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The age-old question of who can adapt the beloved Broadway hit Wicked for theaters was finally answered the day Jon M. Chu was brought on board to deliver the wizardly magic behind one of cinema’s most iconic lands, Oz. His world-building vision of this subverted origin story extends to his department heads to craft one all-encompassing saga of female friendship that travels into the psyche of Oz like never before.

Offscreen Central had the opportunity to talk to the sound team, Andy Nelson, Nancy Nugent Title, and John Marquis, behind Wicked focusing on the challenges of creating a soundscape that complements the film’s visual and emotional depth, the seamless transition between music and dialogue, and specific scenes, such as the “No One Mourns the Wicked” and “Defying Gravity”.

Jillian Chilingerian: Hi, it’s so nice to meet you all. I’m very excited to talk about the film today. I’ve seen it about five times. I want to go again, and I’m into all the Wicked lore. This is one of those films where I want to learn everything about the making of it.
John Marquis: Awesome that’s so cool!

Jillian Chilingerian: How did you all come onto this project, it feels like one of those films that it was meant to be that all of these people are working on this film, and someone like Jon to figure out how they were going to make this film with his vision.
John Marquis: Yeah, well, I was working on In The Heights with Jon and Myron Kerstein. I heard him talking at the desk as we were mixing and I got immediately very excited because Jon’s clearly musicals are his wheelhouse, and seeing the trajectory of where he was going, what he’d been doing, and seeing what he did on In The Heights, and hearing them talk about Wicked was super exciting. I was more excited about the team and the people that we were working together on because we worked with Jon for several years so it was feeling really solid, really good, and I was not getting too ahead of myself with how massive the property is and the expectations of the hands of everything was going to go into it. I managed, at least from my perspective, tried to keep it just, you know, isolated, and down to we’re a tight group of people that know each other inside and out, and can have a shorthand, and should be able to manage this, hopefully. Nancy and I and maybe at this point too, Andy, had been to the set or something, but Nancy and I had seen a sizzle reel that Myron had put together in 2023 maybe, but it gave us an idea of the scope and scale. It was just as big and as huge as we thought it was potentially going to be Lord of the Rings meets Harry Potter meets, it’s just gigantic. It was exciting to see at that point that all the crafts and all the team were going to be given the liberty to realize this dream to its fullest with Jon leading. I keep saying, like all the crafts, all the departments, were firing on all cylinders, and we all inspired each other to do what this movie deserves to be and become.
Nancy Nugent Title: As far as putting the entire crew together, my first film with Jon Chu was Now You See Me 2 and I had known him longer than you could see the musicality in Jon’s filmmaking, even in nonmusical films, and also his growth as a filmmaker, which he will talk about as well on every project that’s come up and I said to Jon at one point, like this movie it took 20 years to make it because it was waiting for you to be ready. It was like you said, it seemed like it was meant to be and we felt very special coming together, of all the different personalities and the leadership and the cast.
Andy Nelson: So I had not met Jon Chu but I worked with the producer Marc Platt on La La Land, and he started talking to me about Wicked back then. Time went on, and I wasn’t sure what was going to happen, hoping it was going to get made because I was very excited, having seen the show a couple of times, and knew what a great piece of cinema it could become. Jon was taken on as director, and I went out to meet him on the set in London, just to see if I was going to be his choice it all came together and he’s been a tremendous delight to work with. He’s so collaborative.

