Cinematographer Alice Brooks nonetheless has the feather she discovered on Will Rogers State Seashore the day she advised her mom that she would reasonably work behind the digicam than in entrance of it.
It was a giant second. Although solely 15, Brooks had been working as a toddler actor for a decade. By the point she was 10, she had finished virtually 40 nationwide commercials, a tribute to Mary Martin on Broadway and an ongoing skit for “Late Night With David Letterman.” Brooks’ sister was having much more success; the household had moved to Los Angeles from New York to additional the ladies’ careers.
On the day Brooks discovered her feather in 1994, she had simply had her seventh and ultimate audition for a small half within the rom-com “While You Were Sleeping.” It was right down to her and one other lady and Brooks knew she hadn’t gotten it.
She additionally knew that she didn’t really need it. Visiting her sister on units, Brooks had turn into more and more enamored of the lighting crew.
“I thought it was magical to sit on a dark sound stage,” she says over Zoom from her dwelling in Maine, “and one by one, a light would go on and out of very little, you created magic. That’s what I wanted to do.”
After the audition, Brooks and her mom walked on the seashore and Brooks advised her, “I don’t want to be an actor — I want to be a cinematographer.”
“My mother said, ‘I know. Let’s figure out what we can do to make that possible.’ I looked down and there was this little feather. I got it framed and it’s moved with me everywhere. It’s a reminder of the moment when I declared my dream.”
If that feels like one thing out of a fairy story, in some ways it’s. A magical feather wouldn’t be misplaced in “Wicked: For Good,” the second of Jon M. Chu’s “Wicked” movies for which Brooks served as director of pictures and cinematographer.
Cynthia Erivo, left, and Ariana Grande within the film “Wicked: For Good.”
(Giles Keyte / Common Photos)
Opening huge on Friday, “Wicked: For Good” continues the story of Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo), Glinda (Ariana Grande) and lots of different residents of Ozas they face the implications of Elphaba’s realization that her beloved Wizard (Jeff Goldblum) isn’t just a fraud however a tyrant. Sides should be taken and decisions made as Elphaba does her finest to battle for the liberty of Oz.
It’s a darker movie than the primary one, each thematically and actually. Brooks, who loves musicals greater than every other form of movie, is thought for her deep understanding of coloration and her means to make use of close-ups and seize particulars even in essentially the most extravagant dance quantity.
“Alice is not about the tricks and gadgets of cinematography,” Chu says in a latest cellphone interview. “She’s about savoring the essence of the frame, the lens, specifically the light. She sees things in a humanistic way. She’s a storyteller, not a technician.”
Differing from “Wicked,” Brooks selected a handheld digicam for extra scenes in “For Good,” which has fewer massive dance numbers and extra intimate moments. Elphaba and Glinda have left the playfully Gothic Shiz College and gone their separate methods. The lighting and hues of their respective environments mirror how totally different their circumstances — and world-views — have turn into.
Early on, Brooks had determined that the solar would all the time rise for Glinda and set for Elphaba. Darkness, dimness and silence make “For Good” a marked distinction from the Technicolor effusiveness of “Wicked.” Whereas doing prep, she, Chu and different crew members created a visible roadmap that listed all of the intentions and feelings that may carry every scene.
“For the first film,” Brooks says, “those intentions were things like celebration, joy, power, friendship and choice. For the second they were sacrifice, surrender, consequence.”
“It became very clear,” she continues, “that the first movie would be effervescent and the second would have a weight and a maturity to it. But there’s a visual heartbeat, through lighting and camera, that connects the two.”
Brooks calls the “Wicked” movies “the greatest love story about two women.” However actual love tales contain selecting to remain the course regardless of the inevitable setbacks and conflicts. Throughout the course of their friendship, Elphaba and Glinda should take dangers and resolve which goals actually matter in the long run.
Certainly, Brooks says her favourite shot within the new movie is one by which Glinda has to make a tough name. “We lit her with one teeny tiny light so it’s a very low light, very shallow focus. The only thing that’s in focus is her eyes and you just sit with her.”
It’s a distinct type of shot, even in a movie that makes use of silence and stillness extra markedly than the primary.
“Jon creates a team that all trust each other so much that when we have ideas, he’s willing to try them or trust us to tell him if he’s gone too far one way or another,” Brooks says. “And this movie is about the quiet places, amid all the noise of all the propaganda that’s going on in Oz.”
