In crafting the visual language of Wicked, cinematographer Alice Brooks and director Jon M. Chu began with words. From that emotional foundation, the pair spent two years trading thousands of images and dreaming bigger than ever before. The vision for Wicked was initially tested on the ground in London, where weekly camera trials served as laboratories for finding the right lenses and exploring how creative elements, such as fabrics, wall textures, and makeup, would appear on camera.
Having collaborated with Chu for 25 years, Brooks was always ready for sudden flashes of inspiration, shaping lighting and camera work to match the vision and make Oz a reality. Brooks recently spoke with Boxoffice Pro for the cover story of our November 2025 print edition. In celebration of Wicked: For Good arriving in theaters from Universal Pictures on November 21, here is our full conversation with the director of photography wizard.
How did you develop the look and the language of Wicked?
When Jon and I first start discussing a movie, we discuss an emotional intention for each scene, and they’re typically one-word descriptions. Some of the descriptions from the first film were words like ‘celebration,’ ‘yearning,’ ‘longing,’ ‘believing,’ ‘dreaming,’ and ‘choice.’ And for the second film, some of the intentions were ‘consequences,’ ‘risk,’ ‘separation,’ ‘sacrifice,’ and ‘surrender.’ Our second step is that we start sharing images. Jon and I were very lucky on these films; we had two years to dream together. He asked me to dream bigger than I had ever dreamed before, and we shared thousands of images over the course of two years.
Then we went into hard, on-the-ground prep in London. We started doing camera tests every week where we would be testing everything from fabrics and different textures that [costume designer] Paul Tazewell was looking at to production design, different light fixtures, wall textures and paint colors, and then with [hair and makeup designer] Frances [Hannon] we were testing makeup. During one of the makeup tests, I put a 65 mm lens on Cynthia, and we weren’t a hundred percent sure what lens package we were going to use. It was this very simple push in on her in what became her final green makeup. We had done weeks and weeks of makeup tests, and Jon looked at me, and he was like, “This is it. These will be the lenses we’re using.”
Then I put the 65 mm on Ari for her close-up lens during her hair and makeup test. It was a little bit different on her, and it wasn’t what we wanted the feeling for Glinda [to be.] I tested lots of other lenses within our same lens package, and we ended up using a 75 mm on her, except for the end of the movie. At the end of Wicked: For Good, we use the 65 mm [lens] on Ari for the first time, and we do it because she finally, truly understands what goodness is. She is able to step into her own power and harness magic.
Jon likes to shoot 360 degrees which, as an audience member, really gives you the feeling of being live in the room with the performances. It also means that there’s a lot of pre-lighting preparation and a lot of flexibility required on your part.
Luckily, I’ve worked with John for 25 years, so now I know what I’m getting into every day. We were chatting with someone the other day, and he said, “Alice now knows that we need every tool available at any moment, because I’ll suddenly have inspiration and want to try something. Alice can be completely flexible and make anything I dream work.” The 360-degree shot became one of our visual themes in Wicked and in Wicked: For Good. In Wicked, Glinda and Elphaba are in almost every scene together. They share almost every frame. The 360-degree shots developed out of that.
The first movie takes place almost all during the day, and the second movie takes place almost all during the night. [For] lots of Wicked: For Good, Elphaba and Glinda are in their own worlds. They live in two different worlds at this point, but when they are together we want to pull at your heartstrings a little bit, so we revisit some of our visual themes, like the holding of the hands and the 360-degree shots. That does present a huge challenge for me because of the lighting involved in 360-degree shots and having two women, one who’s in dark colors and green and one who’s in light colors with blonde hair.
Weekend pre-lights were a massive thing to be able to figure out. We had to do live lighting cues, basically, as we do 360-degree shots. It also made it very, very exciting, because it was like a live stage performance. Typically, when you’re doing a musical number on film, you have time coding that you just put into a dimmer board, and that’s what your lighting is going to be. But on Wicked and Wicked: For Good, we did live lighting cues, and the women were singing live, and we were doing these 360-degree shots where our camera operator had to riff on and improvise off of what Cynthia and Ari were doing. Even though it’s a film, there are all these live show elements to it that I think make our film very special.
Having practical sets to light on a fantasy film of this scale must have been such a gift.
It’s a massive gift. We shot on 17 sound stages and four back lots—actually five back lots in the end because we ended up building a smaller back lot after the strike—and three locations. On those 17 sound stages, we ended up transforming them into 60 different set iterations. Whether they’re completely different sets or a different lighting design because of a different musical number in the same set or a tornado or bright sunlight versus the middle of the night. We had 60 different iterations of sets.
It was a massive, massive undertaking, but [worth] being able to have real, tangible spaces in a fantasy film. They’re built on such a huge scale that I could design shots in any direction, 360 degrees. [Production Designer] Nathan [Crowley] didn’t just build us two walls. They were 360-degree sets. Some were several levels tall. I could feel the world we were standing in and imagine what it was like for Elphaba and Glinda to be standing on those sets when I was doing pre-light and what they would be feeling when they were in the scene. That just doesn’t exist if you’re in a blue screen box like so many movies are these days.
