Alison Stewart: You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. The Oscars are on Sunday, so let's continue my conversations with some of this year's nominees. In just a bit, we'll learn about the practical special effects behind the gruesome transformations in The Substance. We'll also discuss the artistic inspirations behind some of the grandest looks in Gladiator II with the Oscar-nominated costume designers. First, let's get this hour started by heading to the wonderful world of Oz.

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Alison Stewart: In the new Wicked film adaptation, Glinda and Elphaba go on a journey to meet the Wizard of Oz. Now, let's meet the wizard behind the film's detailed, practical, yet fantastical set design. Nathan Crowley is nominated at this year's Oscars for his Wicked production design. He's previously worked on films like The Greatest Showman, The Dark Knight, Interstellar, Dunkirk, and more. Instead of relying on just CGI, Crowley and his team actually built the sets from Emerald City to Shiz University to Glinda and Elphaba's dorm room. Yes, it is true, they did plant 9 million tulips for the meadows.

Nathan Crowley took home the BAFTA for his work earlier this month and he is Oscar-nominated for Best Production Designs. He joined us as part of our Oscar series The Big Picture, where we spotlight talent nominated for their work behind the camera. I began my conversation with Nathan by asking him why it was important for him to create practical sets for this movie.

Nathan Crowley: First of all, I come from films where we do things practically. I don't think a lot of people know that. We tend not to advertise it that much. On this film, we were moving into fantasy and it was really important to not solely rely on CGI because I think audiences feel that. We have to intertwine it with practical sets, and that's really to get an old-school feeling. It changes the look when you build it for real. You extend it with CGI, but you go as high as you can to 50 foot and you try and interweave it so the audience feels the originality or the nostalgia of the set rather than being popped out of the experience by too much CGI. The balance was essential.

Alison Stewart: What does it do for the actors to be on a non-CGI set, on a practical set?

Nathan Crowley: What's amazing is, especially with younger actors, they're not used to seeing fully realized pets. We have animatronic puppeteers, and we did the big wizard's head physically. It's 15 foot high. It was all animatronics, so it could have expressions. When that came out, the curtain, I think we got Glinda and Elphaba to jump.

Alison Stewart: [laughs]

Nathan Crowley: You should, because the theory behind that is he tries to intimidate people. You want it to be surprising and you want the audience to sit back in their seats as well.

Alison Stewart: I was going to ask then. What does the theater-goer get from practical sets?

Nathan Crowley: As a designer, your ultimate task is to a little bit go unnoticed and let the audience sink into Oz and the story and the narrative. If we can put them there in that place without them questioning it, to me, we've done our job in cinema. To me, cinema is about falling into the film and losing yourself for however long the film runs. Can we keep you lost in Oz for over two hours? To me, that's the job.

Alison Stewart: You obviously work with director Jon Chu. What ideas did you have when you first read the script and you first talked to him?

Nathan Crowley: How did it work? We had a long chat on a Zoom call, and then Marc Platt got involved and they asked me to come out to LA and spend a few days with Jon. I think that process of a designer and director is you spend days or weeks together and you try and find visually the film. He has a script. He has ideas of what he's looking to do and what kind of wondrous, whimsical world Jon wanted. I need to now sit with him and take that vision of that film he's running in his head, and I need to put it into mine and then get the visuals going.

It's about spending time with people because we're searching for the film. He doesn't like, "Oh, this is the way we're going to do it. A, B, C, D." It's like you're investigating it. Like you're investigating Oz, you're investigating Wicked, the stage show. You're investigating the fact that's an American fairy tale and we need Americana. What are those images? The train is an American image. In the giant flat barley fields, we planted those as well. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: Oh, yes. We're going to get to the barley. [laughs] We've got a lot to discuss.

Nathan Crowley: You're looking for themes. You're looking for visual themes. The writers work in a writers' room where they put up scenes and they try and find the jigsaw puzzle of the story. We do the same but with visuals. We try and find common threads and themes and ideas by putting images on the wall in scene order. You try and run a film as a visual storyboard. It's pretty exciting stuff. When you're in those rooms, you lose hours and hours because you're lost in a visual process, and that's engaging.

Alison Stewart: What was challenging? What was a scene that was particularly challenging for you as a production designer on Wicked? He's laughing at me.

[laughter]

Nathan Crowley: It was all challenging. I've done a lot of big films, and this was by far the biggest and most challenging. I made my own problems by saying I want to build as much of it practically, and that caused problems for my crew. I think physically, Shiz was probably the toughest mentally design-wise. Emerald City was the trickiest because it's a very difficult image to find a new look for.

