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Architectural Digest welcomes back production designer Nathan Crowley to share how ‘Wicked For Good’ brings the Land of Oz to life. Find out how Crowley recreated the Yellow Brick Road using painted scenic backings inspired by the 1939 ‘Wizard of Oz’ and staged Kiamo Ko for Elphaba and Glinda to sing No Good Deed and For Good. Step behind the scenes to see how timeless Hollywood artistry and modern design come together to reimagine Oz for a new generation.
WICKED: FOR GOOD is in theaters November 21, 2025. https://wickedmovie.com
WICKED: FOR GOOD is in theaters November 21, 2025. https://wickedmovie.com
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00:00It's an old Hollywood trick.
00:01We hand paint all the backings with scenic painters,
00:04much as they did in the past, in the 39 film,
00:07The Wizard of Oz.
00:08So if you look here, everything this side is real set,
00:11everything this side is painted backing.
00:14So we very much looked at the golden age of Hollywood
00:16in the 30s and really took cues from that era.
00:20Hi, I'm Nathan Crowley, the production designer
00:23for Wicked For Good, and I'm here today
00:24to talk to you about the building of Oz.
00:30Here we have the map of Oz.
00:32So in the first film, we mainly center on Chis University,
00:36which sits up in Gillikin country, quite north.
00:39And we travel between here and the Emerald City.
00:41And then we also travel between the Munchkin village
00:45and the Emerald City.
00:46And the only other place we sort of feature
00:48is Elphaba singing The Wizard and I
00:50and looking over the impassable desert.
00:52And the journey that leads us during film two
00:55exists from the Emerald City
00:58when she leaves it in Defying Gravity through the forest,
01:01the great forests of Oz, where she builds
01:04her really temporary sanctuary, a hiding place,
01:07and eventually ends up at Chiamako,
01:08which is an ancient seat of Oz,
01:10once owned by Fiero's family.
01:13And now in Chiamako, we understand the creation
01:15of the Wicked Witch of the West.
01:17Galinda's journey south to Emerald City
01:19eventually becomes her journey
01:21into being the Good Witch of the North.
01:23And we start identifying those main characters.
01:26If Nessa Rose becomes a Wicked Witch of the East,
01:28we get to understand the creation of the Tin Man,
01:31the creation of the Lion,
01:32the creation of the Scarecrow,
01:34and eventually they come together for good.
01:37The other defining connective tissue in this film
01:39is the yellow brick road.
01:41The story demands that we now start to see
01:45what that yellow brick road signifies to the story.
01:50Here we have Elphaba trying to free the animals
01:53that are enslaved to build this yellow brick road.
01:56So what we're actually seeing here is,
01:58this is on location, this is all real road,
02:01and this is CGI trees, but we've photographed them
02:04at the studio because we've made them for the forest,
02:06so the VFX have the information they need.
02:08And Elphaba's actually on wires here,
02:10and we are landing her with big cranes onto the road.
02:13You'll see piles of bricks in the background here.
02:17These come from Munchkinland, and Munchkins are tasked
02:19with only using and planting yellow tulips,
02:22which provides the colors for the bricks.
02:24Mark Eves, our farmer who grew all the nine million tulips,
02:28he also planted a million yellow tulips.
02:30And we need to see these tulips being cut down,
02:33the yellow dye used, taken to Munchkinland,
02:36and made into bricks.
02:37Behind this camera, a few fills away,
02:39all the colorful tulips we grew for film one.
02:41Farmer who grew all those nine million tulips,
02:44we actually get to see them in the second film,
02:46and at the end of this sequence,
02:47you'll see one of the guards run across our nine million tulips
02:51from the first film, High Shot, into the Munchkin village.
02:54Really, in film one, all the colored tulips
02:56were this joy and delight,
02:57and really showed the colorfulness of Oz,
03:00and the freedom, and the lifestyle of the Munchkins.
03:03These yellow tulips represent quite the opposite, oppression,
03:07the turning of Oz into a place that the wizard is controlling.
03:12So these are not good.
03:14Here we have the yellow brick road pushing west through the forest,
03:17and these are made out of plasters,
03:19and then we have to paint it yellow,
03:20and that's where it actually gets a bit tricky,
03:22because yellow under different lighting becomes very difficult.
03:24So once we've found the yellow we like,
03:27we then use a series of different glazes.
03:30So under different lighting conditions,
03:32it will fill the same color.
