Jonathan Bailey, Director Jon M. Chu and the rest of the crew break down the making of Wicked's 'Dancing Through Life' scene. In this exclusive episode of Entertainment Weekly's new series 'It Takes a Village', step into the dazzling world of 'Wicked' as the cast and crew pull back the curtain on one of the film's most intricate scenes for the song 'Dancing Through Life!' This series dives into how every department—from set design to VFX—comes together to create a single, iconic scene. Jonathan Bailey takes center stage in a jaw-dropping musical number featuring spinning wheels, gravity-defying choreography, and soaring vocals. From the creative choreography to the technical wizardry, watch how this electrifying moment was brought to life. Hear from Jonathan himself about the challenges (and thrills!) of dancing on moving platforms, along with exclusive insights from the director, choreographer, and production designers who made the magic happen.
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00:00Hello, my name is Johnny Bailey and I play Fierro in Wicked, and I'm John M. Chiu,
00:12I'm the director of Wicked. I'm Alice Brooks. My name is Paul Taswell. I'm Myron Kirstein. I'm
00:16Pablo Hellman. My name is Christopher Scott. My name is Francis Hammond. We're here together
00:21to break down one of the scenes in the film.
00:23So this scene is where Fierro is loosening up this school. This is a perfect example.
00:39We have the spinning wheel. It was this idea of spinning into it and landing and crashing into a
00:45new headspace. This set took up the entire stage. It is almost 180 feet long by 140 feet.
00:5345 feet wide, and it went all the way up to the roof in the center, which is 45 feet high.
00:58A massively huge set. We used 495 lights to light the scene.
01:03We're watching a lot of work. I think when we were shooting this, about 350 people were on set.
01:08We knew if this worked, if Dancing Through Life works, that we had our movie.
01:17Some people call it a hamster wheel. I hated that name, so I was like,
01:20let's call it a tornado wheel from now on. Keep it Aussie in.
01:23Yes. So the hamster, sorry, John hates it being called the hamster wheel. It's called the tornado
01:29wheel. Three different bookshelves would be rotating with these ladders. How do we move a camera
01:36through this tornado wheel safely? It's very dangerous, actually. The amount of engineering
01:41and people that had to go into securing this. I mean, insurance alone really didn't want us to do this.
01:46I wasn't sure they were going to allow Jonathan Bailey in the tornado wheel because of safety,
01:52which makes sense because this is, you know, he needs to carry on. We can't injure our Fiero.
01:57I remember getting the dailies for the scene and thinking, how is no one getting crushed while
02:02they're dancing through it? You know how? Because there's about four or five people that are behind
02:06that are looking at a bunch of monitors in there and they're changing the speed so that the dancers
02:11don't get crashed. And you have to have dancers who can move that thing. You have to have engineers who can
02:14run that thing and you don't know what kind of dances you can do until you have the thing built.
02:18And this thing wasn't built until two weeks before shooting. We very early on started placing cameras
02:23in the wheel, seeing where we could attach cameras to. And then I worked with our key grip and the camera
02:28operator to figure out how do we get our massively huge crane in here and make it feel like you're moving
02:36through all three of the ladders, but you physically can't and keep it centered. Those ladders were
02:42headaches because they are stationary on that, even though they're turning and that can chop
02:45someone's head off. But Johnny, the dancers, Chris, what you guys did was ignored all the technical
02:51parts of it and made it feel like butter. They did build us a little miniature model
02:56that worked. It ran and so I could like kind of like run it and like think about the things.
03:00But ultimately it was like, you got to get in there and play. You know, you can think about a million
03:04things, but until you get inside of that space, there's really nothing you can do. We had these
03:09extraordinary dancers Chris gathered from far and wide. We ended up with some martial artists,
03:14some parkour performers, some circus performers. Really parkour was probably the most valuable
03:19skill set to put into a contraption like this. Because it's timed and everything's moving, people
03:25need to react fast. And that's what parkour does really well. They could keep up with the speed of
03:31this contraption. Our parkour performer like Chima, his name is Chima, and he jumps and he slides down
03:42the thing at the time. We rotate the camera. That was another thing I found very early on in the
03:46rehearsal process. I played with this, with the contrasting the camera with the ladders going a
03:52certain way and the books going a certain way. It's like an easy illusion to pull off because of the nature
03:56of the circle.
04:06Some of those shots that you're looking at, these people are upside down and you're thinking,
04:11you know, how is that possible? Well, it's between the design of the rotating drum and the camera
04:16moving the opposite way. Yeah, at this point I was harnessed in. I would turn upside down. It would take
04:20about 25, 30 seconds to get then strapped in and then you'd wait for, you know, the blood to then
04:26bring that out and you'd black out for a second maybe. Really him, by the way, going all the way
04:30upside down, rotating 360. Very scary feeling. We're also asking him to still sing. And I just remember
04:35like how it looked when their legs just start to float and you're like, oh, this is a whole moment
04:41in this number. It's one of my favorite moments of the whole thing. It's amazing what hair products can do
04:44though. It was very hard for us to keep it in place because they were upside down most of the
04:50time and we had to keep resetting because it's extraordinarily complicated. From our point of
04:54view, it was keeping them perfect, even though they'd been upside down for 20 times at this stage.
05:00Jonathan certainly has product, but one wants to keep him a little more natural and let it move,
05:06whereas our dancers were concentrated on keeping it as solid as we could so we didn't have to keep going
05:11in 2000 cans of hairspray went mainly on the background.
