Celebrating Community

In 2002, when cinematographer Alice Brooks and director Jon M. Chu were still film students at the University of Southern California, they partnered for the short When the Kids Are Away, a musical about how a group of neighborhood moms spend their day after sending their children to school. During that collaboration, Chu interviewed Brooks on camera about the project, asking her why she wanted to shoot the short. As Brooks tells it, I said, Ive always loved musicals. My mom was an actor, dancer and singer, my dad was a theater director and a playwright, and I grew up going to theater. When you handed me your script for a musical, I knew I had to do this. We bonded over our love of musicals.

In the years since, music and dance have remained central to their creative collaboration as they've reteamed for such projects as the web series The LXD: The Legion of Extraordinary Dancers, the feature Jem and the Holograms, and now the musical In the Heights. In the middle of doing In the Heights, Brooks recalls, Jon said to me, We have been preparing our entire careers for this moment.'

Based on the stage musical featuring music and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda and a script by Quiara Alegr a Hudes, In the Heights offers a rich portrait of the characters who inhabit the Washington Heights neighborhood in New York City. Now playing in theaters and streaming on HBO Max, In the Heights was originally slated for release in June 2020, but the pandemic delayed its opening by a year. This is the perfect moment for this movie to come out, Brooks offers. It was always intended to be a huge theatrical experience, but even in places where people might not be able to go to the movie theater yet, it can give a sense of hope and a reminder of what community is.

The movie's release marks the culmination of a five-year journey for Brooks. I knew Jon was attached to In the Heights back in 2016, she says. He mentioned it a few times in passing, and in the back of my head, I was thinking, I have to shoot this movie.' So, without telling him, I started keeping a file of images that I thought might be interesting.

Then, in late 2018, Brooks and Chu partnered for the first two episodes of the Apple TV+ series Home Before Dark. (Brooks would also shoot episodes 5 and 6.) The night Chu arrived in Vancouver, he and Brooks met for dinner, and Chu asked her to shoot In the Heights. We went through his initial pitch for the movie, and for the look and feel of the story he wanted to tell, and why it was important for him specifically to make this movie, Brooks reflects. Jon always has such a deep connection to the material, and he felt he needed to tell the story of In the Heights.

Production designer Nelson Coates and editor Myron Kerstein both of whom had previously worked with Chu on the feature Crazy Rich Asians along with costume designer Mitchell Travers also went from Home Before Dark to In the Heights. Additionally, the feature reunited Brooks and Chu with choreographer Christopher Scott, who had been a key collaborator on both The LXD and Jem and the Holograms. Brooks notes that she, Chu and Scott have this great shorthand with each other. We figured out how to capture dance in a really organic way on The LXD, which was a challenging series, but it totally prepared us for In the Heights.

Finding Inspiration on Location

During Brooks' 10 weeks of prep for In the Heights, she says, We knew very quickly we needed to make the movie in Washington Heights. Immersing ourselves in the neighborhood was such an inspiration. I needed my crew to be part of that, too, so over the course of two days, gaffer Charlie Grubbs, key grip Kevin Lowry, A and B operators Mark Schmidt and Peter Agliata, and I all went up to Washington Heights, and I showed them all the key locations. I wanted them to have ownership and feel part of the process early on. Also, this was my first union movie in New York, so that time together gave us a chance to get to know one another. Im so grateful to the line producer, David Nicksay, and UPM Maggie Engelhardt for giving us that time long before the crew's prep started.

Meanwhile, Brooks and Chu compared the visual references they'd each been collecting in preparation for In the Heights. I consciously made a choice not to watch any musicals, the cinematographer notes. We both already have a huge musical encyclopedia in our brains. We didn't want to mimic anything else or do something just because it was on trend. But we did want to make a classic New York movie, so that's what I ended up looking at movies like Do the Right Thing, Moonstruck, Searching for Bobby Fischer. But really, more than another movie or a photograph, it was the community that inspired the look of the movie. We started collecting images from local photographers some of those photographers' work can be seen as part of the end credits.

It was great that Nelson, Mitchell and I had all done Home Before Dark together, because we very quickly understood the aesthetic of the movie, Brooks says. After working with Panavision's Millennium DXL2 camera on Home Before Dark, Brooks elected to use the camera again to shoot In the Heights, further streamlining her collaboration with Coates and Travers. We all knew the camera and understood how the colors were going to render, the cinematographer explains. The DXL2 was amazing.

After testing, Brooks opted to pair the camera with Panavision G Series anamorphic lenses. This movie is a celebration of Washington Heights and of immigrants, she reflects. Jon said, These are people with big dreams,' and he wanted the movie to feel as big as possible. In the movie, Abuela Claudia [Olga Merediz] talks about little details that tell the world we are not invisible.' The details we picked, like anamorphic and

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