Cinematographer Alice Brooks still has the feather she found on Will Rogers State Beach the day she told her mother that she would rather work behind the camera than in front of it.
It was a big moment. Though only 15, Brooks had been working as a child actor for a decade. By the time she was 10, she had done almost 40 national commercials, a tribute to Mary Martin on Broadway and an ongoing skit for “Late Night With David Letterman.” Brooks’ sister was having even more success; the family had moved to Los Angeles from New York to further the girls’ careers.
On the day Brooks found her feather in 1994, she had just had her seventh and final audition for a small part in the rom-com “While You Were Sleeping.” It was down to her and another girl and Brooks knew she hadn’t gotten it.
She also knew that she didn’t really want it. Visiting her sister on sets, Brooks had become increasingly enamored of the lighting crew.
“I thought it was magical to sit on a dark sound stage,” she says over Zoom from her home in Maine, “and one by one, a light would go on and out of very little, you created magic. That’s what I wanted to do.”
After the audition, Brooks and her mother walked on the beach and Brooks told her, “I don’t want to be an actor — I want to be a cinematographer.”
“My mother said, ‘I know. Let’s figure out what we can do to make that possible.’ I looked down and there was this little feather. I got it framed and it’s moved with me everywhere. It’s a reminder of the moment when I declared my dream.”
If that sounds like something out of a fairy tale, in many ways it is. A magical feather would not be out of place in “Wicked: For Good,” the second of Jon M. Chu’s “Wicked” films for which Brooks served as director of photography and cinematographer.
Opening wide on Friday, “Wicked: For Good” continues the story of Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo), Glinda (Ariana Grande) and many other citizens of Oz as they face the consequences of Elphaba’s realization that her beloved Wizard (Jeff Goldblum) is not just a fraud but a tyrant. Sides must be taken and choices made as Elphaba does her best to battle for the freedom of Oz.
It is a darker film than the first one, both thematically and literally. Brooks, who loves musicals more than any other sort of film, is known for her deep understanding of color and her ability to use close-ups and capture details even in the most extravagant dance number.
“Alice is not about the tricks and gadgets of cinematography,” Chu says in a recent phone interview. “She’s about savoring the essence of the frame, the lens, specifically the light. She sees things in a humanistic way. She’s a storyteller, not a technician.”
Differing from “Wicked,” Brooks chose a handheld camera for more scenes in “For Good,” which has fewer big dance numbers and more intimate moments. Elphaba and Glinda have left the playfully Gothic Shiz University and gone their separate ways. The lighting and hues of their respective environments reflect how different their circumstances — and world-views — have become.
Early on, Brooks had decided that the sun would always rise for Glinda and set for Elphaba. Darkness, dimness and silence make “For Good” a marked contrast from the Technicolor effusiveness of “Wicked.” While doing prep, she, Chu and other team members created a visual roadmap that listed all the intentions and emotions that would carry each scene.
“For the first film,” Brooks says, “those intentions were things like celebration, joy, power, friendship and choice. For the second they were sacrifice, surrender, consequence.”
“It became very clear,” she continues, “that the first movie would be effervescent and the second would have a weight and a maturity to it. But there’s a visual heartbeat, through lighting and camera, that connects the two.”
Brooks calls the “Wicked” films “the greatest love story about two women.” But real love stories involve choosing to stay the course despite the inevitable setbacks and conflicts. During the course of their friendship, Elphaba and Glinda have to take risks and decide which dreams really matter in the end.
Indeed, Brooks says her favorite shot in the new film is one in which Glinda has to make a difficult call. “We lit her with one teeny tiny light so it’s a very low light, very shallow focus. The only thing that’s in focus is her eyes and you just sit with her.”
It’s a different kind of shot, even in a film that uses silence and stillness more markedly than the first.
“Jon creates a team that all trust each other so much that when we have ideas, he’s willing to try them or trust us to tell him if he’s gone too far one way or another,” Brooks says. “And this movie is about the quiet places, amid all the noise of all the propaganda that’s going on in Oz.”
