Spoiler Alert: How Wicked: For Good Cinematographer Alice Brooks Achieved That Shot

OK, you’ve been warned.

The final shot of Wicked: For Good almost didn’t happen. Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo unexpectedly re-creating the Broadway musical’s iconic logo—seen in flashback right before the credits roll—wasn’t the product of meticulous planning, but a narrowly avoided disaster. According to cinematographer Alice Brooks, it came down to a split-second scramble that would determine whether the film’s secret ending would exist at all.

“We shot mostly on stages or on backlots, and that scene is actually shot on location in Windsor Great Park,” Brooks says. “We had scouted this location a year before we filmed it. There was this glorious, beautiful sunset, and we saw the tree on the side of a hill.” They called it the “Friendship Montage” at the time, “a moment between the two women,” flashing back to their days at Shiz, before Elphaba became the so-called Wicked Witch of the West.

Of course, things never go as planned. “The entire day we were shooting, it was gloomy,” Brooks recalls. “There was no sun.” She had a light prepped to create a fake sunset, “but it never looks like the sun,” she says.

Then, suddenly, the spirits of Billie Burke and Margaret Hamilton smiled down on them. “In the distance, I see this little sliver of break in the clouds, and I said, ‘We have to do this in two minutes.'” They grabbed handheld cameras and sprinted up the hill. It would end up being the only break of sun for weeks.

For the moment to echo the now-legendary Broadway artwork, Elphaba’s black witch hat had to be in place, and it wasn’t. “We didn’t have her hat suddenly ready, and we needed the hat obviously for the whisper. You want it to look exactly like the poster.” According to Brooks, Oscar-winning costume designer Paul Tazewell even created a special white dress for Grande—Glinda doesn’t wear anything else completely white at any point in the film—so every detail would match.

The black witch hat finally arrived, the sun shined as if on cue, the poppies glistened in the field, and director Jon M. Chu said the magic word: “Whisper.”

“It happened, and it’s our last shot of the movie,” Brooks says proudly. “It was like real movie magic.”