron had worked with Jon for a long time, and so how difficult could it be for me to go in there and work with them?
I have to say that you guys invited me in, and it was a great collaboration. It was talking about lighting. For me, in visual effects, I have always said that 95 percent of it is light. And it’s also timing and continuity and everything else. And so my job as a visual effects supervisor is to get inside the head of the director and always preemptively be really quiet.
I do a lot of listening, but also offer choices to the director. And Jon is somebody who also — I think it’s because he’s coming from a culinary kind of background, his family — so you offer, you know, five things and he’ll go, “Oh, give me a little bit of this and a little bit of this, a little bit of this.”
And then we all sit down and work this out. Throughout the eight months of post, that’s something else that I haven’t done before. It’s a good thing. Editor and cinematographer in dailies with the director for visual effects, through 2,200 visual effects shots, working with, you know, all the wonderful work that they did on set. It’s great.
John Marquis: Yeah, it’s fun to hear. And I’ve worked with Alice and Myron plenty over the last years, but my first show with Jon, he showed me the musical that he and Alice put together. And so it was very clear from the beginning where Jon’s sensibilities were pointed. And so as each movie we do, you could feel the train building steam, and you could feel the confidence in the team that he was putting together, the family that he was creating.
So by the time we get to Wicked, the confidence was high. It was huge. But Jon had assembled a crew around that really felt like this is something we can do. And it’s a testament because on the sound side, there’s a lot in the beginning where we just have to kind of invent and make things, you know, we don’t have this visual effect element here yet, so we’re going to just put some sound in there.
And as things started to come together, you could just start really feeling all the crafts firing on all cylinders. And like every time something new would be introduced, or a new shot or something, you would just feel the magnitude of what you’re working on. And you just feel like this film deserves the best that we can do, and it was like a feeding upon each other and just feeling the real friendship.
RL: It shows in the work, it’s incredible. A question I have is I noticed an homage to The Natural in the end of the movie, [that film’s cinematographer] Caleb Deschanel being one of my favorite people. I was going to ask the general question of the homage of, there was the original Wizard of Oz, there’s the stage play, there’s every musical ever made by MGM. So was there any allusion to or homages to films and sequences and dances and that spirit?
AB: Yeah, I won’t say what part because I don’t want to be a spoiler, but the earliest movie-watching experience I remember was with my dad, and we watched The Natural, and I was curled up in his arms, watching the movie, and I knew there was something special about that film.
And I knew there was something about light, and that was all I knew. But 10 years later, when I was 15, I decided I was going to be a cinematographer, and The Natural has always been this source of inspiration for me. So there’s this moment, and I remember when I’m trying to discuss it to the special effects people on set, we were shooting in the UK, we were shooting in London. I’m like, well, it’s The Natural. And no one knew what that was because it’s an American baseball movie.
So I pulled up, and I’m like, “This is what it needs to be.”
But when I make a movie, I stop watching anything contemporary. I don’t go to the movies because I don’t want it to be on trend with what’s going on. I want it to be our own complete universe. So I watch a lot of old movies. And I also didn’t watch The Wizard of Oz the second I got this movie. So it’s been, I have been on this movie for three and a half years.
And what I did do though, is read the original Wizard of Oz books, and each book has this incredibly rich color description, and each color means something very different. And I decided at one point during prep that I was going to use every color of the rainbow to light certain scenes.
And then we had to figure out what those colors of the rainbow, like, what color of light, what color temperature of light blue was. Or what pink was, and our pink was one-and-three-quarter magenta on a tungsten lamp.
MK: Obviously.
AB: Down forty five percent.
MK: You know, growing up, I just loved musicals — The Music Man, Grease, films with music like Purple Rain — they just became like this sort of a collage of different things that influenced me.
So when I started working with John, I just had a love for anything that was related with music, but then he found a way of making something feel very grounded. And so when we worked on In the Heights, I was like, well, this is a whole other different level of a musical. It just feels very grounded in reality.
And then when we were tasked to work on Wicked, it was like, “Okay, now we’re making something that is fantasy, but can we do both?” Can we make something that is epic and big and a homage to these big giant musicals, but also be incredibly grounded? And so my task was just to never forget that it was about this relationship and about character and about emotion.
And so it’s really fun to be, as an editor, to work on a musical because you get to — there’s flourishes there, and there’s opportunities to be really cutty and show off. But for me, I had to restrain myself. I wanted to make sure that I never got too fancy just because I could.
