By Iain Blair

Cinematographer Alice Brooks is having a monster year. First was her inspired work on In the Heights, the film adaptation of the Lin-Manuel Miranda musical directed by Jon M. Chu (Crazy Rich Asians). Then next up is Tick, Tick…Boom! for Netflix and Imagine Entertainment, which comes out later this year. Also a musical, it’s helmed by Miranda, in his feature directorial debut, and produced by Ron Howard.

Alice Brooks on set with director Jon Chu

Brooks (Queen Bees, Home Before Dark and The LXD: The Legion of Extraordinary Dancers), has worked with Chu since their days as film students at the University of Southern California nearly 20 years ago. Brooks describes filming In the Heights as the highlight of their long collaboration and her individual career. “Shooting it was my sueñito. It was the most magical summer of my career as a cinematographer.”

I talked to Brooks about the challenges of shooting In the Heights, the cinematography, lighting and working with the DIT, DI and visual effects.

Turning a stage musical into a film can be challenging. How did you approach the look of the movie?
There were so many challenges, the main one being, how to you connect emotionally to the characters in a very real way. Jon stressed that it had to be about real people in a real neighborhood with real dreams, and that’s how we began developing our visual language. So sometimes it would be very intimate, and then we’d have these grand musical numbers.

Alice Brooks

How long was the prep and shoot?
I had a 10-week prep, and then we shot for 49 days — 10 on stage and the rest on location.

How did you make all your camera and lens choices?
I did several rounds of tests. I went to ARRI and Panavision and tested different systems. I got to look at an early ARRI Mini LF but it wasn’t quite ready for us to use, so we ended up shooting on the Panavision DXL2.

We wanted to shoot anamorphic, so we tested lots of different lenses, and it’s really an intuitive thing for me. I spent a good month testing different systems, going back and forth and projecting stuff, being immersed in the story and dancing and so on, until I decided on the right package.

Did you work with a colorist in prep on any LUTs?
Yes, we did all our dailies and then the DI through Company 3 in New York, and I worked very closely with the great dailies colorist Dustin Wadsworth in conjunction with Stephen Nakamura, who did the final DI. So I’d take all the tests into Dustin and we spent time playing with different parts of the frame and how the lenses rendered the color naturally with the camera and in-camera LUT. Then we’d start to tweak the LUT. Ultimately, we used a slightly tweaked version of the Light Iron film LUT, which comes with the camera.

Did you have a DIT on set?
Yes, Bjorn Jackson, and I loved working with him. We did CDLs for different scenes, but nothing too aggressive. I loved to watch the light during prep. We began prepping the movie in winter and when we got to spring, New York suddenly felt warm, and I could start to feel the quality and color of the light that ended up being what our summer would look like in Washington Heights.

It’s a very specific look and light, I think because the bricks are more silver-gray there, and it’s very small and sandwiched between two bodies of water, and you get a much cooler light and cooler shadows than the rest of Manhattan. So while we were doing our CDLs and then the DI, I kept stressing, “This is not an orange tropical summer look. You still feel the heat, but it doesn’t come from a warm color.”

How did you do the big opening sequences technically? Doesn’t New York have a strict no drone policy?
You’re right, and that really restricted what we could do. We had some helicopter shots in the opening, but not being able to fly drones posed a lot of problems, especially for the Busby Berkley-style stuff, as shooting with a drone would have been so simple.

It was the same with the big pool scene, which was so challenging without a drone. There were all these tunnels there under the pool deck, which really restricted the weight of the crane we could use, and we also had to deal with all the underwater stuff.

How did you deal with the subway scenes?
That was so intense! Jon wanted to create this elegant immigrant journey — shot like a painting and a ballet — and he wanted this to be the only thing in the whole movie that could possibly be theatrical. So we scouted all these theaters and event spaces, but nothing felt right until we had the idea of making a character’s (Vanessa’s) journey using subway cars.

And then finding a platform was very difficult until our location manager and the MTA came up with an abandoned platform in Brooklyn on the D Avenue line. No one had been allowed to shoot there before. It was three stories underground with no elevator, and it was very dark and very hot, and we also had to bring all the equipment down and do a huge amount of cabling and rigging to light the cars and platforms. So it gave us this huge space, but it was like a week of lighting, and we only had one day to shoot it all.

Then we did the graffiti tunnel bit at 191st Street in Washington Heights on the hottest day — 110 degrees — of the whole schedule. It was also incredibly humid, and we had just a few hours at night to light and shoot it all. Amazingly, the walls were sweating with moisture, which gave us all these beautiful reflections down the tunnels. It was this happy accident that made it visually even better than I could have imagined.

How involved were you in all the VFX?
I’m very lucky since Jon, picture editor Myron Kerstein and I are a great team. And since I was in New York, I got to see all the VFX reviews; Company 3 would show me how things were progressing. VFX super Mark Russell was great to work with and very collaborative, so any notes I had were listened to, and all my ideas were incorporated. The place it shows the most is the scene where the sun goes down. The sun was setting in the initial CG environment — we’d shot it for real, but when you’re looking east, it was full-CG, not plates — and I said, “When the sun sets in New York, the light never comes from just one direction because of all the reflective surfaces, so it should be bouncing off windows and cars and so on.” So we added in all those elements, and the scene came to life.

Tell us about the DI at Company 3 with colorist Stephen Nakamura. What was entailed?
When I began it in February 2020, I was in the middle of prep on Tick, Tick…Boom! in New York, so we’d meet either at night or on weekends, and then he’d work on my notes. We planned to take a break, as VFX still had a lot of shots to turn in, but then COVID hit, and we got shut down. That ended up being a good thing for the film, as I just felt something wasn’t quite clicking, and it gave me six months to really think about the DI.

So I didn’t go back till August, and we did two more weeks on the DI, and that ended up being remote. Stephen was at Company 3 in LA, but Jon couldn’t even get in there because of COVID. I was in New York on a high-speed live feed with Stephen, so I could see a [Resolve] Power Window in real time, and that’s how we did it.

When we restarted the DI, I told Stephen I didn’t want to start at the beginning of the film, but with the big Carnaval sequence, which is the heart and soul of the whole film. I felt if we could get that color right, then the rest would fall into place. But it was hard to do, as we shot a lot of day exteriors. Carnaval was shot over the course of 14 hours, and it has to feel like 8 minutes. But when we finally got it, and all the skin tones and coolness of the shadows felt right, and we’d pulled out saturation, then we went back to the opening number. We used Carnaval as a reference and kept checking it for tone, and then it all worked great.

Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.