When we're in those rooms, we say, "Okay, how do you get to Shiz?" You can't go by horse and cart because you're stepping on the freedom of the animals, and that's part of the narrative. You can't go by balloon because the wizard owns that. You can't go by mechanical clockwork train because the wizard owns that as well. There's no cars in Oz. You end up with an obvious thing. It's like, "Oh, rivers. We go by river. We got to get Glinda and all the other students into Shiz by river and boat."

If you're a practical filmmaker, you go find a river, and then you go and build a boat, an Ozzy boat, and you get a journey. That, to me, is cinema. That journey is the start of Dear Old Shiz. You've got to go in through the archway. Then you go in through the archway, and you realize we've got to build a backlot that has a water tank in it. Then you've got to build a giant water tank and then you've got to build the set in the water tank. Then you have to figure out how we're going to shoot it because the camera crew is like, "How are we going to shoot this?"

Alison Stewart: "Looks real pretty. How do we do it?"

Nathan Crowley: I've built water tanks before, not this size. I can tell you this, there is no water tank in film that doesn't leak.

Alison Stewart: [laughs]

Nathan Crowley: At the same time, I'm with my construction team of 20 years and it's like, "Okay, we're going to try and attempt this and that." They get excited and they go, "Okay, how are we doing the physics of that and the mechanics?" Then you got special effects coming in and they're saying, "Well, how can we do this, and how can we move this? How can we rotate bookshelves?" It excites everyone. No one is bored on that set.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: My guest is Nathan Crowley, Oscar-nominated for Wicked. He is a production designer. He's here as part of our installment, The Big Picture series, where we speak to Oscar-nominated talent who work behind the camera. When you were thinking about the production design of Wicked, you obviously have to think about The Wizard of Oz and that universe and as you said, the Americana of it all. What was your original relationship with The Wizard of Oz?

Nathan Crowley: I grew up in London. Every once a year at Christmas, I'd watch The Wizard of Oz every Christmas, probably like many kids. I knew that film pretty intimately and to take on the '39 film and really put-- because it was done with backings very cleverly on MGM style sound stages. It might be in the Warner sound stages. Anyway, it doesn't matter. To push into that backing and cross through the backing into Emerald City was really the challenge. It's like I want to get off the Arabic road. I want to physically go into Emerald City. Wicked, the play, obviously has ShIz, has some different scenery that The Wizard of Oz doesn't have.

Alison Stewart: Did you do research into the making of The Wizard of Oz or even Wicked?

Nathan Crowley: I obviously went to see Wicked many, many times. The Wizard of Oz I started in the film industry at Warner Brothers and MGM, the old MGM, which is now Sony. I love the history of those sound stages. I used to go and look at them and look at what was shot in there. I had the research in my head, if that makes sense because it was always there. There's an interesting thing about the old MGM lot, which is obviously where they did a lot of great musicals, is all the stages are different sizes. That's because you build different sets and you have a requirement. Nowadays, all the stages are the same size, which I never understood. It's like, well, you might want to get really high or really low. Anyway, that's it. Sorry, I went off.

Alison Stewart: That's okay. How did you get your start in production design?

Nathan Crowley: Where was I? I was living in Los Angeles and I had been a set designer, then an art director. I was lucky enough to start on Hook, which has a weird relevance to this. I was just a draftsman. Then my production design start was really-- I went to Ireland to make Braveheart as an art director and I stayed there. Barry Levinson hired me on a very small film he was doing there as the production designer. Barry Levinson actually was the one who got me started on a film called An Everlasting Piece, which is a play on wigs. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: What did you learn from An Everlasting Piece that has stuck with you as a production designer?

Nathan Crowley: You have to have a voice in the room and you have to have ideas and you have to look and see and think. Design, for me, is about fluid thinking. It's like, how are we going to solve that? It's not about negativity, it's about positivity and solving problems. Barry taught me how you could see a problem, just look at it differently. I think that's how it started, really.

Alison Stewart: That's interesting. You said problems and puzzles. I sense that you do a lot of that.

Nathan Crowley: The puzzle is how are we going to build a 100-foot train and run it for a barley field. You'll sit around with my team is like, "Okay, what's that train look like? Who is the wizard? He's an illusionist. What mechanics do illusionists have inside?" If you go back to the late 1800s, you have automatons, and you look at the orange tree, and the orange tree was a watchmaking. It seemed to come to life, but it was all just mechanics.

That feeds back into who the wizard is. He's more than an illusion. He's more than the man behind the curtain. He has an automaton clockwork technology. Then you push that back into the train because we don't just want a steam train. You want the wizard's train. You have to find a way into that design and how you can manipulate the themes or the story to help you give him technology. Then you apply that to the head where he's got all those cranks in the film and he's pulling all those levers and that operates his mechanical head. Does that make sense?

Alison Stewart: Yes. It's interesting because it does come from the character.