I wanted to always make sure I built into emotion and that the audience would feel that. And I think that was very unique to this experience.
PH: For me, this is my first musical, even though I come from music.
RL: You were in a band, weren’t you?
PH: Yeah, I was in a band.
RL: I have all your records.
PH: You should have.
But somehow, you know, everybody tells me, how do you get into visual effects? I have no idea. It kind of fell on my lap, but I had never worked in a musical before. And for us, visual effects, everything ends and starts with images. And that’s pretty much it.
It’s very rare that we even get the dialogue when we’re working on shots. So, for me, just being in the middle of hundreds of dancers with incredible lights and music and also the actors singing live and the dancers all around you. It just reminded me a little bit of Saving Private Ryan, being in the middle of it with a bunch of explosions, people around you, doing that creative thing.
And I always wondered how you were going to cut it.
MK: Me too.
PH: You did a great job.
MK: Well, Jon likes to start and stop songs all the time. So, it was really frustrating when you’re like, okay, you just can’t go from start to finish in a song.
And then I remember thinking, how are we gonna do “Defying Gravity”? How are we gonna be singing and singing live vocals and flying around and — spoilers, there’s some other things chasing her. And then, you know, of course, on the sound side, like how does it all work sort of organically?
RL: It seems like the tag team of getting the picture and how beautifully shot it is and the camera movements and all that stuff, the sound is an enormous portion of this movie, because it makes it soar even beyond what you see, so you’ve obviously picked up on everything that everybody else was doing and then created the sound masterpiece as well.
JM: Yeah, I mean the, a lot of it did itself, just due to the nature of the way the tracks were recorded. You know, you get Cynthia and Ari, and it’s track after track, take after take, of amazing vocal performances that they do live, and so the challenge with the musical, obviously, is just trying to, what Myron was saying, keep it grounded, not have it pop on and off, and like, “Now we’re going into the musical number.”
And again, Jon is very much into celebrating the musicality of life, you know. These environments are as much an instrument as the orchestra. And so we had a lot of fun being able to build up from the practical elements that these songs would blossom from into the full-blown spectacle that they became.
MK: I remember that there was this musical number called “One Short Day,” and the beginning of the musical number, there’s a train that pulls into Emerald City, and there’s a little steam of the train, and we’re debating on the music stage, like, whether or not to have the sound of the steam, and then we finally say, “Okay, let’s have the steam,” and then we’re like, “But it doesn’t go with the music.”
So John’s spending like an hour trying to figure out how to tune it properly to feel like one of the instruments.
JM: Yeah. I mean, it was like that from pop to pop at every reel, you know, we had click tracks. So, I mean, things as mundane-sounding as footsteps up to all the wild and crazy — it sounds like the train coming in — all these things are timed and tuned to the music too. Yeah. And it makes it a very cohesive and homogenous experience. You don’t feel detached, it just pulls you in as a viewer.
RL: I was going to ask Alice a question about the camera movement, because all of it was very beautifully orchestrated, and sort of in the tradition of musicals, but it’s not — it goes beyond that. And it wasn’t forced or like let’s show off or let’s whatever. Is there anything you wanted to speak about how sort of you’re inspired, or maybe the music or the or the direction of the day inspired the camera movement?
AB: When Jon and I first start talking about a movie, we talk about emotion. And it’s all we talk about for months and months and months, and knowing the technical will come later, it is about feeling and humanity and goals for the film. And he asked me what goal for this movie was, and I said that it would be the greatest, most beautiful love story ever told between these two women, these two best friends.
And that became my intention for the entire movie, that even though we are in this vast, huge, epic world of Oz, and we are doing a musical, it’s actually about the close-ups. It is about these two women connecting. And so, we shoot 360 degrees, moving the camera often, but really, it is — as Jon likes to say, he made a musical, but it’s the silence where you guys should be leaning in, where the audience leans in, and it’s the stillness of the shots and when we are restrained and we don’t move the camera.
And we set out to make a movie that was an old Hollywood movie. That was another thing he discussed, you know, with real tangible sets, that we could move around 360 degrees, and that sort of led me to this more romantic, softer feel to the whole movie.