03:33And this was a set build on quite a large stage
03:37in Sky Studios north of London.
03:39And you can start to see the fact that we weave it,
03:42and it goes down here and up here
03:45to create these sort of undulating hills.
03:48So you may wonder why it's always winding and undulating,
03:53especially in the 39 film.
03:55It's really taken from how they did the first film.
03:57Because they went straight into backings,
03:59and you have to create a transfer gap between real set and backing.
04:04So you have to feel like there's another gentle rolling hill
04:07before you hit the backings.
04:08So this is an old trick from the original film,
04:10where you literally go down and you come back up
04:12and you create a little hump.
04:13So you feel like it goes down here and back up into the backing.
04:17We put a canvas up around the entire stage,
04:20as high as the 35 feet,
04:22and we hand paint the backing with scenic painters.
04:24And then we light that.
04:25Oddly, if it's photographically sharp,
04:29it looks flat and fake.
04:30But whereas a painter,
04:32the fact that you get a slight diffusion through paint
04:35allows the human imagination to push that backing away.
04:39OK, so here we have a stage plan,
04:41which is a top view looking down on the forest
04:44and the yellow brick road.
04:45So here is the yellow brick road with undulating ramping,
04:49and it finishes here.
04:51So we're at high points here.
04:52We're probably at plus six, plus six.
04:54And we go down to plus one in the center
04:56and then probably plus two there.
04:58So you can really feel the undulation.
05:00Around this whole stage,
05:02this is the painted backing, the whole lot.
05:04And we can't really paint this
05:06until we understand all the placements of the trees.
05:10So we can start to understand what views we need
05:14and how the perspective works into the backing.
05:17So the perspective on this side is not hard
05:19because we know the yellow brick road is going to wind in
05:21and it's surrounded by trees.
05:23So we know kind of these two sides.
05:25It's these two sides in terms of the painted backing
05:28that we really have to be careful with
05:30because we don't want a big tree too close to the backing.
05:33And if we have a big tree there,
05:34we're going to need to put perspectives
05:37of trees getting smaller at the right scale into that backing.
05:41So it's very important that it happens as one journey for the scenics,
05:46for the set construction, for the greens department.
05:49And we'll paint it for night.
05:50And then if there's areas we need, we can paint it for day two.
05:54Okay. So the other place, the yellow brick road exists,
05:59is in Munchkinland in the village.
06:01So here we have the collision of the Wizard of Oz and Wicked.
06:04We're looking at the yellow brick road as it comes in and it curls.
06:09This spiral is the actual collision of the two stories.
06:14So this is the story of Dorothy on her journey to the Emerald City.
06:17And it's a journey that's really been created by the wizard.
06:21She's now being used by the wizard as a witch hunter to chase Elphaba.
06:25We have the tornado that drops the house on the Wicked Witch of the East.
06:29We have Nessa Rose's journey down towards that tragic moment.
06:34This is also the moment where Glinda and Elphaba confront each other.
06:38There's a very intense emotional moment.
06:41We have a lot of story ideas colliding and that needs a lot of visual ideas.
06:47So here we have the crashed house.
06:50That's the start of Dorothy's story.
06:52And it's the start of the Wizard of Oz clashing with Wicked.
06:56So how do we do a crashed house in Munchkinland?
07:00We're also doing a lot of filming here without the house.
07:03Practically, we need to create this house somewhere else.
07:08And we need to design it, make it, fabricate it so we can move it into place.
07:13So this image shows us constructing the crashed house outside the set.
07:18We actually built it about 300 feet behind the set.
07:21And we sculpted it and built it and then figured out how to move it and crane it into position
07:26for these shots and then take it out for the filming that happened after it.
07:30These are all prop warehouses.
07:32Actually, we're growing tulips in this one.
07:34And so behind here is the actual set.
07:37So this looks like a house from the outside.
07:39But inside, it's just a series of bracing and structure.
07:43So we can pick it up and crane it onto set as a sort of overnight changeover.
07:47So the inside is a series of cross bracing, except where we'd have to put a window dressing
07:54and actually some pieces of furniture or wall hangings for any view we might see through a window.
07:58So you'll notice how these windows are notoriously small.
08:02And that really is to constrict the view because we've got to lift this thing onto set.
08:05So we have to make sure that the structure is safe.
08:08This is the most famous house in a fairy tale.
08:11It's most certainly American fairy tale.
08:13So it really has to be a slice of Americana.