Jillian Chilingerian: I love hearing all of this. This movie brings us to new worlds that we never had access to or have never seen before. I interpreted Wicked, of how we see it as we are the Ozians, and we’re understanding all the culture of the land, getting into the psyche of who these people are and what this world is. For a world we are creating what does that mean for the soundscape?
John Marquis: Yeah, at least from a sound design sound effects perspective I didn’t go in thinking we need to come up with all these crazy, weird new sounds. It’s more about the feeling, I grew up with The Wizard of Oz as a child, and so more of my memories are directly related to the feelings I got from that movie. A lot of what we’re working on with the sounds is what memories are. What are these sounds evoking, as opposed to the practicality or the literal aspects of these things? It’s a whimsical world so everything had to have a musicality to it, very handmade, handcrafted, deco crafts, there was no mass production. It was all made by an artisan and everything, all those artisans all led back to the Wizard. With that couple as a template, feeling sound design-wise, it’s a musical so everything has to be musical. The world is an instrument, right? So all these sounds need to work sonically, rhythmically, tonality, all that stuff within the scope of the score, and, of course, the songs and so that was another just piece of making sure we’re rhythmically in tune and then also just emotionally that we’re feeling the emotional beats throughout all these places too.
Nancy Nugent Title: It was helpful to have such an amazing visual landscape to take our cues from because so much detail was put into every set. Every costume is a little bit different, and every hairstyle that sort of detail was very easy to be inspired by, as far as matching the sounds to what we see.
Andy Nelson: I think for me, Jillian, it was the fact that this is a musical, therefore we knew this was going to be the leading factor. I had no idea, of course, until we started hearing what the orchestra was going to do, as opposed to what had been conventionally the use of the music, which was more like a small pit orchestra on stage, once we realized this, the scope and size of that orchestra and all the rhythm tracks that Greg Wells, the producer, put together for all the drums, bass guitar, things like that, it helped, then Jon to find that language inside of all these unique sounds that had to come into the world, because they all had to be, as John pointed out, musically coherent as well. It was a fun blend. We worked our way down through every scene, knowing that the music was always going to be a very present factor, but the dynamics of the film allowed us to go very big when we needed it and very small when we needed it. There was plenty of time to do that, and that’s because, Jon, Marc, and Universal smartly decided to make this into two films which allowed this tremendous depth to go into the characters, and therefore helped us design the soundtrack with that in mind.

Jillian Chilingerian: These sets, are the most insane and I cannot imagine being an actor and being on those with the live singing. Everything is so back connected to how you use this environment to flesh out the sound and the emotions. It’s a very emotional film and I always listen to the soundtrack from the Broadway play, because I love it so much but after seeing it with these visuals, it feels like it has a new meaning now when you see those visuals mixed with those sound cues and immerse yourself in that world compared to how you might see it if you were just in the theater watching the play, and we’re all seeing it at the same time, getting to feel and hear and just be with those characters very intimately.
Andy Nelson: Yes. I mean, it expands the show. The show is tremendous to go see, but there’s something about the cinematic experience that lifts it off the screen. It’s a it’s a very different experience, and yet it’s all interconnected. I think that was the treat of having something like this and talking about the set when I was on there, even so briefly it was all practical, and it made such a difference because you’re right, the actors react to that differently. John and Nancy’s preparation of all the sound design was a part of the fact that it was practical because it just lent itself to certain ways, you didn’t have to think of it in a more traditional visual effects style. It was just there. It was happening. It was real, it was tangible. And I think that comes across.

