“Euphoria” is back.
After a four-year hiatus, creator Sam Levinson was excited to grow his high school characters into adults. “They can exist in a wider world, and that freedom has clear consequences,” he says.
Enter Rue (Zendaya). For the past few years, she’s spent her days doing the futile task of smuggling fentanyl across the border. It’s all part of paying off a debt to his dealer, Laurie (Martha Kelly). The show begins with her driving a beat-up car back on the road. She drives her car up a makeshift ramp and gets stuck. I then tried to maneuver the car around in hopes of rolling it forward. Lou eventually gives up and leaves it hanging in the air, teetering on the edge.
In an interview with Variety for Inside the Frame, Levinson said, “There’s a strong emphasis on humor and tension in this season, and they work together. It’s a larger metaphor for her journey, and she’s just wandering around. One wrong move and she’s, you know, going over the edge.”
But Levinson had no intention of starting the season that way.
He says, “In the script, the scene was for her to cross a river, but she gets swept away and gets lost.” A visit to the Drug Enforcement Agency headquarters in Los Angeles changed the situation. “There are pictures on the wall of busts of cocaine and money and all sorts of things. And all of a sudden you see a picture of a Jeep stuck on top of the border wall. I said, ‘So what happened here?’ ‘Some idiot tried to drive across the border with a load of cocaine,’ they said. He thought that was what Lou was going to do and wrote that into the script.
However, this raised many questions logically. First, he wanted to use a real border wall and drive over it. “The answer was no,” Levinson said.
Production designer François Audouy created a 7-meter-long wall, and VFX supervisor Mark R. Byers designed a hydraulic system that could lift the car and tilt it back and forth. Lou is trapped inside.
He also wanted to change things up visually to give the show a sense of objectivity. Season 1 used an aspect ratio of 1.78:1 (16:9), and Season 2 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 were in it. It just added to the danger.”
Levinson was also drawn to Westerns and viewed the show through that lens. Cinematographer Marcel Lev had discussed the idea of using edgier stock. “We were thinking about the richness of classic film photography from the ’50s and ’60s, a film stock that had all the colors that Kodak and Technicolor had at the time.”
The Rev was intended to be shot on 35mm film using anamorphic lenses. But things changed once we started testing. They tested using 65mm film and it was perfect for creating a saturated look. “That surprised us,” the pastor says.
The biggest challenge in filming this scene was the sun. The pastor said, “We are in the desert and the sun is moving.” The need to keep the sun at a certain angle meant I had to think strategically about when to take wide shots and when to take close-up shots. Lev says: “It’s a battle against the weather to get there, but you always want to get the right angle, take the right shot, and make the right move.”
Levinson always wanted to tell the story of the dawn. “In Season 1 and Season 2, we worked a lot at night. I wanted to tell this story in the daytime, and I wanted to find shadows in the light. I felt like this was a nice contrast to what we’ve been doing. It can give it a different visual feel, and also express our collective dreams of what California is and what it might not be.”
Apart from the elements and logistics, Rev needed to hit the emotional beat of balancing humor and tension. “You let her go up the ramp, and you don’t know exactly what she’s doing at that point, so there’s a moment where you’re like, ‘What’s going on?'” he explains. And when will it be revealed? When will the first wide shot appear? What angle is that? He continued, “And then there’s the part when she’s in the car and realizes she’s stuck. And we, the audience, realize she’s on this wall.”
Watch the video above.
“Euphoria” Season 3 will air every Sunday at 9pm ET on HBO/HBO Max.
