Alice Brooks decided she wanted to be a cinematographer when she was fifteen years old. By then, she and her older sister had already spent more than a decade as child actors, long enough for Brooks to realize that the part of the business she truly enjoyed was the “lights” plus “camera” that came before the “action!” 

“Light has always been my attraction,” says Brooks. “The earliest memories I have are of light. I pointed to a light fixture in a parking lot in New Jersey where my grandparents lived and said ‘moon’ as my first word.” As she accompanied her sister to film and television shoots, Brooks would watch the lighting crew bring sets to life. “I was supposed to be doing my homework, but I just watched the lighting guys work, and I thought it was amazing to sit in a dark soundstage as, one by one, the lights came on, and out of what seemed to be nothing, magic was made.” 

When Brooks revealed her career plan to her mother during a walk along Santa Monica Beach, she was expecting resistance. The income she and her sister earned provided a major chunk of the family’s income. Instead, her mother surprised her with a life-changing response—if she was going to be a cinematographer, she had to enroll at USC.

By the time Brooks graduated from the Film & Television Production Division in 2001, she had become the go-to Director of Photography for her classmates. “I was in a class where everyone wanted to be writers or directors or producers, and so I just shot and shot and shot as much as I could,” she says. “My film school years were incredible. It was the best time of my life.”

Brooks then spent a year after graduation honing her technique, and expanding her clientele. “Since I had a scholarship I only had something like $5,000 in debt, which is incredible coming out of USC and I knew I didn't want to go into greater debt to go to grad school,” she says. “So, the following year, I call it my graduate school year, I stuck around USC, waiting tables, and offered all the graduate students my services to shoot their thesis films.” She shot thirty films that year. 

At the very end of that skills-building year, an undergrad asked her to shoot his thesis titled When the Kids Are Away, about the secret lives of stay-at-home moms. Although Brooks had already compiled an incredible reel by then, she took the job because the film was a musical. “I mean, I do think musicals are the greatest movie genre, because you can take song and dance and emote a person's feelings like you cannot in any other way in movies,” she gushes. The undergrad of the musical thesis was none other than producer/writer/director, Jon M. Chu, who has gone on to an incredibly successful career that includes the cultural touchstone, Crazy Rich Asians. “We bonded over our love of musicals,” says Brooks. “We were two kids at SC who wanted to make musicals more than anything. And here we are twenty-three years later, making the biggest musicals ever.”