As the returning production designer from the first film, Nathan Crowley had a lot of new areas to explore in Wicked: For Good. From the seemingly floating castle Kiamo Ko to Elphaba’s forest hideaway, and even new locations within The Emerald City like Glinda’s apartment, Crowley’s work in the second film focuses more on expanding the world of Oz past Shiz University.
“The story takes off, and we go on these incredible epic journeys,” says Crowley. “We come back some years later, the Wizard’s building yellow brick roads and oppressing the landscape, so where has Elphaba gone?”
One of the first locations Crowley had to think of, story-wise, was where Elphaba would be hiding out. “It started with having this dense canopy that she just flies into, and then we intertwine all the tree trunks and branches and it creates a nest,” says Crowley.
Constructing the nest for Elphaba’s hideout.
Universal Pictures
When Crowley says “intertwine all the tree trunks and branches”, he means that literally, as he had a greens department who wove together the space with actual wood and branches. “We realized if we built it out of molds and casts, it just wouldn’t flow,” says Crowley. “So these three or four nature sculptors wove together the whole set, and we sculpted it over a period of six to eight weeks. It’s a very organic set, and I think that plays in the film.”
3D model of Kiamo Ko’s support pillars.
Universal Pictures
Elphaba’s next location of escape is a castle owned by Fiyero’s family, Kiamo Ko. In contrast to the organic, natural appearance of the precious set, Kiamo Ko was designed to be man-made in a way that seems to defy physics. “We leave film one with ‘Defying Gravity’, and then we end up at Kiamo Ko, which I wanted to do as a floating castle,” says Crowley. “I needed to come up with architecture that defied gravity for Elphaba.”
Using the idea that this ancient castle was built in the original time of the Grimmerie, the magical book of spells, Crowley says the idea of a castle made to float by ancient magic gave him the perfect reasoning. “It has upside-down arches and the top half has correctly sized arches, and there’s a gap in between, so it’s actually floating,” says Crowley.
Glinda’s apartment in the Emerald City.
Universal Pictures
For Glinda’s apartment, Crowley wanted to contrast the “aggressive” nature of the Wizard’s tower and Madame Morrible’s propaganda tower. “Glinda’s had to be softer, more romantic to suit her personality,” he says. “The inspiration was the golden age of Hollywood, when they did Art Deco and obviously that relates to The Wizard of Oz because the designer for that film, Cedric Gibbons, was a great fan of Art Deco.”
The actual layout of the apartment was more complicated, as the song “The Girl in the Bubble” had the camera moving seamlessly through mirrors and reflections, so an intricate collaboration with director Jon M. Chu and cinematographer Alice Brooks was necessary. “They wanted to move through the mirror and have this sort of journey between her and a reflection,” he says. “A reflection being the past, her being the future person she has to become.”
The solution was to create an almost completely symmetrical set. “There’s two stairs, two mirrors, equal doors… there’s symmetry in that set and it’s there for a very particular reason,” he says. Crowley also says there were many other “tricks” they used in the set, like hinged walls that could move so the camera could seamlessly travel behind the mirrors.
