Fresh off his Oscar win for Jon M. Chu and Universal’s hit musical adventure, the production designer talks real trains, Unreal Engine digital fly-bys, and growing 9 million tulips.
Jon M. Chu and Universal's ‘Wicked.’ Images © Universal Studios. All Rights Reserved.
Before notching seven Academy Award-nominations and a win earlier this month for his work as the production designer on Wicked, Nathan Crowley started out as a junior set designer for Steven Spielberg’s Hook. Getting the opportunity to work on Jon M. Chu and Universal’s epic, award-winning musical enabled him to recapture the same experience… but this time as the production designer. “I remember walking through the door of MGM Stage 27 and Hook’s ship was up to the rafters,” recalls Crowley. “I recall thinking, ‘This is where I want to be.’ I thought all films were like that. It turns out that few are. But Wicked was. There are so many visual effects in this film. It’s about how we can make enough that’s real. What I liked about Pablo Helman [VFX Supervisor] is he said, ‘Give me enough so I can see the real photography and the natural lighting, so we know what we’re matching to.’ My job is to reduce questions for his teams in post-production. We know what it looks like because we’ve got an example over there. That balance was good. Pablo has got enough on his plate with flying animals and monkeys without having to deal with architecture. We grew nine million tulips. Of course, you can do that in CGI if you wanted to.”
Crowley emphasizes in-camera elements as a mantra, having worked with Christopher Nolan on eight productions, with five of them earning Oscar nominations. “It took working on all of those other films to make this one,” he notes. “On Interstellar, I grew 500 acres of corn where the house was located. I knew that we could grow tulips because all you have to do is find the right farmer who is excited. We found Mark Eves, and his wife is a fanatic about Wicked. The tulips are the color of the rainbow. There are all of these themes. People have asked me, ‘Why did you bother growing nine million tulips when you can do it in CGI?’ Because it was one of the first things we did, and we had to start as we intended. If people see a film crew that is going to grow tulips, and the studio can see we’re going to do this for real it stamps a code on the film.” Budgeting and time had to be taken into consideration. “Pablo has a certain amount of time in post-production, and I only have a certain amount of time in pre-production. It’s not going to look good if he is overloaded and can’t get the scale and size of the sets required to balance the image. The art of production design is determining with visual effects where reality ends and CGI starts. The CGI needs to go unnoticed and unquestioned by the audience.”
Unreal Engine was a critical component of Crowley’s art department workflow. “What I do is design the set, we push it through Unreal Engine and do a fly-through,” he explains. “I build a big foamcore model of what I can build out of that fly-through. Hopefully we can afford to build that or then we have to get spray paint and say, ‘We can’t afford to build that bit.’ For Shiz, it was about starting in reality with a real boat, landscape and river, digital Shiz in the background, and pushing through an archway into the dock which is physical and real. I’m going to try to have a 50-foot-high set so I can get most of it in-camera, but if we turn this way, Pablo knows he’s got to top that up. The departments run as one.”
Clever decisions had to be made to accommodate the need for production “mobility.” According to Crowley, “The problem with musical dance numbers is there’s all of this other crew that you don’t get on other films. It’s not like doing a Christopher Nolan film where we can go light in Iceland and shoot this stuff. We’ve got to take 50 or 100 dancers, all of the make-up and costumes. It becomes this mammoth thing so that’s why traditionally musicals are shot on backlots. But we had all of these tulips. Jon M. Chu [Director] said to me, ‘If we sink the village we can run through the tulips and if you build me a runup of the tulips into the backlot we can link them perfectly.’ What that allows us then to do is build embankments on the backlot, so we didn’t have greenscreen below 35 feet. We embanked it and put landscape up and grass, flowers and tulips. It was like the Teletubbies!”