Nathan Crowley: Yes, everything comes from the script. I guess that's what I was saying early on. I want Jon to put his version of the script into my head so we can then take his characters and what he wants from the film and push it back into design and see if we can find themes. The tulips were all the colors of the rainbow, or you have to work back from what do we want to gain from all the colors of the rainbow. It's like, what can we grow? Then you immediately go to tulips. You work your way back to the idea, if that makes sense.

Alison Stewart: All right. Let's talk about those 9 million tulips you planted. I swear, I researched it. I put it in Google. Like 9 million? You planted 9 million tulips leading up to Emerald City. Logistically, how does one get 9 million tulips?

Nathan Crowley: You need 9 million bulbs from Holland.

Alison Stewart: There are none in Holland anymore.

Nathan Crowley: Yes. It's like, how did that come about? I remember we were in meetings and it was like, "We shouldn't do this digitally." There was a push. It's like, "Well, how else are you going to do it?" It's like, "Well, we could grow them." I worked on Interstellar and we grew 500 acres of corn for the film, which was nerve-wracking, but I knew it could be done. If I applied that experience to Wicked, I could then grow tulips. Then my location manager, Adam, is like, "Can you find me a tulip farmer we can go and talk to?"

Mark, the tulip farmer, was brilliant. He's saying, "Okay, we're going to have to buy 9 million--" Actually, I thought he said 1 million, which I thought was a lot. I misheard him because I showed him the kind of area we needed and we found a location to do it. I said, "I need to fill this amount of fields." I thought he said a million. I went back to the producers and said, "We need to buy a million bulbs immediately from Holland for this. We need to write a check," which they did.

When I went back to see him, he said, "I got to get those 9 million bulbs into the ground before the ground freezes." I said, "What?" [laughs] Anyway, so that's how 9 million came up. Really, it was based on the size of the fields I needed to fill.

Alison Stewart: What went through your brain when you heard the word 9 million, when you thought it was 1 million?

Nathan Crowley: I got a bit worried because it's like, "Oh my God, I told everyone it was 1 million." [laughs] I remember saying that to the location manager. I said, "Do we tell them?" I think I told Jon Chu and he was so happy it was nine and not one. He's a very excitable, brilliant man. He was like--

Alison Stewart: "It's good. Nine's great. Nine's the best."

Nathan Crowley: Sometime later, I asked the farmer, Mark. I said, "You came to 9 million?" He said, "Yes. I thought we needed 12." It kept on growing. It was very abstract farming.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Nathan Crowley. He's Oscar-nominated for Wicked in production design. It's part of our Big Picture series, where we look at talent behind the camera. Let's talk about a little bit of a smaller scope, the dorm room between Elphaba and Glinda. It's so interesting. How did you telegraph that these two are going to be living together, but clearly not in harmony?

Nathan Crowley: That was a difficult set as well because we have a huge song number to do in that popular. It can't be a small dorm room. It needs to be part of Shiz. It needs the character. It needs some romantic character to it. It needs some feminine qualities. It was a difficult start. I knew that I had to make the room circular. It wasn't circular. It was elliptical at the end. I knew if I made it circular, the camera wouldn't feel the restriction of the space and we could frame up the two little half-moon pockets we made for their bed.

I knew we could make it feel small or big, but not get bored of the space. Then if we put enough decoration in-- One thing we do as designers, we go and we look at places, not necessarily to shooting because we know we're going to build that set, but to get inspiration and play out a scene in a real space and see how we feel about it. The Brighton Pavilion, which is down on the south coast of England, I knew pretty well because I went to art school down there. It was built by the Prince Regent, which is this crazy Taj Mahal Chinese influence palace. It's the only building piece of architecture, I think, in England that is Ozzyian.

We stood in there and we went up to the crazy onion domes at the top and we got a little private tour. It's like, "Okay, the room needs to be elliptical. It's got to be in one of these domes." That was the start of it. Then we work with the choreographer and Jon because they're figuring out a huge dance scene, so we have to work side by side. We had a rehearsal stage for the dancers and then we had a rehearsal stage with a rough layout of what might be the set in plywood. Then we had the real stage. We were building the real set.

As the three came together, we would adjust and manipulate the set to work for the action. Because in popular, there's these trunks and there's hydraulics and those are all practical effects. You have to lift the set 6 feet off the ground on a rostrum and you've got all this hydraulics underneath popping up clothes and racks and shoes and makeup. It's all done from underneath. It's a stage show within itself. You need everyone to come together. Having a physical mock-up of a set that you can change, I think, is essential in a musical.

Alison Stewart: That was my conversation with Oscar-nominated production designer Nathan Crowley about his work on the film Wicked.

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Alison Stewart: Up next, we move from practical sets to practical effects with The Substance makeup artist Pierre Olivier Persin. He tells us how he created Demi Moore's memorable transformations. Stay with us.