Jillian Chilingerian: I want to go into the opening scene when the Universal logo is on there, and then we hear Glinda in the background giving her broadcast about what’s going on, and then immediately opening up into “No One Mourns the Wicked”, for musical openings does that have challenges when you’re starting off the project right at a song and needing to use that as a maybe a thread of how the rest is going to go?
John Marquis: Yeah, well, I think we’ll all have something to say about this. There’s a lot of info in that first song, and as a first-time viewer, you’ve got to try to get that across. There are lots of peaks and valleys with epic scope and scale to that sequence. It is the first cue in the movie and you don’t want to bowl the audience over knowing where we got to go by the time we get to “Defying Gravity”, you always want to build with dynamics in it, but it’s a huge piece. The challenge in doing that, obviously, is the clarity of the story has to come across, but we also need to have these emotional beats and the arc to the song to get us to the effigy, needs to be a big moment, but then the Wicked title card comes up, and that’s got to be bigger than the effigy but knowing that you’re going to keep going like this through the movie. The fortunate part that we had with that was the way it was put together. It allowed for those spaces to become, dynamically what they needed to be.
Andy Nelson: Once that downbeat hits you’re on that journey, it was tell the story through the song and it’s a busy song, and it’s a busy opening, and we had to refine it until we found where it needed to sit. It did take a little while often does in movies. When you start the film, it’s often you find that you have to find the sort of style and signature of the story. Jon M. Chu kept us very focused on the story and that dictated the track.
Nancy Nugent Title: I think you keyed into something that was true, Jillian, is that was probably the most challenging scene of the movie for us, just in the process of mixing and editorial-wise as well because we don’t get to the Wicked title card until 10 minutes into the movie. To not have that to wrangle the length of that time there, while telling all the backstory of all these characters we have. We’re in the future with multiple flashbacks and songs within songs, but it has to be succinct, and it has to lead up to the actual start of the film. It was, it was tricky on all fronts.
John Marquis: I’m glad you appreciated that opening logo was fun because we saw there were a bunch of different iterations of that. There was the big sound design version, and the visual representation of that had been different for a long time. Finally, near the end of our mix, we got that throwback Universal logo, and that just radically changed our approach to it, and just started very quiet and trying to tell a little bit of the story of what’s happening off stage with Elphaba and the bucket of water.
Jillian Chilingerian: There’s so much build-up to things and we know we’re gonna eventually end at “Defying Gravity”, but starting it off in the future and we’re going back, and when we get to the title of Wicked, it starts to feel very nostalgic. Even if it’s your first time watching or like you’re a fan of the musical, is there’s just something about it that, as you’re all saying, emotionality and what these cues are telling us as the audience, that you’re immediately leaning in, and you’re just hooked to what’s going to come.
John Marquis: I’ll tell you one little funny thing, that bucket splash was the Achilles heel of this movie. I can’t tell you how long we fretted over that and each time a version of it. It’s happening in darkness and if you don’t know what it is people might think, what is that a wave crashing? What is that something else? It’s amazing how simple a sound is when you have to focus in like that, how hard something becomes when it’s that simple.

Jillian Chilingerian: Even with that, you have those different elements of like the water splashing, or the train so how do you with the musicality keep things in sync with the songs? How they are going to start, or the scores laced in there. It’s really impressive to me.
John Marquis: We had great music editing on stage with us, we had Jack Dolman and Katherine Wilson our music editorial superstars who made sure that we were in tempo. I had click tracks from pop to pop, and we were tuning every sound that we could to make sure we were working harmonically with the score because all it takes is a degree with an interval to make something sad or make something happy. There were all these little nuanced tuning things that we had to do throughout and so it was a collaborative effort between the sound editorial team and the music editorial team to accomplish that.
Andy Nelson: The John Powell score, which was so integral to the film, gluing the songs together. As you’re starting to mix, there’s a little bit of a moving target, where it might sit, how it might play, even the position within it musically so John Marquis would have to constantly pay attention if Jack was shifting the cue very slightly or doing something, it would have affected this way the sound effects would work with it. John Powell did such an extraordinary job being able to quote little phrases from the songs to keep you familiar that you are in a musical, but always allowing the score to tell the story as well, and allowing us to be as dynamic as we could with it. It was an ever-moving target as it often is on a mix, but I’d say even more so on this, because of the the musicality.

Jillian Chilingerian: There are also so many good sound motifs in the score, and seeing how they pair up with visuals as a fan makes you excited, and you’re like, oh my gosh, I caught that.
Nancy Nugent Title: Yeah, it was satisfying just to go through the process because all the three of us, especially Andy, have worked on many, many films, and we’ve been in many situations where it’s sound versus music, who’s going take the lead, one thing is disturbing to the other, and this film process was amazing that we never had those moments. It was always collaborative and yes, sometimes one takes the lead over the other, but there was never an us versus them mentality. It was very much the departments working together to build the same world.
John Marquis: I’ve never worked on a movie like this. I think we’ve all talked about this is where you feel championed by the other crafts, like the choreographer would come in, or the cinematographer, and they’d all just be like, this sounds great. We couldn’t do these sounds without the choreography doing this, it was just fun feeling that camaraderie between each other.