08:15There's a painter called Andrew Wyeth who described a lot of this type of farmhouse in his painting.
08:21So we really have to connect with the feeling that those paintings give you
08:26alongside something you're very familiar with.
08:28And we spend a lot of time looking at this house and deciding how this collapse,
08:32how roof tiles collapse, how wall might collapse, how window might collapse.
08:36Remembering we have to leave an area for the shoes to exist,
08:40which is actually one of the most important pieces of this design.
08:45One of the most important sets in the second film is Kiamako.
08:49It's actually where we hinted it in the first film, in the opening shot,
08:53but it really exists in the second film as a new set, a very important place.
08:58It's really what we know as the castle of the Wicked Witch of the West.
09:01This is as far west as Oz goes.
09:04This is being held onto the land of Oz by a very small bridge and it's pushing west
09:10into the impassable desert.
09:11And this is a reminder of where our story ends.
09:14There's two sets I needed.
09:16I needed this area for No Good Deed.
09:19So I needed this arch area here to play a whole scene.
09:22And then I needed the battlements at the top for good.
09:24For good being a very emotional song and the connection of these two friends.
09:30Could I then design it in a way that it felt like it belonged to Elphaba when she finally
09:35becomes the Wicked Witch of the West?
09:37And here I saw the opportunity to start bringing in the time that belongs to the Grimmery.
09:44Could I make a castle that felt like the top half was floating?
09:50So how do we make a floating castle?
09:53So some time ago I thought, well, if you have arches that sit on the ground,
09:58you know, wouldn't that be great?
09:59But what if they didn't sit on the ground and they floated?
10:02So the magic in a floating arch, which is great.
10:04But that would mean there's really a very small gap between the arch and the floor.
10:10But what if the castle had a mirrored arch in it?
10:14So then suddenly you get these arches that feel like they are floating.
10:19So from a distance, we start to see views and light through all these arches,
10:25but they don't connect.
10:26So the whole top half of the castle here feels like it is floating.
10:32Here we have the No Good Deeds set.
10:35And you'll notice here's the floating columns.
10:37Here's the gap.
10:38Here's the arches, which connect to allow the castle to float,
10:42if this is the upper bit of the castle.
10:44This place is also a network of stairs, trapdoors for the monkey, hidden passages.
10:50These trapdoors and these staircases play a very important part in the final scenes
10:55of film two, Wicked For Good, and you'll find out why.
10:59This was the planned idea of what we might build on a soundstage.
11:02Here's the problem.
11:03We would need to hang this entire top half of the set because it doesn't connect to the bottom half
11:09from the grid.
11:10And then we need to put this lower half on the floor with its upside down arches,
11:14which ultimately wouldn't allow the camera to make the moves it needed within the set.
11:20And so there's a lot of complexity in here.
11:22We knew that we could only build the moments where Elphaba needed to travel for No Good Deed.
11:30And so within this set, we just picked certain parts of it and built those bits only
11:35on a soundstage, still leaving the correct distances.
11:38So it was a strange set.
11:39It looked kind of half built.
11:41So visual effects could take this 3D model and then recreate the bits in between,
11:47and they wouldn't get in the way of the camera.
11:49And also allow us to put in the flying monkeys where we needed and the rest of the castle.
11:55Kiamako also houses the battlements,
11:57which is the top portion of the floating section of the castle.
12:01And that's where we stage For Good, one of the main songs of the second film.
12:06We came up with this design of the battlements that really was in keeping with passageways,
12:11special staircases, and rooftops.
12:13So we have walkways, caps, all leading the large turret,
12:18which is where we house the scene where Dorothy melts the Wicked Witch of the West.
12:23And all of this is pushing west.
12:26So the Impassable Desert's down here.
12:27So it really feels like it's a wave of architecture at the front of Kiamako.
12:32This is the set we constructed at The Play For Good.
12:35When we sing For Good, they are looking out west into the Impassable Desert,
12:40knowing the journey that is coming.
12:42And we've got these flying buttresses, which give us shape and form.
12:46We sculpted these two fallen angels,
12:49which really play into the story of these two great friends.
12:52So then there's key story points here,
12:55which is the buckets and the water pump for the witch hunters when they arrive.
12:58Rather than just the stone castle we see a lot,
13:01I ended up putting in these glazed brick steps that work all the way through this castle,
13:06just to really push the blue or maybe make it a bit more Aussian.
13:12Here's the only bit we saw in the first film,
13:14with the flying monkeys crashing out through the window.