And we created these shots during 18 weeks of prep, where we were in dance rehearsals, and I brought my camera operator on. I really had to fight for this, for my camera operator to come on, with 10 weeks of prep, because I wanted him to learn all the choreography as well. And we had something called movie club on Wednesday night, and the gaffer at first thought I was completely nuts that I just wanted to sit down and watch movies on Wednesday afternoons, because he said we have way too much work to be doing.
But it became a space, week after week, for us to sit down and just talk about what we liked, what we were attracted to, and then be able to speak to each other on an artistic level rather than on a technical level, and I think that prep process for me is why the movie looks the way it does, and it was such a special time, and I’m really grateful for it.
RL: I was going to ask Myron a question, because I found myself doing this. The musical numbers are great, they’re phenomenal and beautifully done, and then I started to lean in for the story, and so maybe the camera stopped — I don’t exactly know, I was manipulated, I’m sure — and so I start to lean in and be fascinated by what they were saying and what they were doing. So there’s something about the choreography of everything else that sets up the drama. Is that a purposeful thing that just happened? The two phenomenal actresses?
MK: Yeah, I mean, I was leaning into their performances. I always feel — like, it doesn’t matter if I’m cutting a drama or a musical, it’s all based on performance. And I had two thoroughbreds just crushing it every day with albeit hours of footage, but 99 percent of it was all usable, and so I’m just attracted to, you know, how I’m leaning in on the day. So I built a little screening room in London, and I would watch dailies, oftentime by myself, and I’d watch these hours of dailies and just let it wash over me.
I’m the first audience member. I’m the lucky one that gets to experience this in a dark theater, and there’s a very powerful scene in the movie that takes place — basically it’s our set piece, and it’s all about just silence and looks and emotion.
And I remember just crying for hours, just sitting in this screening room. And so whatever my choices are, is all based on that performance. And if I’m leaning in, I’m hoping that the audience is also going to be leaning in. And I know that if it works, if this relationship works and their performance works, then all the musical numbers, everything, the scale, the creature work, all that is just sort of like icing on the cake.
RL: A quick question for Pablo about the talking animals, and how they were also characters that you have emotion with, and it’s meant to be — how would you do that?
PH: Yeah, definitely, it’s exactly what they were talking about, which is that we pick up the camera movement and your editing, and we have to come up with shots that cover those animals, even though there is an animal unit on set.
It was about 15 people — not animals, but people that would act as animals so that Jon could direct it. You could light it and do all this wonderful stuff. So we pick up the camera movement and many times we propose shots, and we would say, “Is this the language of the film?”
It might be a good shot for visual effects, but not necessarily for whatever is happening there. If you actually take a look at the creature work, there are animals that speak, they’re mirroring what the actresses are doing. Sometimes, Cynthia does this thing with her mouth, and you can see that the animals are doing the same thing.
RL: They’re imitating her?
PH: Yeah, they’re imitating her a little bit, and eye contact is really important. But it’s the language of the film that we all develop during the movie and then in post.
RL: And John, anything about the collection of all the art forms inspires you to choose a particular — I don’t know if you choose the music yourself, or you choose it in concert with everybody else, or when to mix it and create the feeling that you’re getting, but it feels like it comes off of the scene itself, suggested, is that true?
JM: Oh, absolutely. I mean, it’s all about feeling, and we’re all very familiar with the songs, and the songs are incredible on their own, but in this environment, you’re able to flesh out the environments that they live in.
And so you quickly realize that there’s a whole world that is working in tandem to tell the same story, and it’s working in concert with the music that is being presented.
It’s just working through the scenes and seeing how those elements help these girls through their scene — that either accent the comedic aspects of a particular moment or just a driving rhythm that you’re really feeling the characters connect to the environment in.
It’s a piece-by-piece process, but at the end it boils down to just kind of how it hits you, how it feels.
RL: Well, it’s an emotional journey when you see the film, and for me, there was a bit of a political sensation that I got from it. Yeah, believe it or not.
It’s a surprise and you need to see it so you believe it. I think you may feel better about life. So, I guess in closing, the people on this stage are all gonna get nominated, whether you like it or not. Which apparently is a great campaign slogan, which I didn’t know, that you could get away with that.
And everybody literally connected with the movie, the actors, the director, the production designer, the costumer, everybody’s at the highest level. I hate to predict anything, but this is something that you will see most likely massive nominations and deservedly so.
I’m as proud of your work as probably you are. You guys should see this film. It’s really awesome. Thank you.