Partnerships with special effects team, led by Paul Corbould, were especially critical when creating the Emerald City Express. “I have worked with Paul on many films, including Dunkirk, so I know that he can build big rigs,” remarks Crowley. “It’s like, ‘You’ve got to build me a train that moves. I wanted 500 yards of track and for the train to run it into and out of the station.’ That didn’t happen but we did build the train, and it did work. The thing is if you don’t build the train, you miss out on the art direction of making it; it’s like a piece of sculpture. If you just go with the concept and then deliver the film, you’ve missed out on that middle bit, which is where you discover the set because you’re physically making it in 3D. You manipulate and change it. You don’t just lay that image. What I find incredible about AI is it is all very 2D. A lot of people are making 2D images that look beautiful. But you have to make them in 3D as a set. You actually need old school art directors who can take something that is ethereal and turn it into something not ethereal. You get a concept, do it in 3D and learn about it. We’ve now gone backwards to a much more art direction driven film industry with AI.”
One significant area of special effects collaboration was when the Wizard of Oz made a grand entrance through a massive mechanical head. “Paul Corbould and a puppeteer built this little 12-inch-tall maquette, whereas the actual thing was more like 17 feet high,” Crowley says. “We worked with these maquettes for a long time to get the expressions right. But the fundamental design was the Wizard is the man behind the curtain. I didn’t want a Wes Anderson curtain. If you have ever been to any art gallery with string architecture, I wanted it to be so you couldn’t see the depth of this hanging string. It seems ethereal. The head would come through the string and go, ‘I am Oz.’ It would be scary, ethereal, like an art piece. But you can’t use string. I remember we sat with Pablo and said, ‘We can build it for real, but you have to enhance it if something goes wrong because I don’t know if this is going to work.’ We did it live scene by scene. You’ve got a big hydraulic head and we’re twisting it. It’s hanging from the stage ceiling so we can get some leverage. It’s incredibly complicated. You take risks but just like the train it has to work on the day. The risk is the fun.”
Reference designs for Shiz, the university where Elphaba and Glinda attend, included the White City from the Chicago World Fair in 1893. “It’s an American Faerie tale so I need nostalgia for the audience,” Crowley shares. “There are also the onion domes and Moorish stuff out of Spain.” Water provided a visual motif, which meant that the set had to be flooded. “No one liked the water, and it was a fight in those meetings. But here’s the theory. How do you get to Shiz? You can’t go by train or air balloon because that’s the Wizard’s technology. You can’t go by horse and cart because the animals are free. There are no cars. Historically how do you move around? By river. Therefore, I have to show Glinda in a boat going down a river. So, I found and put the White City arch in that landscape. I’ve got to build the set two-sided so I can push through it. I also have to construct a tank and a set around the tank. Everyone hates you when you build a tank because there’s no such thing as a tank that doesn’t leak. You have to keep refilling it and that costs a lot of money. You have to have pumps and 24-hour people. Something I’ve learned from Chris Nolan is if you made it difficult then only the people who need to be there show up!”
The Map Room was inspired by a museum installation Crowley discovered during the production of Dunkirk. “The Map Room started as separate set,” he reveals. “But then I showed Jon this image of a map on a wall. It was an art installation that was in 3D. When you walk up to it you step into it and realize it’s not a picture but a 3D space. I saw it in Dunkirk when I had a free Sunday. They had these crazy installations in the ship museum of these forced perspective shipyards. I had always thought that was fascinating, so we decided we were going to build this forced map of the whole of Oz in this half egg dome that would show everything. Then Jon said, ‘I want to do Sentimental Man in there and to go from day to night.’ We had to hydraulically lift the lid off the top of the egg and put a night backing behind. It became this theatrical show within the Map Room, which when you see it, is brilliant.”
Forests were ultimately constructed on soundstages. “I didn’t want to use my biggest stage in that way, but we went scouting forests and Jon was like, ‘I don’t like any of these,’” Crowley says. “In the van on the way back, he said, ‘Trees shouldn’t be straight.’ I said, ‘Maybe they should be circular.’ Then we sketched out all these circular trees and he was like, ‘We need to build this forest.’ I could only go so high with the trees because we had a ceiling height problem on that stage. Most stages are 50 to 55 feet, which is annoying. I could only get a light rig in. That is one set which Pablo didn’t like!”
Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer best known for composing in-depth filmmaker and movie profiles for VFX Voice, Animation Magazine, and British Cinematographer.
