The Set of ‘Wicked’ Features a Field of 9 Million Real Tulips
Call it Tulipmania—nine million tulips in all. That’s how many actual bulbs were planted for the opening scenes of Wicked, the hotly anticipated November 22 movie release that is creating its own kind of fervor. For the stage-to-screen adaptation, helmed by Crazy Rich Asians’ Jon M. Chu, few expenses were spared to immerse the audience in the world of Oz. There’s a yellow brick road paved with real bricks, a 106-foot-long functioning locomotive, and an Emerald City inspired by Chicago’s neoclassical White City, built for the 1893 World’s Fair.
But for all the cinematic wizardry, the biggest scene stealer might be the glorious fields of real tulips planted in color-blocked rows that lead to Munchkinland—a 6.8-acre set in Norfolk, England. “Jon said, ‘I need color—I want a rainbow,’” recalls the movie’s production designer, Nathan Crowley. “And I said, ‘Let’s go find a tulip farmer.’”
The idea wasn’t completely outlandish. For the movie Interstellar, Crowley had successfully grown 500 acres of corn. In Wicked, the Munchkins cultivate tulips not just for beauty but also for their ability to provide natural dyes for beautiful garments in silk and velvet. “They are artist-alchemists, coaxing the rainbow from their blooms,” Crowley says. “It was nerve-racking to grow the tulips, but I had great faith that if we found the right farmer we could do it.”
Fortunately, they did. Wicked’s location manager, Adam Richards, invited Norfolk flower farmer Mark Eves to meet Crowley on the Munchkinland set. “I told him that I needed tulips as far as the eye can see,” Crowley says. “And Mark said, ‘Well I’ve got to get on with it and ship the bulbs over here from the Netherlands and put them in the ground before it freezes.’ Mark was the right guy.”
As zany as the project sounds, things got even wackier. “I know it sounds insane, but I thought he said we’d need one million tulip heads to fill the space,” the production designer says. “But Mark actually said nine million. So when the shipment arrived, we realized we had purchased nine million tulip bulbs. The studio got a good deal!”
The flatlands around the Munchkinland set were planted with the bulbs in stripes of vibrant color, enabling glorious wide cinematographic shots. “Imagine inky violets, fiery oranges, and sunshine yellows alongside the classic reds,” Crowley says of the joyous landscape that appears in the movie’s opening scenes. “It’s a celebration of color.”
But why go to the trouble when so much of today’s moviemaking is created digitally using techniques like CGI? “For me the cinema is about being taken away on a journey,” Crowley says. “And when the CGI is too much and the set build is too little, it stops me from falling into the film. Here, the actors are running through actual flower fields, and you see the blooms move in the wind. It feels organic.”
Best of all, the nine million tulips were recycled. The heads of the flowers were harvested and used as living roofs on the Munchkins’ houses, and the bulbs were returned to the farmer and replanted. “They all just bloomed again,” Crowley says.
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