When speaking to production designer Nathan Crowley a few weeks ago, he recalled how he wanted the movie to feel like you were “touching Oz.” “Wicked” is a movie with a massive amount of practical sets. They grew 9,000 tulips. The Emerald Express was a real train that Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande jumped on. The Wizard’s facade was a complicated puppet held from steel beams in the ceiling. Munchkin Land, the Emerald City and Shiz University were gigantic, pratcial sets. Crowley allowed audiences to touch Oz and now, after an acclaimed career, he may finally be touching Oscar himself.
READ MORE: Jon M. Chu on the surprising cameos that are more than cameos in ‘Wicked’ [Interview]
“Wicked” is Crowley’s seventh Academy Award nomination after previously being recognized for “The Prestige,” “The Dark Knight,” “Interstellar,” “Dunkirk,” “First Man,” and “Tenet.” His other credits include “The Greatest Showman,” “Wonka” and the pilot for “Westworld.” We’re not saying it’s time, but it might be time.
Over the course of our conversation, Crowley goes into detail about building Shiz University, the Emerald Express train, the Emerald City and, much more.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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The Playlist: You are now a seven-time Oscar nominee. Are you feeling Diane Warren-ish? Are you concerned that this will be another year potentially losing again?
Nathan Crowley: [Laughs] Well, I’m used to it, I guess. But it’s a different state of mind. It’s just brilliant to get nominated and I have to always remember that and at the end of the day, if your name is called out, it’ll be fabulous. So, we’ll see. I mean, fingers crossed. I mean, it’s great to continually be part of it, which I’m very grateful for. That means we’ve been doing some diverse work across the years, which I like.
How did the project come your way and what made you want to go down this road to bring “Wicked” to the big screen?
Yeah, perfect. That’s a good question. So John actually, my agent got in touch and said, Jon Chu wants to talk to you. He would’ve been talking to a number of people. I don’t have a colossal musical history…
But you do have some though.
Some. When I did “The Greatest Showman,” which was my first venture, it opened a door for me that I didn’t realize I enjoyed so much. So, I very much realized back then it was like, “Oh, I like this.” I just had never done it. And then “Wonka” happened, which was also fantastic. It’s just opening the door to this kind of musical fantasy. And then when Jon called it was just brilliant. I waited a week and Marc Platt then joined the conversation and we talked it through. And I guess for my entire career, I’ve always been doing things practically making physical sets, and I think they were very interested in feeling Oz and touching Oz, which means you have to sort of construct it. And that really is my thing. Building sets, designing sets, big sets practically. I think they were really interested in that and I’m very much a massive cinema fan. They hired me and I had no idea the joy of this job or looking back now, it was just a very special project, one of the most special projects in my entire career, which is there’s some are up here and Wicked is up here.
You’ve worked on many consequential projects that were huge in scope, that shot for a long time. Is this the longest production you’ve ever worked on or is it similar to your Nolan projects?
It was an enormous schedule and an enormous task to build all these sets. We had a decent amount of prep time. It’s by far the largest film I’ve ever worked on, and that’s probably saying something. It was enormous. And I think I couldn’t have taken this on unless I’d done all the other films that I’ve worked on [before]. I needed all of that experience and I needed all of those brilliant crew members and artists and sculptors that I’d been working with over the years to help me put this together. So, it came at the perfect time. There’s always fortune in Hollywood and you get a bit of luck and a bit of fortune. This came exactly as I was hoping to open this giant fantasy door and move across from my realistic space, [such as] “Batman.” I wanted to try something new and Jon opened that door for me, and he’s just a wonderful person if you ever get to meet him. He’s a very generous man.
He’s super nice. This sounds like such a naive question, but beyond the scope of creating something like Shiv University, it’s also this set that’s outside in the elements. Filmed and constructed in the U.K. in winterish conditions. What goes into construction when you have to build a set that the elements aren’t going to destroy, as opposed to when you’re building something that you won’t be there in a week? Not that you would cut corners or whatever, but does more go into it when you need it for such an extended period?
