How did you decide on the visual language of the supernatural?

Koepp: I like the idea of an unsettling movie. And when you make them, it’s all about how well can you create an atmosphere. The more real it seems, the more unsettling it’s going to feel. The idea of having the kid start the movie talking to the presence was in the script. Brian De Palma, who I was working with a lot then, read the script and one of his first ideas was, “Why doesn’t he look right down the barrel of the lens whenever he is talking to the ghost?” And I knew enough to hear a good idea and take it when I was handed it. And then the rest was a collaboration between the production designer and the director of photography Fred Murphy. We just tried to really get everything very, very specific and accurate.

Were there other inspirations or influences from folks that you had worked with, be it De Palma or Steven Spielberg? I guess every filmmaker to some extent steals from Spielberg.

Koepp: They’re not that hard to spot. “Close Encounters,” obviously there’s a great deal in common — there’s something wrong with dad. He’s obsessed. He’s wrecking the house. There was a moment in “Poltergeist” where when the weird things first started happening in the house, Craig T. Nelson comes home and there’s JoBeth Williams on the floor with the kid and the football helmet and lets the kid slide across the floor and she whoops and jumps up and down. It’s fun at first, and I think it’s very true to human nature. If something extraordinary happens, it’s fascinating and exciting, you can’t leave that out just to have the spooks and scares and jumpstarts. So Spielberg, obviously not so much for visuals or shots, but for thematic things like extraordinary things happening to normal, regular people. And there’s some of “The Shining” in that.

As a writer of many stories full of fantastical ideas, what’s your barometer for storytelling where you give a character a choice that may not be the most believable choice, but you know that it serves a story?

Koepp: It goes back to Hitchcock’s thing — in every thriller, and ghost stories are thrillers of a different type — where you must answer the fundamental question, why don’t they call the police? And sometimes the answer is they do, and the police don’t do anything, or they do and that makes it worse. Before my first movie, as long as you’re encouraging me to name-drop, Bob Zemeckis had said, “You’ve got to read ‘Hitchcock/Truffaut’ twice before you do anything.” His other advice was, “Go stand in an airport for 12 hours. That’ll train you to be a director.” I didn’t do the airport one, but I read “Hitchcock/Truffaut” a few times and I picked that up from there. And in “Stir of Echoes,” I have [Tom’s wife Maggie] say, “We’re calling the police.” And he says, “And tell them what? Run it by me. I want to hear how it sounds,” which I thought adequately addressed that. But I also think the answer for Kevin’s character was because he’s compelled and he has to know.

This film comes after you’d worked on “Jurassic Park” and “The Lost World,” which used computer-generated effects in such an inventive and groundbreaking way. What was your experience like with CGI on this film?

Koepp: The CGI stuff we did was less fun, certainly, and less effective than practical solutions that we found. The thing where he pulls his tooth out was very old-fashioned kind of switcheroo makeup. And for the movements of the ghost, Fred and I watched this music video that we liked, and there was some very strange movement in it. So we shot at six frames a second whenever the ghost appeared, but we told the actress to move at quarter speed. So if she was walking across the room, it plays at apparently normal speed, but with a very bizarre shudder about her. Even when she’s just looking at him, there’s these tiny little movements in her face. And it was real, so that made it work better.

See also: Variety - Embracing Pulpy Genre, Germany’s Hnywood Aims for the Stars

Brian De Palma is generally a bit dismissive of Alfred Hitchcock’s work after Psycho (1960), claiming it to be too artificial and old-fashioned. There can be little doubt, however, that at least one element of Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964) impressed itself deeply on De Palma’s unconscious: the use of an actor to project psycho-physical states of both adulthood and childhood, veritably regressing to relive a primal scene of trauma. Let’s look at the interplay between Marnie and Obsession (1976).

Regarding De Palma picking up on Hitchcock's cinematic language post-Psycho, I know there are more instances in De Palma we can trace back to these films, but it's always seemed to me that among the elements that make up the centerpiece sequence in De Palma's Mission: Impossible are strong vibes from both Marnie and The Birds. The way that Hitchock shows Marnie waiting in the stall of a women's restroom as everybody leaves introduces a strong sense of silence as Marnie then exits the ladies room, and gets the combination to the safe. As Marnie empties the safe, Hitchcock essentially splits the screen to show us that there is a lady mopping the floor on the other side of the room. Still in complete silence, Marnie has taken money from the safe and as she makes her way toward the exit, she notices the cleaning lady, and removes her shoes. More suspense, as Hitchcock shows the shoe about to drop out of Marnie's pocket - and then it does drop, breaking the silence - but the cleaning lady doesn't seem to have heard it. Between the silence, the suspense, and then the shoe drop, I think we can see (hear?) echoes in De Palma's CIA set-piece: the "complete silence," the suspense, and not only the drop of sweat, but finally, the dropping of the knife, which De Palma shows us in Kubrickian slow motion. In between, there is the creepy moment when our hero, Ethan Hunt, is waiting up above CIA analyst William Donloe like a bird of prey. This moment often makes me think of the playground scene in Hitchcock's The Birds, where flocks of crows have quietly gathered behind Tippi Hedren.

As Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin suggest, these and other Hitchcock elements in De Palma's work are likely imprinted on his subconcious. Although it certainly seems that De Palma can recall any or most of these elements quite vividly, he has likely absorbed them so deeply, they are very much a part of his cinematic ways of thinking.

DOMINO -
In a fantastic text entitled The Place of the Spectator, Olivier Assayas argued that Brian De Palma tends to grant an archetypal value not to situations but to devices, claiming that the device is the only subject of cinema. This bold hypothesis, corroborated again and again by the eminently self-reflexive work of the director of Carrie (1976) and Mission: Impossible (1996), is confirmed again in Domino, a film in which the plausibility of the ‘situations’ counts much less than De Palma’s interest in reflecting on the ‘devices’ for capturing images that populate our contemporary reality: in this case, microcameras built into rifles or drones.

Appreciated for his elaborate camera movements, Brian De Palma, one of the most gifted directors of his generation, constantly engages in dialogue with other filmmakers through his films (Kubrick, Hitchcock, Godard, Welles, Michael Powell or Buñuel).

De Palma's universe frequently immerses us in bizarre, fast-paced stories with an unstoppable thread of cunning, irony, criticism, humour, horror and a highly refined technique.

Joelle Garguilo: I’m going to bring up a project, and just the first thing that comes to mind for you.

John C. Reilly: Okay.

Joelle Garguilo: Casualties Of War.

John C. Reilly: Casualties Of War was my first movie. That was my first time on an airplane, first time in front of a camera. Yeah, a lot of firsts. I met my wife on that movie. And a few near-death experiences come to mind right away, too. As Michael J. Fox said, never drive in a country that believes in reincarnation.

Witney Seibold, Slash Film

In Chu's film, future Wicked Witch Elphaba is an illegitimate child born with green skin and "Carrie"-like telekinetic powers, powers which she uses when the local brats make fun of her color. Elphaba will eventually grow up to be a stalwart and not terribly interesting young woman played by Cynthia Erivo. Erivo is an excellent singer and can certainly belt out the show's bigger numbers with a Broadway baby's aplomb, but her performance otherwise is frustratingly subdued. It's as if she's afraid to show any actual wickedness, anger, joy, or any other emotion beyond intense frustration and mild concern.

The same might be said of Ariana Grande (credited in the film as Ariana Grande-Butera for reasons you can read here), who plays Galinda (the future Glinda). Elphaba meets Galinda at Shiz University, presented as a Hogwarts-like school for witches and warlocks (despite it just being the college for all of Oz) where Elphaba's little sister Nessarose (Marissa Bode) has been accepted. Galinda is presented as a vapid, shallow valley-girl-type character, more concerned with fashion and popularity than skill or achievement. Grande, a professional pop star, can likewise hit the high notes, but rarely brings any kind of lifelike expressions to her Beverly-Hills-inflected performance.

Elphaba unwittingly performs a feat of telekinesis in front of Shiz University's headmistress, Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), and the young witch is accepted on the spot, not even having applied. Elphaba and Galinda become roommates, and one might expect the two actresses to downshift into cattiness mode as they discover their mutual loathing for one another. Song lyrics assure the audience that loathing is indeed developing, but I see nothing of that on the lead actresses' faces or in their performances.

A lot happens before the main title appears, most importantly a recap of Elphaba’s birth. Attended to by her ursine nanny Dulcibear and a goat obstetrician, Elphaba’s entry into the world is greeted with shock. When her father, Governor Thropp (Andy Nyman), sees the baby’s pea green skin he shrieks, “Take it away!” In a clever moment right out of Carrie, Elphaba demonstrates her instinctual powers even as a newborn when surgical instruments go flying up to the ceiling.

Wicked’s greatest dramatic asset, even more so than Schwartz’s score, is Holzman’s brutally efficient book. In crafting the stage musical, which charts Elphaba’s rise from undergraduate outcast at Shiz University to the Most Wanted Witch in Oz, Holzman and Schwartz identified the exact amount of exposition, backstories, and comic asides that they needed to expand a fantasy world and communicate their characters, cutting every second of excess fluff. On stage, Elphaba finishes belting the roof-raising “The Wizard and I,” in which she dreams of becoming famous and being “de-greenified,” and then immediately steps a few feet stage left to launch into a rageful duet, “What Is This Feeling?,” with Glinda. There’s no transition, no perfunctory dialogue—the show just barrels shrewdly from essential moment to essential moment.

