PRODUCTION WICKED: FOR GOOD
P ink and green: these
complementary colours have come to represent Jon M Chu’s two-part adaptation of Wicked ,
itself the result of a long stream of adaptations of L Frank Baum’s 1900 novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz . Charting the origin story of Elphaba, the so-called Wicked Witch of the West, and Glinda the Good, Chu’s Wicked (2024) and Wicked: For Good (2025) tell a tale of friendship, social ostracism and self-fulfilling prophecies – often through song and dance. Alice Brooks, ASC took the reins for the cinematography on both films, having previously worked with Chu on In the Heights (2021), another film adaptation of a Broadway musical. Friends for nearly 25 years, Brooks and Chu began planning Wicked and Wicked: For Good by keeping the story’s emotions front and centre. “For movie one, these were emotions such as celebration or desire or choice, and for movie two, they were things like sacrifice and separation and consequence,” she explains. “As our discussions deepened, we quickly realised that the first movie would be effervescent and glowing, while the second would have more of a weight and density to it. Every lighting cue, every lens choice, every movement is rooted in these emotional intentions.”
MAPPING TWO MOVIES After establishing the story’s emotional beats, Brooks parsed thousands of images, creating a moodboard that featured everything from Instagram photos to stills from classic movies like The Empire Strikes Back . “It was all over
the place,” she admits. “The next process was to create a colour script – a hand- painted drawing for each sequence in the movie – or sometimes a few if things tonally shifted,” Brooks continues. “I picked one photograph per scene and put them up on the wall in sequential order. When I stepped back and softened my gaze, I could see where we were light and dark. I could see the entire arc of both movies as one whole.” Brooks and Chu took two years – plus an additional 18 weeks, officially – to prep the Wicked films. “I had a crew of over 200 people, and we shot on 73 sets, 17 sound stages, four backlots and three locations: a huge scope of things to keep track of,” she admits. To keep everyone organised and on schedule, “my team would create weekly packets that included, at a glance, the emotional intentions, colour script, script pages, shot list and storyboards.” To map out the more complex sequences, such as the films’ combined total of 26 musical numbers, Brooks and Chu would “shoot video of dance rehearsals and then cut them together from our iPhone footage,” she describes. Those too were included in the weekly plan packets.
TAKING A TURN The celebratory emotions that defined Brooks’ creative approach to the first movie gave way to darker themes of separation and sacrifice in Wicked: For Good
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