Brooks, Chu says, connects with the characters on a deep emotional level. “It’s not about the razzle dazzle — it’s about what you feel,” the director says. “So I can have all those vulnerable conversations about character with her.”
For Brooks, the dream she confessed to harboring on that Santa Monica beach almost 30 years ago, has most certainly come true. In the last five years, her career has taken off with “In the Heights,” “Tick, Tick … Boom!,” “Queen Bees” and the “Wicked” films. In February, she became one of only a few women to ever be nominated for the American Cinematographers Society award for a theatrical release. (Rachel Morrison was the first, in 2018, for “Mudbound” and Mandy Walker became the first female winner in 2023 for “Elvis.”) It’s a nomination she could easily replicate with “Wicked: For Good.” She’s currently working on “Spiderman: Beyond the Spider-Verse.”
Brooks was born in New York, where she grew up in a family rich with love and creativity — her father, Stephen Levi, was a playwright, her mother, Candace Coulston, a singer and a dancer — but often short on finances. “We lived a teeny tenement apartment on 29th and 2nd Avenue above the Wonderland Blues Bar,” Brooks says. “I know what it is to not have enough food.”
Money was one reason Brooks and her sister became child actors and why her announcement that she wanted to be a cinematographer was such a big deal. She knew she would have to go to film school and the family could not afford it.
Her mother, agreeing on both counts, decided on the film school at USC. “She made me apply in person and she told them, ‘Alice deserves to go here, but we can’t afford to send her,’” Brooks recalls.
Two weeks later Brooks received a full academic scholarship from USC, as well as a smaller one from the Ebell of Los Angeles.
Over the course of her studies, she met Chu.
“She had a reputation before I even knew her,” he says, remembering one of her early assignments, a project she photographed but didn’t direct. “It opened with a subway shot and when the screen went dark, she had a black light that showed up all the graffiti and I was like, ‘Who is this? I have to work with her.’”
When she finished in 2001, she knew she couldn’t afford graduate school so she worked as a waitress while attempting to convince film students to let her shoot their thesis films. She did 30 in one year, including Chu’s much acclaimed early musical “When the Kids Are Away.” He was impressed by her love of musicals and her willingness to stay up until 2 in the morning editing her films.
Like Chu, she was considered a rising star and wound up with a reel that got her an agent.
“And then,” she says with a small, rueful laugh, “everything was really hard for the next 20 years.”
Even with an agent, Brooks found it difficult to find work that paid, either in money or decent film credits, never mind anyone who was making the musicals she longed to shoot. The pixie dust of film school wore off fairly quickly, she remembers.
“I started doing features where I made a hundred dollars a day and no one has ever seen them and they’re terrible,” she says. “The thesis films had money and lights — you have everything and suddenly you don’t have anything. So learning how to make movies with nothing was a new skill set.”
After four years of waiting tables and making forgettable movies, she decided she’d had enough of Los Angeles and its cutthroat competition.
”I kept getting so close to breaking through and then not getting there,” she says. She moved to Maine, where her mother now lives.
There, she met her husband, Sam Spencer, a businessman who was working for the state’s Democratic Party. They were attending President Obama’s 2009 inauguration when, out of the blue, Chu called. He had released his first feature film, “Step Up 2: The Streets” and he wanted Brooks for his next project.
“I was outside in the freezing cold in Washington, D.C., and I hadn’t talked to him for a couple of years. He said ‘I’ve got this idea for a web series that Hulu is going to do. You need to be in L.A. tomorrow.’”
“I called her,” Chu says, “because it was a high-ambition show with no resources and that’s what we were best at — we knew how to make something out of nothing. Someone who was going break new ground. Alice was that person to always do that.”