Jillian Chilingerian: The Ozdust ballroom sequence, I’m sure this has been a sequence that a lot of people bring up to all of you because it’s just so beautifully done. We see multiple moments with Elphaba, where I feel like the sound plays such a crucial role in letting us get inside her head and understand her, like whether it’s when she’s trying to use her magic and the rattling and we’re feeling her frustration. In the Ozdust ballroom, where we have that silence there’s not the music, the sound is the visual cues coming from what we’re hearing, and the way she claps her hands having that moment very in her head with the hat, and sharing that, and getting to be in her sphere of what that feels like to enter a room where everyone is bullying you for nothing you can control.
Andy Nelson: Well, I’ll say thank God for Jon and Myron, the picture editor, putting that scene together. When you get offered a scene like that, that allows you to take your time and go deeper inside that moment, I think they don’t come along very often in films, and I think that was a real testament to the boldness that they did in the cutting room, which then allowed us to all put our work in there. I mean, Nancy, you had a ton of work in that scene to create that sense of the crowd, really, more than anything.
Nancy Nugent Title: That’s, a very, very delicate and emotional scene, the most emotional in the movie, some would say, and a turning point in the relationship between the two main characters and in sometimes, like John said, with the bucket of water, with something so simple you don’t realize how complex and and difficult it can be. With sound, sometimes the quietest scenes are the most difficult. It’s easy to play everything big in some ways, but there’s just nothing to hide behind. There’s no music leading us everything is through the performance and through the small amounts of sounds that we hear. Jon Chu sat with me and went through that whole scene and like second by second, moment to moment, said, this is the emotion, this is what the crowd’s feeling, this is what they’re communicating to her, this is what she’s communicating to us, and this is what each character is feeling. He plotted it out from top to bottom, and then that enabled us with the sounds of the crowd around Elphaba and her emotive sounds and Glinda’s responses. The use of creating a little bubble around her when she claps her hand allowed us to be the architects and create sonically, what he was describing emotionally. It was a challenge, but it was, it was satisfying.
John Marquis: It’s all about the performance. A lot of times in a scene,
people are trying to cover up for something that’s lacking, it’s like we need to distract with some sounds over here and bring the score up because we’re not getting the emotion. We could have muted the whole thing, and you were still seeing what was happening so was like this great exercise in restraint and paring down until we get to just the essence of seeing Elphaba in silence, accepting her herself, and picking that hat back up and putting it on now, now she is who’s she’s becoming.

When you think about the arc of the whole movie, you’ve got these huge moments, and like, how did we get to this moment where we’re just listening to pure silence? From my memory of the stage play, which I haven’t seen in 20 years, I remember that moment being different feeling more like you wanted to laugh at her, or it was like a comedic moment. I remember the first time I saw it was when Myron was giving us a little sizzle reel, he showed us the scene. I remember just being blown away, like, it’s my favorite scene in the movie, between that and when Elphaba gets the cape, I’m always fighting back tears. It’s crazy. It’s super satisfying to be able to go so quiet and just rely on the power of the image there.
Andy Nelson: Yeah, you’re right. John on the show, is sort of a bit humorous, and I think that is the response from the audience and it resonates, but it doesn’t resonate the way the film does in that sense. It was about getting the humiliation and the sense of awkwardness about it, it that that doesn’t happen quickly. It has to happen over some time and again I refer back to the cutting room because they did deliver that scene, knowing that the sound would then just take it to the next level, sort of thing. It’s a big testament to them putting that together in such a bold way.
Jillian Chilingerian: I feel that way towards the end of the “Popular” sequence, too when they’re both looking in the mirror, and it gets emotional. In the stage play, these moments are played up more for laughs so it’s interesting when I see a change in a few little things, and you have those visuals, and you get inside of the character.