13:17And that's how we opened the first film.
13:19But the entire film concludes here in The Wicked Witch of the West Chamber.
13:23But the reason there's a big window here is this faces the Impassable Desert.
13:29You'll see the stepping brick,
13:31the glazed blue brick that collides with the floor.
13:34These stepping glazed brick pilasters are sort of inspired in a sort of modern
13:39Art Deco kind of form with the stepping down.
13:42Behind the tapestries are hidden doors.
13:44And that's important for when Glinda witnesses the events that happen in this room.
13:49Let's talk about where Elphaba goes directly after the first film.
13:54She leaves the Emerald City and she heads towards the forest.
13:57And this is where she makes a hiding place.
14:00And the idea here was to build a hiding place in what I consider the mother tree of the forest.
14:09So what does that look like in terms of design?
14:11So now we need to build this set on a soundstage.
14:14Talking to the greens department, they felt that if we gave them a rough structure,
14:18they could actually weave this out of found branches and materials from the forest.
14:24We were sort of excited to sculpt out of natural materials a whole set.
14:28So we knew we were going to weave this with our greens department.
14:31And we knew that the steel department had to provide some kind of framework.
14:34Because the other thing that really enhances this design is we know
14:39OSEAN trees are circular and they curve upwards and the branch weaves together.
14:45So how do we do it?
14:46You can see the structure, you can see some of the tubes, the steel tube here.
14:49And here you see our greens department or one person.
14:53Here you see our greens department with their materials.
14:55And then they slowly start to weave this into a nest.
14:59We had the construction riggers give them structure as they went.
15:02We started with the entrance door here and we weaved as many branches as we could.
15:07And we needed to flow them around this area.
15:10And once we got that structure and then we could turn those branches into windows and openings,
15:16we could then find a way to go down into the bedroom and out onto the balcony.
15:20So this was very much a sculptural job.
15:22It was a piece of art.
15:23It's probably about 30, 40 feet in circumference.
15:26Our size of our greens department was quite large.
15:29It had at least 40 people.
15:31That's because we were doing landscapes.
15:32We were doing munchkin land.
15:33We were dealing with the flowers and the thatching.
15:36We had about three or four people from the greens department working on this.
15:40And really it needed to be less because it was a weaving job.
15:43We needed particular people who would slowly look at this and make it.
15:47It couldn't be hit on mass.
15:49Here's the finished set looking from the doorway out to the balcony here.
15:54And you can see everything is natural from the greens department,
15:57apart from this tree which is sculpted by our construction department.
16:01And you can see it splays out to allow us to create this roof of branches.
16:05And so how do we get light into here?
16:07Well we can't leave it open because you'll see the stage ceiling.
16:10So we don't want to put blue screen up here.
16:12So then the plasterer said we think out of resin we could make these giant leaves
16:16out of translucent material.
16:18And if we layered those up it would look like the canopy of a forest in translucent materials.
16:22And so we laid those on top of this canopy and that allowed us to hide any lights.
16:29And then the lighting department would take away the leaves where they were pushing light through.
16:33And you can see the windows.
16:34These are woven branches.
16:35Here's a woven window from the outside.
16:39So you can see how they wove these windows.
16:42So if we needed to get a shot from the outside in we could then frame that area.
16:46You can see some sort of dense wicker fencing here.
16:49This was used to kill any light leaks from the outside.
16:53So the greens department foraged for a very particular type of branch that had some flexibility
16:58and then we could actually weave with.
17:00We kind of designed this as we went with the help of all our departments.
17:04Because it was a piece of sculpture.
17:07So while Elphaba is heading west to Chiamaco we find Glinda in the Emerald City.
17:14And now we get to describe the three towers of the Emerald City.
17:18So we have the Wizard's Tower where Elphaba in Defying Gravity departed from.
17:24We have Madame Morrible's Tower where the Propaganda Room is in film two.
17:29And that's her domain.
17:30And then we now have Glinda's Tower which is slightly more elegant.
17:36Now we get to describe all these new places in the Emerald City that exist higher up.
17:41And you can start to see a transition from more solid materials which exist on our backlog set
17:48up into the lighter, more sort of translucent materials that form the three towers of Emerald City.
17:54One of the reasons we do this kind of conceptual drawing and three-dimensional drawing in the art
17:59department, we need to design every inch of Oz and every piece of architecture, every landscape.
18:04So in post-production visual effects know what everything looks like.
