Villain: for good Production designer Nathan Crowley explained how he found ways to expand the world of Wicked in its continuation, For good.
The sequel follows the story of Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) and Glinda’s (Ariana Grande) choices and consequences in the first film, leading to Elphaba being declared the Wicked Witch of the West.
After being rejected by her peers, Elphaba is forced to hide in the forest.
“In the show, it’s written as a cave. It’s a hiding place,” Crowley explained to Variety. In his designs, Crowley notes that the forests were “full of rotating circular trees. They formed fluid shapes.”
Sharing one of his first ideas, he said he wanted to place Elphaba in a canopy. He had the idea of a mother tree in the forest of Oz where she would create her nest.
“She must take a journey to the West. She must become the Wicked Witch of the West,” he said. The forest was therefore to the west.
To build it, he discussed it with the film’s greens department to see if they could collect wood from local forests and weave the nest together.
“We gave them a big pile of wood from the greens, and then we had a platform at the right height, and we had scaffolding and steel departments to help us with the structure,” he said.
He continued: “It was a very organic whole. They started twisting and weaving all these beautiful shapes.”
The entire installation took six weeks, with the “windows sort of seamlessly integrated into this structure.”
Sharing his idea for making the Wicked Witch of the West’s bed in the nest, Crowley said: “It was a sculptural piece. It’s totally an art installation. It’s branches intertwining, creating the bed. I can’t say we knew what it was when we made it.”
Villain: for good is scheduled to be released on November 21.