Time of day is a really big part of your handprint on the heart of Wicked.
There’s this visual heartbeat in Wicked that intricately weaves the two movies together into one with lighting and camera. When you step back and look at both of the films as a whole, every intention and choice is clear, vibrant, and beautiful. I had this idea for the sun to become our spotlight in the first movie, where the sun would rise for Glinda and set for Elphaba.
The second movie takes place where the sunset meets the sunrise in the dead of the night, which creates its own unique world. I’m so grateful for Jon being so open to collaborating on the idea of the time of day through the movies, because that gave us a complete story arc. Each movie is complete on its own, but if you look at both movies as a whole, there’s a complete visual story arc. I’m really excited for people to see it.
In the first film, you were working a lot with color temperature shifts and color separation in the visual storytelling. How does that evolve in Wicked: For Good?
As my discussions with Jon became deeper during prep, it started to become clear that the first film would be effervescent and weightless, and the second film would have a weight and a density to it. We shift from this bubbly, effervescent world where the first movie is all about choice and dreaming.
The second movie is all about the consequences of those choices, and there’s a visual weight that is very different from the first film. The last 40 minutes of the first film is all one long sunset that starts with Wizomania and ends with Elphaba jumping off the Emerald City tower and descending into darkness, where she finds her power. That sets the tone for the second movie.
You mentioned a forest scene shot was a favorite for you in Wicked. Do you have a favorite shot in For Good?
I do. Well, I have several. Right now, I think I’ll say my favorite shot in Wicked: For Good is right after the women sing ‘For Good,’ and they have a final moment together. It is an in-camera split screen that brings us back to their first musical number, which was ‘What is This Feeling.’ Except now we’re very static and still, and we do it in camera. Elphaba puts Glinda in a closet to hide. They’re able to have their goodbye together, live, without cutting. The moment is long and quiet. We don’t move the camera at all; we just let it sit. Glinda is in the closet in this very cool light, and Elphaba is in this warm orange light from the flickering flames of Kiamo Ko. We use every color of the rainbow to light Wicked and Wicked: For Good. And orange is the color of Elphaba’s transformation. It’s our last moment before she no longer has to be the Wicked Witch of the West.
I’ve heard you talk about some of the shots in Wicked that were perhaps the hardest or the most challenging. What about For Good? Was there a particular shot that was as hard as getting the flip over the camera in ‘Dancing Through Life’ in one take?
We have a whole number that is one long take, and it’s called ‘Girl in the Bubble.’ Jon came to me with this idea during prep, and he was like, “I think it’s really about Glinda being able to see who she has become.” He wanted to be able to go in and out of mirrors through the sequence. She has this set that Nathan built, which we called Glinda’s suite, but it’s a big, two-story apartment where she lives in the Emerald City. It has a huge balcony with a view of the Emerald City where her bubble sits. There are circular mirrors throughout the whole set. So we could put Glinda in circle after circle after circle. Jon wanted it to all be one single shot. We don’t know if we’re in the reflection or we’re out of the reflection. It’s actually seven shots that we stitched together, but it was very tricky and complicated to figure out. It’s one of those shots where intuition takes over.
A lot of my ideas come in the middle of the night, when I wake up at two in the morning and get out of bed and start writing down my ideas. We looked at all the greatest movie mirror shots of all time and every mirror shot we could find in film. Or on YouTube that some amazing kid had done. Every morning during prep at 8am we discussed a sequence or several sequences, and I knew we were going to talk about this number. In the middle of the night, I realized I needed to really figure it out moment by moment. I got my husband’s shaving mirror and my daughter’s two princess bath dolls. Glinda’s suite has these two staircases, so I used two bananas. I put three oranges for the balcony doors and a plate as the sunken living room. One of the princesses represented her in the mirror, and one represented her out of the mirror. With my iPhone, I was able to figure out the cut points and when we were in the mirror and out of the mirror.
Every single department had to work together to make this shot work. We needed special effects to perform hydraulic moves with two huge walls, so that the camera, as we spun around, could pull through the wall and suddenly be reflected in the mirror. Visual effects had to figure out the exact science of mathematically where the camera should be in space if we’re in the mirror. We needed to be able to get close to Glinda at certain points, and her bubble dress is five-feet wide. If we weren’t seeing the skirt, Paul [Tazewell] was able to provide a partial skirt with less bustle so that the camera could get close. I needed practical lighting because of all these live lighting cues as she’s moving through the whole space, so Nathan and I worked with Lee Sandales, the set decorator, on finding the perfect lighting fixtures for the suite and what height they needed to be based on how I wanted the light to fit Glinda. Choreographer Chris Scott worked with us on how she would turn so that the camera could spin in a certain way as we twisted into mirrors. It was really and truly one of the greatest collaborative moments of my career.
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