18:08And they know that from our 3D model if you're at Glinda's looking out here,
18:12you're looking across at this view here.
18:15So it's very important during production that the art department not only build the sets down here
18:21with construction and set deck.
18:23Even though it's digital, we have to keep designing the whole of the Emerald City
18:29so we know exactly what each view is and it all starts to make sense.
18:33So in Glinda's tower, we have Glinda's apartment.
18:39So in film 2, in Elphaba's journey out of the Emerald City was her realization that she has to
18:46become the villain that Oz needs, not the hero they deserve.
18:51And she has to become the Wicked Witch of the West.
18:53Glinda's journey centers on the Emerald City and she has to give up privilege to become the Good Witch of
18:59the North and we needed to create an interior that suited Glinda but still kind of clung onto the
19:05Emerald City.
19:06So we very much looked at the golden age of Hollywood in the 30s and really took cues from that era.
19:12One of the reasons I liked that idea was because the designer Cedric Gibbons of the original Wizard of
19:18Oz, his favorite architecture was Art Deco.
19:21So I really felt that it belonged to Glinda, belonged to the Wizard of Oz, belonged to Wicked,
19:25and we could now introduce it to Glinda.
19:28We'd have to change a few things.
19:29We'd have to put luscious silk fabric panels everywhere.
19:33We had to soften it with this wonderful sunken seating area.
19:36The reason why we employed symmetry for the Girl in the Bubble,
19:41because a Girl in the Bubble is the moment after Glinda sees the witch hunters leave to go and
19:48kill her best friend.
19:49She doesn't like her reflection anymore.
19:51This is a turning point for Glinda.
19:53So that number has to divide itself into reflection and the real Glinda and leave the reflection behind
20:01as who she was and who she has become.
20:04Reflective Glinda, real Glinda, the new Glinda, the old Glinda.
20:08How do we do that in a song?
20:10John Chu and Alice Brooks, the cinematographer, wanted to push from reflection to real Glinda,
20:16which means crossing a mirror line in a set.
20:19It's an old Hollywood trick.
20:21It's an old illusionist trick.
20:23So how do we do that?
20:24First of all, the set has to be symmetrical.
20:26This half of the set here has to match that half.
20:30So when she comes in from the witch hunters,
20:32she comes in through these double doors and she heads towards a mirror.
20:36The camera's here and we see her in the reflection.
20:39Onto the reflected side of the room.
20:41So I know that sounds complicated, but the easiest way to explain it is if we were building two sets,
20:46it would be a lot simpler.
20:47This is this reflected here.
20:49So it'd be very easy here to come around with Glinda looking at each other,
20:54but we're not able to build mirror sets and light them.
20:57We only can build one set, light one set.
21:00So we have to shoot the whole scene on this set.
21:03And now we do the whole reflected set from this.
21:06We just cut up here.
21:07So now we're opening this wall and the camera comes around here and pushes away with reflected Glinda.
21:13So we're now in the reflection side of Glinda and she moves across here.
21:18And there's about five of these sort of crossovers between reflections and real Glinda.
21:23We come here and we push up to a mirror in the ceiling.
21:27And that reflection is actually a camera move down.
21:30And so now we're back into real Glinda.
21:32Then we follow up the stairs and we eventually come to this corridor.
21:35And this corridor, the reflection of that corridor is this.
21:39So that's the mirror version of that side of the set.
21:41So now we're back in reflected Glinda and we're here and we're going to go down the stairs.
21:46So what does that mean in terms of the real set?
21:49What it means is we are going down this staircase, which is that one over to the north side.
21:57As we come down and reflected Glinda moves here, our camera pushes into this reflection,
22:04which means that we're back with real Glinda.
22:07And then we hinge this wall back and our camera is here.
22:10We've lost reflected Glinda and we push with real Glinda to the center door,
22:15then out to the bubble.
22:17Here's the bubble.
22:18And this is where she looks at her distorted reflection in the bubble,
22:22knowing that she has now changed and the old Glinda doesn't exist anymore.
22:29The second film for myself and my art department really depending on us being able to build enough,
22:37to design enough, to explain enough, so the audience could feel like they were touching it.
22:43And we really had to continue that into the landscape, unlike the first film.
22:47That was very important to me and my team that we touched Oz and we touched the 39 film
22:54and we embraced a little art deco, a little bit of art modern and a little bit of something new.
23:00And we gave a nostalgia that belongs to this story.
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