Jon M. Chu on Making the Oz of ‘Wicked’ an Onscreen Reality: ‘We Had to Actually Build Cultures’
“I walked in on a Munchkin taking a nap!” Ariana Grande said with a straight face at a “Wicked” post-screening Q&A November 12 at the DGA theater in New York. “In Munchkin land! Inside the Munchkin huts, there were Munchkins sleeping everywhere!”
That was the kind of 360-degree realism director Jon M. Chu was going for in the long-anticipated adaptation of the musical “Wicked.” Chu wanted Oz to be a physical place, not just CGI. So that meant nine million flowers in the field (a number repeated a few times during the chat!) as well as big set pieces for the actors to ground themselves in.
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“We all have a different relationship with Oz, the color, the thing,” Chu explained. “And what we did was we really looked at Oz and said, ‘…What are the people, and how do they struggle together or apart?’ And in order to do that, we had to actually build cultures. We had to build munchkins. We had to build what Emerald City was; how diverse or how ambitious those people were. We had to build what the Wizard was bringing to that. And that meant you had to touch it and feel it; [we] wanted the ground to be dirty; we wanted to have dust and scratches.”
He continued, “It gave us a touchstone, so that [the cast] can then build characters, real characters that can have real reactions to certain things. Even the process of acting it, to see a giant wizard head that actually moves, which took a crazy amount of engineering, or the [shoe and clothing] boxes in ‘Popular.’ It seems simple, but there were giant men in small spaces and wiring that could crush your toes if you get too close. And the chandelier [that Grande swings from] had a guy up there for safety to spin her around. She’s actually very, very high. These things were there in place so that we could take the characters seriously. And I think credit to Marc [Platt, the film’s producer], who defended us against the studio in every way.”
In addition to the physical world of the Emerald City, of course, there’s the emotional world. Chu and cast members — including Cynthia Erivo, Jeff Goldblum, Grande, Marissa Bode and Ethan Slater — spoke about how Oz holds such a prestigious place in the cultural imagination.
“‘Wizard of Oz’ is so personal to everybody; it’s personal to my family,” Chu said. “As immigrants in my family came over, that [the idea of] the yellow brick road, the wizard that would give you your heart’s desire. We all have our pieces in this. It’s the American fairy tale, about the American dream here.” Regarding the story’s timely themes, Chu said, “What’s happening now didn’t exist when they wrote it, but these scenarios always did. Everyone always rose above it. The resilience of the people always rose above it. And I love that, that we get to remind people that you have to just keep walking. So for me, it was: How do you get the big scope and use the tools of cinema to sweep people [up]? I really believe that movies — I saw with ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ — really can change things, really can make a difference.”
Bode, who portrays Elphaba’s sister Nessarose and uses a wheelchair, is already seeing that dream.
“I really hope to be part of the change in the future so that more disabled people can be cast in things and be a part of that change,” she said. “And what was really special the other night in Los Angeles at the L.A. premiere, I had my wonderful girlfriend with me, who’s also disabled, and seeing mini-Nessa on screen was just so special, and she ended up breaking down in tears just seeing that moment. Because it’s like seeing her inner child and seeing a part of her that she also didn’t see on screen growing up, and for me, it was almost a little bit healing also… Hopefully, having this kind of representation can embolden other disabled people to feel less alone and to advocate for themselves and ask for their accommodations and know that they’re not asking for too much when they’re asking for their basic human rights.”
A Universal Pictures release, “Wicked” hits theaters November 22.
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