Brooks flew to L.A. the next day and began shooting the web series “The Legion of Extraordinary Dancers,” which followed the adventures of a group of men whose superpower was their ability to dance. (The series was choreographed by Christopher Scott, who had starred in “Step Up 2” and would go on to work with Chu and Brooks on “In the Heights” and “Wicked.”)
They worked on “Legion” for three years, then re-united for the feature film “Jem and the Holograms,” which had the opposite effect of boosting her career.
“It was,” Brooks says, “a complete box-office disaster.”
For a minute in 2017, it appeared that she and Chu would collaborate again, on an ABC musical drama that had breakthrough promise.
“I thought: Great, finally I have made it. I was 38 years old, about to turn 39, I have a kid and it was more money than I had ever made,” she recalls.
When the show was axed mere days before production was set to begin, Brooks took it as a sign that her dream was dead.
“I sat in the car and cried and cried,” she says. “Luckily, my daughter slept through it. I told my husband, ‘I’m done. I can’t keep doing this. I feel like there’s no success in my future.’”
Spencer told her it was fine if she quit. “Then there was this long pause,” Brooks recalls, “and he said, ‘But you can’t do it tomorrow. You have to wait six months and in those six months, you have to do everything you can.’ Finally I agreed.”
She shot a small musical film in New York “which gave me confidence,” Brooks says, and made weekly trips from Maine for days filled with meetings. She got a new agent and landed the Ellen Burstyn film “Queen Bees.”
Then, six months after she told her husband she wanted to quit, Chu reached out again. He was in the middle of making “Crazy Rich Asians” and he wanted her to meet with Dana Fox, who had co-created what would be Chu’s next project, the series “Home Before Dark.”
She got the job and when she met Chu in Vancouver to begin shooting, he asked her to join him on his next film, “In the Heights.”
“‘Crazy Rich Asians’ had come out,” Brooks said, “and he suddenly had power to say who he wanted.”
And Brooks was exactly who Chu wanted.
“I like being around someone who knows exactly what she’s doing but is open to other ideas,” he says. “We call each other out and we get to paint together.”
Her work on “In the Heights” led to Lin-Manuel Miranda asking her to shoot “Tick, Tick … Boom!,” the autobiographical musical written by Jonathan Larson, who died on the opening night of his then-new musical “Rent.”
Soon after, Chu told her that his team would be moving on to “Wicked.”
“For Jon, the team is like family,” Brooks says, adding that some of that team, including her, Chu and Scott, had just shot a Target commercial to air at Christmas.
With the “Wicked” movies, which were filmed at the same time over the course of 155 days, Brooks had every resource imaginable (including her own team of 200 people) and got to do virtually everything she had ever imagined as a cinematographer.
“Jon encourages every single person on his to dream bigger and better than before,” she says. “He wants you to go out and be your ultimate creative self.”
Even so, there were plenty of moments when even the best-laid plans went awry. Shooting scenes with Grande and Erivo could be a challenge — each required completely different lighting, which meant that Brooks had to make audible calls to the lighting crew as their scenes were shot. When the set for Oz was built, choreographer Scott realized it was much bigger than he had envisioned and it would require at least 100 more dancers for big numbers, so Brooks had to move parts around to accommodate cameras and cranes.
“I remember laying on the ground with Jon in the middle of that set as we tried to figure things out and him laughing and saying, ‘It’s just like film school.’”
As her five-year-long journey in Oz comes to a close, Brooks is working on “Spiderman: Beyond the Spider-Verse,” her first animated feature, which will come out in 2027 and scouting locations for a Colman Domingo project about the love affair between Kim Novak and Sammy Davis Jr.
One of those locations was the historic headquarters of the Ebell, which had given Brooks a scholarship all those years ago.
Over the Zoom call, Brooks holds up the feather she has kept for 30 years. Trying to make it in Hollywood, she says, remembering some advice she was given, is like trying to get to the other side of a brick wall by throwing stones at it. At some point you will get exhausted and, seeing that you have made only the tiniest hole, you will want to quit.
“That’s the moment” she says, “when you have to keep going.”
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