‘Wicked’ Production Designer Nathan Crowley on Planting Barley and 9 Million Tulips to Create Oz
With Wicked, Oscar-nominated production designer Nathan Crowley was tasked with transporting audiences to the wonderful, fantastical place of Oz — with as little VFX as possible. That meant building massive sets on four backlots, constructing magical trains and planting fields of barley and tulips. Many, many tulips. Like, 9 million of them.
“I’ve always looked at fantasy films, and I always wanted to explore trying to do them more practically like they might have done in the old days,” Crowley tells THR. “And that was a real challenge for me. I’ve been on a lot of Christopher Nolan films where we do think practically, but they’re not fantasy and they’re not musicals. I really wanted to challenge myself to think, ‘Can we do a fantasy as practically as possible with VFX interwound?’ ”
For Crowley, it started with finding real locations that would anchor the set pieces. They scouted landscapes that would mirror an American fairy tale: big corn fields and vast farmlands. Then, building out Munchkinland, Shiz University and the Emerald City as much as possible enabled actors to really sink into their characters in real places.
“They could feel like they’re at Shiz or they’re in the Emerald City, and we gave them everything to react to and gave them a reality by building the sets as detailed and big as possible. I think it definitely pushed the entire crew into feeling the film,” he explains.
Ariana Grande (left) and Cynthia Erivo as Glinda and Elphaba, respectively, in the Emerald City.
Courtesy of Universal Studios
The first set built was the spinning wheels of the library. (Interiors were shot first because production started during winter.) Because it was such a complicated piece of machinery to construct and because Jonathan Bailey, who plays Fiyero, and the dancers had to learn their choreography around it, it was built first.
The second set, which was actually shot first, was Glinda and Elphaba’s dorm room, which “was odd to start in such a small set, but a great place to start because it holds ‘Popular’ and part of ‘What Is This Feeling?’, so it needed a lot of attention.”
Most of the sets took eight to 12 weeks to make, but the most challenging set piece to design was the Emerald City, which required 15 weeks. “I have to cross into the Emerald City and give you something unexpected, but at the same time something the audience would accept and go, ‘Yeah, of course! That’s the Emerald City!’ It has to be this sort of whimsical dream, so that was the hardest design challenge, but it’s my favorite moment in the film,” he says.
The Emerald City was built on two backlots (“an enormous amount of acres,” says Crowley) with Shiz University down the road and Munchkinland beyond that, and the train and station in another field, full of barley that was planted and grown by the production team. The train that transports the two protagonists in and of itself is 106 feet long, 16 feet high and weighs 40 tons.
Crowley and his team built the 160-foot train and planted barley seeds in a field.
Lara Cornell/Universal Studios
“We planted the barley before we even conceived of putting the train in the field. I told the greens department to buy the seed and get it in the ground before it freezes, then block off the entrance to the field so no one will drive on it, and then we built the set within the field,” explains Crowley.
“Americana”-style arches, which drew inspiration from the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, were placed throughout the Emerald City, acting as transition points among different parts of the set that led to grandiose framing shots, showing off the vastness of the green city. They also were employed on the set of Shiz University, which relied heavily on American architecture. Shiz’s construction involved building features such as the arrival dock, water tank and entrance courtyard.
The set near the fountain in front of the Emerald Palace. The fountain is a centerpiece of “One Short Day” and rotates with dancers moving around it in a sequence.
Courtesy of Universal Studios
Crowley, whose Oscar nomination for best production design on Wicked marks his seventh in the category (he received noms for Tenet, First Man, Interstellar and The Dark Knight, among others), had worked on musicals The Greatest Showman and Wonka, which he says came in handy for his work on Wicked.
“The Greatest Showman prepared me on how dancers work and how musicals are made,” says Crowley. “Wonka was an extension of that, by trying to apply large-scale backlot builds into fantasy, because Showman is slightly more period and less fantasy than Wonka.
“For Wicked, I needed every film I’ve ever made to be able to do this. It’s the biggest thing I’ve ever done, and that’s saying something.”
Shiz University was built around a water tank for the arrivals of the students. “There’s a journey to get to Shiz, but you can’t go by train because that belongs to the wizard, there are no cars, and an air balloon also belongs to the wizard. It was obvious: We have to go by waterways, but that caused its own problems,” says Crowley.
Courtesy of Universal Studios
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