05:21If he's thinking about being carefree, you know, let go and just live life. It's like, well,
05:25what does that look like inside of this tornado wheel from his perspective? How does that translate
05:30through his body? When he drops down and he lifts up and that thing picks him up, it's like,
05:34I remember just finding that moment, you know, this feels carefree.
05:41He's basically a prince. So I chose blue as his signifying color palette. Because of the choreography,
05:52we wanted to make sure that he could move as easily as possible, choosing the right fabrics that will
05:58hold up, that will tailor in the way that I want for them to tailor. The jacket is a suede jacket. We
06:05made that with corded stretch panels on either side of the jacket that opens up. It kind of stretches with him.
06:16Could you back off a few frames, please? Jonathan had been away working in Canada,
06:22so while he was in Canada, we had some wig shapes done for him. With Jonathan, you want it to flop around,
06:27because that's part of the attraction is his lovely floppy hair. But without it actually hanging like he's
06:32hanging upside down. Jonathan's hair performed perfectly, as did Jonathan.
06:38I love this moment where Galinda is, with the rest of the ASEAN students, are just kind of like
06:43looking at Fiero with curiosity. And then over time, they sort of get into it a little bit more.
06:49Before you know it, it's this explosion of bodies and dancers. And I just love how that builds,
06:54because at first, he's just kind of coaxing everybody out of their sort of shells a little bit.
06:59If we went too aggressive with the edit from the get-go, then it starts to lose its power. So you
07:03want it to sort of build over the course of the edit. It was making sure that they all looked of the
07:08same type of age group within the students. And it was making sure that everybody had a
07:13youthful appearance about them. But something a little quirky and different, because Shiz is its own
07:19entity. And along with the wonderful costumes that Paul did, we didn't want it to look too ordinary or
07:24boring. We just made sure there's the odd one or two around that had the same sort of similar styles,
07:29and that way you make it very cohesive. Galinda, I've got her in her pink. She's actually in her
07:34flirty dress. Fiero, obviously, is in his princely suit.
07:44I'm gonna go study outside, thank you. If you back up a few frames, with Elphaba,
07:49she actually is in a slightly darker version of the same pinstripe. But because it's a darker palette,
07:56it pulls out from the rest of the students.
08:08Right here, the dancer jumps on from ladder to ladder to ladder, and the camera then flips upside
08:14down. In one shot, we do not cut. And there's a whole group of dancers on the other side of the
08:17camera. Oh, yes, the flip. There's no cut here. So Alice has to light both ways. The camera has
08:22to be able to flip back. All dancers have to do it exactly right. No one can crash into things.
08:27It's very dangerous, and it's a real shot. It's pretty incredible. And a lot of people are like,
08:31you stitched that together. No, that's actually the same dancer who's going through that whole tunnel.
08:36We knew we had to nail the shot, and we conceived of it on an iPhone. And an iPhone's
08:42very different than an Alexa 65 camera. We needed the camera to spin and land and then push. So we're
08:48pulling back, pulling back, pulling back on the crane, and then spinning and doing this big push in.
08:52Chris came to me right before we started shooting. And he's like, just so you know, the dancer can do
08:57this four times safely. And then after that, he could potentially hurt himself. So we have four chances
09:03to get it right. That's a lot of pressure, right? And we did it. And this is the shot. There's no
09:07cut. That's our take. For dancing sequences, wearing fake hair for Jonathan and Ethan,
09:20it makes it much easier because if you don't have fake hair and you get so hot, your own head goes
09:26very flat. And of course, there's no time in the middle of a performance day to go away and wash it
09:33or anything. Having fake hair is a wonderful way to keep it all day long, 10 hours a day, however
09:39many times you do your sequence. Capturing Fiero from these low angles where he seems to be in command
09:52and in charge was something that we played with. We would place him on things in the library to
09:58just elevate him even higher. And we had Glinda's gaze at him. Like, how does she see him? I like that
10:05we got to shoot this through the female gaze in many ways as well. And the romantic notion of what Fiero is.
10:11It comes from the equestrian style of dress. It basically has riding pants and riding boots. It's
10:25called ponte, which is a cotton stretch that's actually suede. It has a little bit of texture.
10:32Just down the arm around his collar, there's a geometric pattern that runs through a bunch of
10:38his clothing. We backed this with a bronze that shines through and it's pretty dashing.
10:45The brass buttons and the golds were very inspirational that Paul did. And I took that
10:51and put it through the hair. I particularly wanted Jonathan's hair to have a different color to his own
10:56across the top. The blonde streaks throughout it were very much part of his story arc as well.
11:01I listen to the music over and over again. I visualize what it's going to be and I write down
11:05each description of what's about to happen. He stands up on the bookshelf and he starts to kick
11:09using the books. And I loved how you surf those books on. Those are real books that you're really
11:13surfing on. It was so hot in this leather. Two B's leather. I think they're velvet trousers.
11:25I had plumbing underneath. I plugged myself into an ice cold, but I carried a little background full of
11:31slushy. I thought you had to pee in there. That was not my catheter. That was a thermostat.
11:36Yeah. And I remember coming over to you and you had the machine all connected. And I was like,
11:40okay, great job. Great job. And you're like, I just need to get through this, John. I'm like,
11:43okay, I'll leave you alone. I'll leave you alone. I was a mascot when I was in high school.
11:47Oh yeah. So I know that feeling.
11:49John and I have been working together for 25 years. We bonded over our love of musicals at USC
12:03Film School. We both knew we wanted to grow up and make musicals, but this was one of his crazier
12:08ideas in the 25 years that I've known him. There's something about a room full of dancers
12:14in unison, feeling the same feeling that just amplifies the power of the moment.
12:23Thank you so much for listening and for watching. And we hope you love what we created.