Brooks, Chu says, connects with the characters on a deep emotional stage. “It’s not about the razzle dazzle — it’s about what you feel,” the director says. “So I can have all those vulnerable conversations about character with her.”
For Brooks, the dream she confessed to harboring on that Santa Monica seashore virtually 30 years in the past, has most definitely come true. Within the final 5 years, her profession has taken off with “In the Heights,” “Tick, Tick … Boom!,” “Queen Bees” and the “Wicked” movies. In February, she turned certainly one of solely a few ladies to ever be nominated for the American Cinematographers Society award for a theatrical launch. (Rachel Morrison was the primary, in 2018, for “Mudbound” and Mandy Walker turned the primary feminine winner in 2023 for “Elvis.”) It’s a nomination she may simply replicate with “Wicked: For Good.” She’s presently engaged on “Spiderman: Beyond the Spider-Verse.”
Brooks was born in New York, the place she grew up in a household wealthy with love and creativity — her father, Stephen Levi, was a playwright, her mom, Candace Coulston, a singer and a dancer — however typically quick on funds. “We lived a teeny tenement apartment on 29th and 2nd Avenue above the Wonderland Blues Bar,” Brooks says. “I know what it is to not have enough food.”
“Alice is not about the tricks and gadgets of cinematography,” says director Jon M. Chu. “She’s about savoring the essence of the frame, the lens, specifically the light. She sees things in a humanistic way.”
(Christina Home / Los Angeles Occasions)
Cash was one purpose Brooks and her sister turned little one actors and why her announcement that she wished to be a cinematographer was such a giant deal. She knew she must go to movie college and the household couldn’t afford it.
Her mom, agreeing on each counts, selected the movie college at USC. “She made me apply in person and she told them, ‘Alice deserves to go here, but we can’t afford to send her,’” Brooks remembers.
Two weeks later Brooks acquired a full educational scholarship from USC, in addition to a smaller one from the Ebell of Los Angeles.
Over the course of her research, she met Chu.
“She had a reputation before I even knew her,” he says, remembering certainly one of her early assignments, a undertaking she photographed however didn’t direct. “It opened with a subway shot and when the screen went dark, she had a black light that showed up all the graffiti and I was like, ‘Who is this? I have to work with her.’”
When she completed in 2001, she knew she couldn’t afford graduate college so she labored as a waitress whereas trying to persuade movie college students to let her shoot their thesis movies. She did 30 in a single 12 months, together with Chu’s a lot acclaimed early musical “When the Kids Are Away.” He was impressed by her love of musicals and her willingness to remain up till 2 within the morning modifying her movies.
Like Chu, she was thought-about a rising star and wound up with a reel that bought her an agent.
“And then,” she says with a small, rueful snort, “everything was really hard for the next 20 years.”
Even with an agent, Brooks discovered it tough to seek out work that paid, both in cash or respectable movie credit, by no means thoughts anybody who was making the musicals she longed to shoot. The pixie mud of movie college wore off pretty rapidly, she remembers.
“I started doing features where I made a hundred dollars a day and no one has ever seen them and they’re terrible,” she says. “The thesis films had money and lights — you have everything and suddenly you don’t have anything. So learning how to make movies with nothing was a new skill set.”
After 4 years of ready tables and making forgettable films, she determined she’d had sufficient of Los Angeles and its cutthroat competitors.
”I stored getting so near breaking by means of after which not getting there,” she says. She moved to Maine, the place her mom now lives.
There, she met her husband, Sam Spencer, a businessman who was working for the state’s Democratic Social gathering. They had been attending President Obama’s 2009 inauguration when, out of the blue, Chu referred to as. He had launched his first characteristic movie, “Step Up 2: The Streets” and he wished Brooks for his subsequent undertaking.
“I was outside in the freezing cold in Washington, D.C., and I hadn’t talked to him for a couple of years. He said ‘I’ve got this idea for a web series that Hulu is going to do. You need to be in L.A. tomorrow.’”
“I called her,” Chu says, “because it was a high-ambition show with no resources and that’s what we were best at — we knew how to make something out of nothing. Someone who was going break new ground. Alice was that person to always do that.”
