“Euphoria” is back.
After a four-year hiatus, creator Sam Levinson was excited to take the high-school characters into adulthood. He says, “They can be in the wider world, and with that freedom comes obvious consequences.”
Enter Rue (Zendaya). For the last few years, she has spent her days up to no good as she smuggles fentanyl across the border. It’s all part of paying off her debt to her dealer, Laurie (Martha Kelly). The show opens with her driving her beat-up car on another run. She drives it up a makeshift ramp and gets stuck, then she tries maneuvering it and moving around inside the car, hoping to get it to roll forward. Rue eventually gives up and leaves it suspended in mid-air, teetering on the edge.
Speaking with Variety for Inside the Frame, Levinson says, “It highlights the humor of this season and the tension of it, and they’re working in tandem. It becomes this bigger metaphor for her journey, where she’s just teetering. One false move, and she’s, you know, and she’s, she’s going over the edge.”
But Levinson hadn’t planned to open the season that way.
He says, “In the script, it was her crossing a river, and she gets swept under and lost.” A visit to the Drug Enforcement Administration HQ in Los Angeles changed things. “On the wall, they have all these photos of different busts they’ve done; cocaine and money and things, and suddenly I see this one picture of a Jeep stuck on top of a border wall. I said, ‘Well, what happened here?’ and they said, ‘Some idiot tried to drive a car over the border filled with cocaine.’” He thought that was something Rue would try to do, so he wrote it into the script.
However, that posed a number of logistical questions. First, he wanted to use the real border wall and try to drive a car over it. “The answer was no,” Levinson says.
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Production designer François Audouy built a 25-foot-long wall, and VFX supervisor Mark R. Byers designed a hydraulic system where they could get the car up and tilt it forward and backwards, and Rue would be stuck in it.
He also wanted to change things visually and give the show a sense of objectivity. For Season 1, the aspect ratio was 1.78:1 (16:9), and for Season 2, they used 1.85:1. Levinson says, “I wanted to open up the frame a little bit more and feel the world around them and how small they are in it. It just added to the danger.”
Levinson was also drawn to Westerns and looked at the show through that lens. Cinematographer Marcell Rev had discussed the idea of using an edgier stock. “We were thinking about a film stock that has the richness of classical film photography from the ‘50s and ‘60s, all those colors that Kodak and Technicolor had at the time.”
Rev was meant to shoot on 35mm film using anamorphic lenses. But as they started testing, things changed. They tested using 65mm film, and it was perfect in creating a saturated look. Rev says, “It blew us away.”
In shooting the scene, the biggest challenge was the sun. Rev says, “We’re out in the desert, and the sun is moving.” He had to maintain the sun at a certain angle, so he had to be strategic about when he shot the wide shots and when he could shoot a close-up. Rev says, “You’re fighting the elements to get there, but you always want to be in the right angle and get the right shots and get the right movements.”
Levinson always wanted to tell the story at dawn. “We had done so much night work in Seasons 1 and 2. I wanted to tell this story in the daytime, and I wanted to find the shadows in the light. It felt like a nice contrast to what we had been doing that could give it a different visual sense and also could represent our collective dream of whatever California may or may not be.”
Aside from the elements and logistics, Rev needed to hit the emotional beats of balancing humor and tension. He explains, “You have her going up the ramp, which you don’t exactly know at the time what she’s up to. So there is this moment when you’re like, ‘’What is going on?’ and when do you reveal that? When do you show the first wide shot? What angle is that?” He continues, “Then there’s the part of it when she’s inside the car realizing that she’s stuck, and we, the audience, realize that she’s on top of this wall.”
“Euphoria” Season 3 airs weekly on HBO/HBO Max on Sundays at 9 p.m. ET.
From Variety US