A hundred percent. I mean, I think it is in the tradition of what I would call the MGM back lots. They’ve always been outside the musical back lots. You have to do dance numbers from start to finish. So you need a controllable space, but there’s no sound stage in the world that could house [it] so you are outside. And we’ve been outside a lot in my career. Like we know we’re going to have problems with wind. So, if we’re building the set to 55 feet high, which is very high, we know we need engineers. We need proper engineered rigging to hold the top, hold the place together, and make sure it can withstand the elements. We’ve worked with engineers for many years so we can sell ’em. And then we have a water tank, which complicates matters because I mean, the reality is all story-driven because we had to come by boat because we couldn’t come by airship, balloon, horse, and car because of other elements of the story. So, it was pretty early on I realized, “Oh, we’ve got to go by boat.” So, we’ve got to find a river. So we can do the approach. We then have to put Shiz in the background. We have to make sure the landscape works, and that’s where we got the white rock from the south coast [of England]. So all these elements play back into what becomes the landscape. Then you realize, “Oh, we need a dock to land the boats as they come through the giant arch” and then you’re like, “O.K., that’s going to cause problems.” We built tanks before. There is no tank ever built that doesn’t leak, but we go in knowing that. So we have pumps and so we make it as sort of bulletproof as possible, but there’s still something always unforeseen. The unforeseen week, as I always call it, in a shoot where you think, “I didn’t see that coming.”
So you have this water tank and then you slowly start to realize if you’ve got to finish the inside walls of Shiz, you can’t fill the water tank because you need to access it with all the machines. For me, it becomes this exciting adventure of building a giant set. It’s not a worry. Everyone’s working, all your painters, your scenics, you are changing things because the joy of building a physical set is you can spend the time building it, of looking at it with people like Jon and Alice [Brooks], the DP and every other department head, and say, “O.K. the dancers, we might need to manipulate this or the best angles would be good here if we put an arch over here.” So you get to sort of sculpt it as you go. So it’s a wonderful process.
You have to build Shiz outside, you have to build the Emerald City outside, you have to build Munchkin Land outside, and then you deal with weather and you have a sound stage set standing by if the weather becomes too much, but you don’t see rain on the camera unless it’s heavy. So, it’s really about the dance. There’s a certain amount of weather that is O.K. and sometimes it gives you something unexpected that could be kind of nice. It rained in the Emerald City, but it gave it a wet down. So when we shot, it had a glistening floor. There are unexpected, sort of unplanned things that make it better. My construction crew unfortunately has to build it over the real winter, and they get snowed on, and then we’ve got to get warming huts there, and the paint doesn’t dry. But we’re used to building in winter, in mud, mud everywhere.
And The Emerald City, that’s also an outside set, or was that interior?
No, no, that was outside. It was next to Shiz. So we had this giant, whatever it was, 25-acre piece of land. We started with Munchkin Land at the front end near the entrance. That was built up on embankments. So as you would run through the real tulip fields. Munchkin Land was sunk, so you could join them digitally, but Munchkin Land had to be a backlot because of the dancing. That was the first set with these huge grass embankments to kind of bury it in the ground. And then next to that was Shiz, which was this enormous water set. And then next to that was Emerald City. And then, adjacent to that, was the barley field with the train and the train station. So we grew barley as well. Everyone talks about the tulips, but the train station is surrounded by barley, which we actually planted and grew as well.
What happened to the barley at the end? Did you guys sell it? Did it go to horses, do you know?
Yeah, it made some beer. [Laughs.] No, I dunno. I mean we trashed a lot of it with the camera crew. So, I don’t think it was worth it I think.
Let’s talk about the train because so many people, and perhaps this is a compliment, can’t believe it’s real. Many viewers think it was a visual effect. Can you talk about what that entailed? I’m assuming there wasn’t a train track on the land you rented…
Exactly. Let’s talk about the train. So we needed to design the Emerald Express. We ended up making a clockwork automaton train because we needed to take some of the technology of the Wizard. He is an illusionist and uses automatons and mechanics. The train had to represent his technology. So I knew how to design it and I’d always intended to build it just because the sort of physicality of the train coming into a station and coming into the Emerald City was, it was too good to miss to not build it. And the other element was the train needed to exist. It is an American fairytale. “Wizard of Oz” is an American fairytale, so you have to have that and the Americana. So I needed big, big empty planes of barley or corn, and the train station just had to be the station on a wooden platform. It was a very sort of Western or Midwest sort of idea. It felt wrong for our actors not to get on a real train. You want that image of the train pulling in, and especially a big green train. Special effects I’ve worked with for many years on different films. I know they can get put an engine, so construction in our department, design it, and we build the carcass, and then special effects lay down the track and put the engine to push it. So the engine’s at the back of the train. And so we’ve been working together for 20 years. So I know we can do it, we just have to convince someone to pay for it. But we need a train. We also, you’re going to the Emerald City. It’s like you’ve got the golden ticket and I need the actors to see the train come into the station and feel passion. It’s like a magical moment. So, if you can give them real objects to react to, and also the crew, if you give them moving trains, everyone gets into that frame of mind to make a film and make the best film they can. I mean, I went up and down on the train, I want to get on the train. Who doesn’t want to get on the train?