Jillian Chilingerian: We can think of musicals as loud noises with a lot of things happening, and it could also be like, start and stop awkwardly. What are the challenges of making sure those musical moments that build up like that, they are feeling natural and organic, and not just like, okay, like another musical number, or we’re waiting for the next one to come, because. The editing and the music have much, like, pay off whether, if you were a fan before you loved the music, of I can’t wait for her to say this line, or I can’t wait for this to happen. It is fun in the way that it’s all paced out.
Andy Nelson: Well, you bring up the word pace, and that’s exactly it, honestly, Jillian, because I remember having lunch with Myron way before I started on the film, where just wanted to get to know him, and we sat and talked, and he knew I’d done quite a few different musicals, and we just talked about some of the challenges that they present and one of them is the fact that there are a lot of big moments that happen fairly quickly, one after another. Again, going back to the decision to make this into two films, it completely allowed us not to have that fight that battle where you’re trying to go from one song to another so quickly because you’ve got a lot of songs to get into one film. That was the decision, and it’s such a smart decision because it dynamically, changed the whole landscape of the mix so that’s the answer to your question. It comes back to the fact that that was a decision to tell the story the way they did, and to allow those moments to play and we just took it and ran with it, because that was a huge advantage for us while we were mixing.
John Marquis: I think there’s also just some built-in aspects that we haven’t talked about, Simon Hayes and the production recordings. All these songs blossom, and there’s all this live singing coming right out of their dialog delivery, so you’ve got a naturally built, seamless transition, for the spine of all the movie of the sequences, so that by that alone, you’ve become a pretty big hurdle when you can utilize all the live recordings like that. So you don’t feel like, okay, I’m gonna flip a switch, and now it’s a song, it just flows very naturally, and that just gave us a lot of leverage and leeway to make those songs all the smoother in regards to the way the music comes in and the environmental sounds. The environmental sounds are a huge thing as the world being an instrument, and so all those were definitely written into the script and shot specifically so the world was very much a part of the music and that was just another transitional element that helped it feel very homogenous from beginning to end.

Jillian Chilingerian: With all of the larger, like, ensemble pieces that we have. One of my favorites is “One Short Day” It’s like the happiest song, but also like the saddest song, because of what happens after. Then you have “Dancing Through Life” working with a lot of these people in the background and making sure those are looped. I love that this brought back people who were in the Broadway play to fill out those vocals.
Nancy Nugent Title: Oh yeah, everything was about the musicality of it and you mentioned two big ensemble scenes, “One Short Day” and “Dancing Through Life” that ended up needing very different approaches, even though they have sort of similar tones. “Dancing Through Life” is a party scene, it’s this rebel who’s come in, who’s the new guy at school, and he’s going to change the attitude, and bring his party atmosphere to it. It required a lot of background vocalizations that all had to be syncopated with the music so you mentioned looping, we had our dancer’s loop group come in and run the movements to make sure all of that was very musically correct. Whereas “One Short Day” is more about the ensemble singing so there wasn’t as much background chatter. It was more focused on the ensembles, which, as you mentioned, were all made up of present and former cast members from Wicked which was fantastic, and Robin Baynton, the sound editor who’s in charge of all the vocals and pre-mixing, was amazing about in especially in that scene, tying vocals to every character on the screen. When we go into the hair salon, we’ve got more of the female ensemble making it all very immersive, but in a different way than we did in the other scene you were talking about, but both sort of to the same fact a custom fit.
Andy Nelson: We would all be on the stage, the way we were mixing everything was virtual so we would be able to just adjust every single shot to sound for every single thing we saw, with the ensemble, with all the loop group, all the material that Nancy had prepared. We adjusted for the size of the screen, we had Dolby Atmos, which helped, which means we could play around with where it was in the room, and all sorts of wonderful tricks, which allowed us to make it a custom fit within each song. They’re both very different, those two songs, but they both had that same sense of what’s happening from moment to moment to moment and how can we achieve that best of all.

Jillian Chilingerian: Every musical sequence, has its personality, and the way that the performer wants to play that, and it feels so accustomed and attuned to each actor to give them the chance to put their mark on really beloved characters.
Andy Nelson: One of the things that comes across strongly for me, and the more I see it, is the way that Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande’s relationship, you feel that their relationship on screen is what’s happening. I think a lot of that’s to do with the fact that they were becoming so close on set, as we’ve read many times and we’ve seen, and I think you feel that, and it’s not often that you get performances like that that feel completely genuine, and I think that connects you to it in a very unique way.

