‘Wicked’, ‘Emilia Perez’ & ‘Joker: Folie A Deux’ Cinematographers On Capturing Musical Magic

What makes a great musical? The immediate things that come to mind are obvious: singing and dancing. But the beauty of a well-choreographed ensemble number, or the power of a stunning duet don’t mean so much if the lighting is poor or the lensing isn’t up to snuff. That’s where the cinematographers come in. The musical films of this year show off the best versions of what the genre can be.

Wicked takes themes of light, dark and color to the extreme for a unique vision of Oz. Musical numbers take control of the images in Emilia Pérez. And anything goes in Joker: Folie à Deux, where fantasy and reality meet in the middle.

Wicked

Cinematographer Alice Brooks is no stranger to musicals, even working previously on In the Heights with Wicked director Jon M. Chu. “Musicals are just a full extension of expression, and in musicals we get to see a character’s inner dreams and thoughts expressed through music,” says Brooks. “As a cinematographer, I then get to do it through light and camera and movement… I got my camera operator in there to learn all the choreography so it was ingrained in him.”

For Wicked, the main themes became focused on light and darkness. “Light is not always the light, and darkness is not always the darkness,” she says, “and we decided nature was going to bring that theatricality to our lighting.” The sun played a pivotal part in this as a spotlight for characters and lighting cues, but Brooks also had the idea for the sun to always rise for Glinda (Ariana Grande) and set for Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo). “Through ‘Popular’, you witness a full 20-minute sunrise from the dark scene of them on their bed, all the way to where we have the pink sunrise and Elphaba is the opposite. The last 40 minutes of the movie is all one long sunset through ‘Defying Gravity’.”

The goal was always to create a new version of Oz, which Brooks says was achieved through a lot of testing with lighting and colors. “I started reading the L. Frank Baum The Wizard of Oz books, and every single paragraph has this very vivid color description that was so inspiring,” she says. “Somewhere through prep, I decided that I would intentionally pick scenes and light them with every color of the rainbow.” Each color is representative of something in the film, like orange being hope and excitement or pink as the continued theme of love between Glinda and Elphaba. “The blue of the Ozdust Ballroom was something we found when we started doing lighting tests and put Cynthia with her green makeup against the wall. That blue just made the green so much more beautiful and there was something about it that made you just completely drawn to her. This is the moment where Elphaba and Glinda fall in love with each other and finally see each other for the first time… The closeup of Elphaba just melts your heart and blue became her color.”

Emilia Pérez

For cinematographer Paul Guilhaume, it was important to find a consistent approach to the look of the film while respecting each musical piece. “Something is always unfolding during a song, so very often the song was calling for the way we would actually shoot it,” he says.

One of the best examples of this is “El Mal”, where Rita (Zoe Saldaña) dances and sings at a charity gala while hopping onto tables. “It’s all about exposing people,” says Guilhaume. “She takes control at this point, not only of her life or the story, but she takes control of the whole film. In the musical piece, she actually directs the camera with her body and the Steadicam was dancing with her. She’s also pointing the light, and we had automatic lights in the ceiling that were controlled with infrared cameras that would point exactly where we wanted it to go.”

That level of control over camera and lighting was achieved by filming in a studio near Paris, rather than on location in Mexico as was originally planned. “We had everything controllable by a console and we could get as many cues as we wanted, and when you are doing daylight in the studio, which is the hardest thing to achieve, you can just turn off the sun or switch off the sky on a specific line,” he says. 

The use of light and shadow became a large element of the story in certain scenes, especially the ability to completely turn off the lighting of the world. “When Jessi (Selena Gomez) is singing about feeling trapped in this big house, in the script it was written that she would walk into this dark room where the dark ideas are dancing,” he says. “We used a big set with a missing wall of her room, replaced by two strong lasers to create a laser wall between her world and the dark world. As soon as she crossed the laser wall, the sun and sky would switch off in her room and the single light in the dark world would switch on, and as she walks back in the laser wall the sun comes back. That’s something that was only possible to do in the studio.”

Joker: Folie à Deux

As the cinematographer of the 2019 Joker, Lawrence Sher says there wasn’t actually a huge change in his work when he signed on for Folie à Deux. “The only thing that was a little bit different was a couple of sequences in which we would be in these fantasies outside of the continued look and feel of the first Joker,” says Sher. “So, we were trying to find the best way to seamlessly integrate the original style and DNA but include something that was a bit out of the box, which was that people would be singing.”

The most important aspect of the cinematography to keep consistent between the first Joker and the sequel was the enhanced realism. “That manifests itself basically in environmental lighting—as much as possible, we like to light the spaces and not the faces,” he says. “We like the environment to be a fully realized sort of world, which the actors and the characters can exist within, and then we can choreograph the camera in a real, improvisational way.”

To present an extension of the existing style without creating too much of a shift, Sher actually refrained from watching any of the choreography ahead of time. “I know that’s not traditional for what would be considered a musical, but we never watched it in advance intentionally,” he says. “Our philosophy was to let them work the environment and for us to discover it in real time.” Rather than breaking up songs into verses and choreography for his team, Sher would watch the masters once the choreography was finalized and ready to shoot before adjusting lighting and cameras. “We didn’t want the camera to control things, and we didn’t want the choreography to control the camera. It was a little bit unique in that regard.”

Although the cinematography doesn’t change for musical numbers where the singing is an extension of dialogue taking place in the real world, fantasies are a different story. “The fantasies introduce more theatrical lighting,” he says. “There’re spotlights, much more vibrant color, more saturation. It’s still dirty, but it’s more expressionistic lighting introducing them in a black void.” The design became more reminiscent of ’40s musicals, in both production design and cinematography for fantasy scenes like on the roof of the Hotel Arkham. “It basically changed the lighting from being completely naturalistic to more expressionistic and much more colorful.”