I want to get on the train! I’m sure someone wants to go to Universal Studios in Hollywood or Orlando and ride it. How fast could it go?
Didn’t go very fast. It was an electric engine. A big, big engine at the back to push it. I’m not actually sure of the actual weight. I thought it was 32 tons, but some people say it’s more. We never weighed it. And we set, I don’t know how many, at least probably about 500 feet of track. So we could push it to the end of the barley field and then drive it in, stop, and then drive it off. So you could pick up your passengers, pick up Alphaba and Glinda, and off you go. The other important design elements were these giant wheels. So when they’re standing against it in profile, they’re surrounded by these bronze clockwork wheels. The reason it has all that lovely, beautiful shape, the panel work is each panel that’s about the size we could mold. So, we had to come up with a design [where] we could have a hundred or a hundred different panels that we could make and would form a beautiful shape with a lovely pattern in you. I mean that’s what we do.
Let’s talk about the animatronic of the Wizard itself. The facade that he hides behind. What was the aesthetic inspiration for that design, and then how complicated was it to build?
So early on, I knew if I could get the Wizard’s head – “I am Oz – if we could get that physically there, and we can push through a curtain, that would be magical for me. I want to be intimidated by the Wizard’s head. And so we had a puppeteer in our special effects department who’d worked on “War Horse” [the stage play] and he made a little maquette saying, I can get all these movements from a face. And so we sat with Jon with the little, it was about 12 inches high, and he automated it. And this again goes back to the Wizards technology. He’s an automaton builder, he’s a watchmaker, he has mechanics, he’s an illusionist, the great orange tree illusion from the late 1800s. And so that’s the wizard’s magic. It’s an illusion. The man behind the curtain. So you know, we need a curtain. So I’d seen a lot of string sculpture at the Dia Beacon in upstate New York, the modernist gallery. And it occurred to me that we should make a deep green string curtain that the head could push through and you could sort of see the breath coming and the strings would move, the curtains would move and you’d see an eye. And so all of this and all the people involved came together. There were definitely stumbling blocks, like holding that head and pushing it through the curtain and animating it at the same time was a difficult thing. It was the big hydraulics that pushed it through. The curtains were attached to the ceiling, so we didn’t have any floor space. An enormous amount of engineering and steelwork went into it and the technology, but it worked perfectly on the day for camera. It was like a little mini stage show that everyone had little cables to pull the curtains. And when you see Glinda and Elphaba’s reaction when they first came onto the set and it came through the curtain again, it put them there. It’s like “This is intimidating” and that’s what the Wizard does. He intimidates everyone.
I hope, to see it again in the second movie. Maybe?
I can’t talk to that. [Laughs.]
Can you say what you’re working on next? Or have you just been taking a well-deserved vacation?
We took a lot of time. We did three films in a row between “Wonka,” “Wicked One”, and “Wicked Two.” So, we’ve been taking a lot of time off. We’ve been consulting on some stuff. We always do odd things. You have to let your brain rest and do other things. So I’m not actually on a giant film project. I don’t think anyone realizes, even though we’ve made a lot of films, but we went on a two-month hike, you know what I mean? You have to do other things in life that inspire you to do other things, to put your head back in a place ready to do another. The problem is, after doing “Wicked” what do you do? Because that was an incredible film to work on. How do you repeat that experience or do you repeat it? I dunno, it’s a bigger question.
“Wicked” is now available to watch on Peacock.