Jillian Chilingerian: That leads me to “Defying Gravity”, another sequence that was broken up. As we talked about, you’re building up to these moments because you have the time to do it. The shattering of the glass, like, every time I watch that sequence, it feels like I’ve seen it for the first time and get chills. There is the silence again and we’re leaning in, we’re watching what’s going to happen to her, whether we know or we don’t know, but it just really feels like the emotional stakes in that environment that’s created.
John Marquis: Yeah, the thing about that, which is so interesting is you realize that there hasn’t been a song for quite some time, right? There’s a little action moment with the balloon and stuff. It’s a testament to how Jon and Myron put this together. You’ve got a lot of space from the last heavy emotional beat so when this one starts, you know it’s coming, and when it hits, you’re just like, oh God, you lock in, this is it. Then those emotional beats are just all the stronger for the break that we’ve had from the prior one before. It’s a very interesting sequence just because it had all those uh, moments of musicality interspersed with the sound effects, the only moment where you break the glass and you have this very emotional bit that’s just all score and sound effects that just gives us palette cleansing kind of feeling. So like, when the song kicks back in, it just, it just hits, and like, every time I’ve seen it with an audience, everyone erupts. I get chills every time I watch it still too. Super satisfying and then again, this was a delicate balance of going back and forth through the mix with Jon in regards to, how many practical sounds are we hearing? How much does the dialog? Maybe the vocals get a little obscure here, maybe not, or what are we sacrificing? How are we harmonizing? Making these the whole greater than the sum of the parts, which is where it gets to by the end of it, it just feels bigger than what’s happening.
Andy Nelson: The sound effects there are so important because she’s got so much power, and the world is starting to respond with the thunder and there’s a lot of moment-to-moment sound, but still, that song has to drive you through it. As John said, the minute those lyrics start the first three notes. There’s a slow, steady burn right to the end in some ways, and here’s the other thing about that and all the songs, in many ways, but particularly that, is their two voices together are so incredibly beautiful. They lock in together in a way, that’s unusual for two voices like that. There’s so much power that sings out from the two of them that we almost just fill in all around it, because they’re doing all the heavy lifting, for sure. Cynthia is hanging, singing live, and performing stunts, which is just crazy to think that she was singing like that at the same time, but she was.

Jillian Chilingerian: Does that impact when someone’s live singing?
Andy Nelson: When it’s captured so brilliantly by Simon Hayes and sung so brilliantly by Cynthia, we just preserve it and build around it, because that doesn’t happen very often but again, you feel the connection, and that’s the important thing. You’re not trying to convince anybody that she’s doing it, she is. So in some ways, it makes our work oddly easier, just because she’s already created the hard part now we just fill in all the gaps around.
Nancy Nugent Title: From a technical aspect, it does create a challenge, and it required all departments to be on the same page from pre-production because in those flying sequences, you would typically have fans blowing and, everybody had to come up with alternate ways to get those effects that would allow Simon to record not just usable, but a great vocal track, which is, I mean, that requires the cooperation of everybody to make that happen. So we were very then, that just makes our jobs that much easier to have.
John Marquis: It’s funny, the problem, I guess, Nancy and Andy and a can attest to is an embarrassment of riches, there is so much good material. I mean, Myron and Jon will talk about this too. Like, which take? How do you choose? They’re all good. You’re nitpicking at this point. When we were at the end, it was nitpicking syllables, like, I mean, there’s just, little polishes.
Andy Nelson: Yes normally you’re still battling to find the landscape, or what you’re trying to convey, in this case, as John said, it was actually just all the little detail, because the landscape was happening and it was just occurring so we were able then to spend time just tuning and refining things.
Jillian Chilingerian: It’s great to hear about how much of that emotion held on the set continued to the post of it, and that integrity. It speaks to how much everyone was on the same page of what they were tasked with, what they wanted to do, and, of course, Jon’s leadership. I love that in every interview, he talks about the emotion of what the camera’s doing, what the actors are doing, and I think it’s just so rare to hear a director talk like that.
Andy Nelson: Yeah, I think the love of the story and everyone knowing it was something that was going to be a bit special. I think that just started from day one, and it certainly took us right through to the last day of mixing the movie for sure.

Jillian Chilingerian: Thank you all so much for this really fun conversation about the sound and all of your work. As I said, I’m obsessed with this movie, and I want to know it all. I’m just so in awe of all of you and your craftsmanship.
John Marquis: Thanks. Well, we’re doing a part two, so feel free to stop by.
Nancy Nugent Title: So much fun, to talk to someone who is such a fan and really interested in how the movie was made so thank you for great, great questions.
Andy Nelson: Yes, thank you.

Wicked is currently available on demand.
You can read our review here.