The film, conversely, takes its sweet time, adding longer scenes between every song, including lots of silly banter for Glinda’s reimagined entourage (Bowen Yang and Bronwyn James), even if there’s almost no changes to the plot. On screen, Wicked feels self-consciously elongated whenever it stretches beyond the musical’s exoskeleton, as if the idea of making a lengthy movie predated the plan for what to do with all the extra minutes. The scene in which Glinda reaches out to Elphaba by mirroring her awkward dance moves at a party can be a tearjerker on stage, but the slow-motion treatment here as the dance goes on and on drains it of emotional energy.

Wicked’s frequent patches of sluggishness are particularly frustrating because so much of the film—especially the songs—is glorious. As in In the Heights, Chu excels at timing shots to match the music precisely, treating Schwartz’s music with an invigorating reverence. When Glinda sings the line, “Of course, I’ll rise above it,” the melody leaps up on the word “rise” and the camera pans upward. Since Chu’s stylistic vigor is essentially playful, Wicked shimmers most distinctively in the comic set pieces, especially “What Is This Feeling?,” choreographed with giddily vicious energy. Much of the broader musical staging, like the ensemble’s dizzying leaps across a series of spinning clock faces in “Dancing Through Life,” is stunning.

Between Oz’s stark, bright colors, the sweeping shots of winged monkeys in flight, and soaring gestures toward the iconography of The Wizard of Oz, Alice Brooks’s cinematography can sometimes offer an exhilarating sensory overload. In the opening sequence, undergirded by newly percussive orchestrations, the camera captures an incandescent rainbow before flying over Dorothy and company making their way across the Yellow Brick Road. Wicked was, perhaps, the last great mega-musical, following in the footsteps of less nimble, more somber shows like Les Misérables and The Phantom of the Opera: Unlike those musicals’ lackluster stage-to-screen adaptations, the world rendered here actually feels huge and wild and full enough to encompass a reality worthy of the largesse suggested on stage.

For devotees looking to see Wicked explode on to the screen, then, Chu’s vision won’t disappoint. Neither will his commitment to ceding several minutes of the film to a series of Broadway cameos that go on for long enough that newcomers to the Wicked-verse may be completely lost. If the utterly campy sequence, which unsubtly pokes fun at a rumored behind-the-scenes feud from 2003, isn’t targeted at casual audiences, the filmmakers are, at least, unapologetic and self-aware in catering to the viewers primed to care the most.

Fortunately, neophyte audiences won’t require any extra knowledge to fully appreciate the freshness blooming from the central performances. Erivo blends her film experience and Broadway bona fides to offer an Elphaba that marries the smallest of gestures—a sweet, inward smile before she launches into her hopeful “The Wizard and I,” for example—with the stadium-sized bravado of her “Defying Gravity.” Though the screenplay’s additions flesh out her character superficially—Elphaba pedantically corrects Glinda’s grammar—Erivo offers a slightly snarky sweetness that makes the role feel unusually layered.

Erivo uniquely takes advantage of all the extra runtime to deepen her characterization, carefully exploring Elphaba’s self-loathing (she blames herself for her mother’s death and her sister’s disability) and the past hurt that fuels her burgeoning activist bent. And the presence of a Black actress in the role reinforces how much Wicked is a barely disguised allegory about skin color and the flammable potency of vilifying the Other for political gain. Erivo actually pushes back against the script’s emphasis on Elphaba’s Carrie-like powers that wreak havoc whenever her emotions get the better of her: She makes Elphaba’s overlooked wit and care and intelligence infinitely more interesting than her magical potential.

Aiding in this redefinition of the character, of course, is the actress’s voice. While Elphabas on Broadway have famously added flamboyant vocal riffs to “The Wizard and I” or “Defying Gravity,” they’ve been constrained by certain stylistic limitations about adapting the score. Erivo seems to have freer rein to shape the role around her own gifts. Especially in the tenderly wistful ballad “I’m Not That Girl,” she weaves liquid melismas into the melody, tendrils of Elphaba’s longing that will surely become a new gold standard for interpreting the song.

If Grande’s fluttery Glinda doesn’t equivalently redefine the role, it’s still an astutely funny, splendidly sung performance. Whenever Grande hits especially high soprano notes, Glinda’s on-screen posse breaks out into applause, perhaps a little meta wink at the naysayers who doubted whether Grande had the vocal chops to sing the role. She not only does, but she’s also refreshingly unafraid to make Glinda quite cruel at the start of the film. Most Wicked castings tend to tilt toward one protagonist or the other—it’s Elphaba’s story or it’s Glinda’s, depending on who’s in the roles—but the pairing here provides a lovely balance, with Holzman and Dana Fox’s extended script giving them both, at least, extra room to grow.