Brooks flew to L.A. the subsequent day and commenced taking pictures the net sequence “The Legion of Extraordinary Dancers,” which adopted the adventures of a gaggle of males whose superpower was their means to bop. (The sequence was choreographed by Christopher Scott, who had starred in “Step Up 2” and would go on to work with Chu and Brooks on “In the Heights” and “Wicked.”)
They labored on “Legion” for 3 years, then re-united for the characteristic movie “Jem and the Holograms,” which had the alternative impact of boosting her profession.
“It was,” Brooks says, “a complete box-office disaster.”
For a minute in 2017, it appeared that she and Chu would collaborate once more, on an ABC musical drama that had breakthrough promise.
“I thought: Great, finally I have made it. I was 38 years old, about to turn 39, I have a kid and it was more money than I had ever made,” she remembers.
When the present was axed mere days earlier than manufacturing was set to start, Brooks took it as an indication that her dream was lifeless.
“I sat in the car and cried and cried,” she says. “Luckily, my daughter slept through it. I told my husband, ‘I’m done. I can’t keep doing this. I feel like there’s no success in my future.’”
Spencer advised her it was wonderful if she stop. “Then there was this long pause,” Brooks remembers, “and he said, ‘But you can’t do it tomorrow. You have to wait six months and in those six months, you have to do everything you can.’ Finally I agreed.”
Ariana Grande, left, and Cynthia Erivo in “Wicked: For Good.”
(Giles Keyte / Common Photos)
She shot a small musical movie in New York “which gave me confidence,” Brooks says, and made weekly journeys from Maine for days full of conferences. She bought a brand new agent and landed the Ellen Burstyn movie “Queen Bees.”
Then, six months after she advised her husband she wished to stop, Chu reached out once more. He was in the midst of making “Crazy Rich Asians” and he wished her to fulfill with Dana Fox, who had co-created what could be Chu’s subsequent undertaking, the sequence “Home Before Dark.”
She bought the job and when she met Chu in Vancouver to start taking pictures, he requested her to affix him on his subsequent movie, “In the Heights.”
“‘Crazy Rich Asians’ had come out,” Brooks mentioned, “and he suddenly had power to say who he wanted.”
And Brooks was precisely who Chu wished.
“I like being around someone who knows exactly what she’s doing but is open to other ideas,” he says. “We call each other out and we get to paint together.”
Her work on “In the Heights” led to Lin-Manuel Miranda asking her to shoot “Tick, Tick … Boom!,” the autobiographical musical written by Jonathan Larson, who died on the opening evening of his then-new musical “Rent.”
Quickly after, Chu advised her that his crew could be transferring on to “Wicked.”
“For Jon, the team is like family,” Brooks says, including that a few of that crew, together with her, Chu and Scott, had simply shot a Goal business to air at Christmas.
With the “Wicked” films, which had been filmed on the identical time over the course of 155 days, Brooks had each useful resource conceivable (together with her personal crew of 200 folks) and bought to do just about all the pieces she had ever imagined as a cinematographer.
“Jon encourages every single person on his to dream bigger and better than before,” she says. “He wants you to go out and be your ultimate creative self.”
Even so, there have been loads of moments when even the best-laid plans went awry. Capturing scenes with Grande and Erivo could possibly be a problem — every required fully totally different lighting, which meant that Brooks needed to make audible calls to the lighting crew as their scenes had been shot. When the set for Ozwas constructed, choreographer Scott realized it was a lot greater than he had envisioned and it could require no less than 100 extra dancers for giant numbers, so Brooks needed to transfer elements round to accommodate cameras and cranes.
“I remember laying on the ground with Jon in the middle of that set as we tried to figure things out and him laughing and saying, ‘It’s just like film school.’”
As her five-year-long journey in Ozinvolves an in depth, Brooks is engaged on “Spiderman: Beyond the Spider-Verse,” her first animated characteristic, which is able to come out in 2027 and scouting places for a Colman Domingo undertaking concerning the love affair between Kim Novak and Sammy Davis Jr.
A kind of places was the historic headquarters of the Ebell, which had given Brooks a scholarship all these years in the past.
Over the Zoom name, Brooks holds up the feather she has stored for 30 years. Attempting to make it in Hollywood, she says, remembering some recommendation she was given, is like attempting to get to the opposite aspect of a brick wall by throwing stones at it. In some unspecified time in the future you’ll get exhausted and, seeing that you’ve made solely the tiniest gap, you’ll want to stop.
“That’s the moment” she says, “when you have to keep going.”
