[Editor’s Note: This article contains spoilers for Season 2 of “Beef”]
Creator Lee Sung Jin and his team perfected the agony of making a series of bad life decisions in season 1 of “Beef.” In season two, the show expands in every way imaginable, including the way cinematographer James Laxton chose to shoot the movie. netflix show.
Laxton, taking over from Season 1 cinematographer Larkin Seiple, wanted to preserve how the show articulates the power dynamics between characters through framing, lighting, scale of shots, and movement. But with season 2 following several couples: country club general manager Josh Martin (Oscar Isaac) and his wife/frustrated designer Lindsay Crane-Martin (Carey Mulligan), country club workers Austin (Carlos Melton) and Ashley (Cailee Spaeny), and the country club’s new owner, President Park (Youn Yuh-jung) and her husband, Dr. Kim (Song Kang-ho), Laxton chose a camera that would give him the largest of large formats.
“We chose to shoot with the ARRI 265 and I think we were the first long-form show to use this camera,” Laxton told IndieWire. “It’s a 65mm size sensor; the format has been around for quite some time. But the camera provided the same size that I’ve used on films like ‘Beale Street,’ but the compact size of the camera gave us a speed that we could move with.” [our setu[s] from steadicam to laptop and back to studio mode.”
As cinematic as streaming show formats are, speed and efficiency are still some of the names of the television game. The choice of camera allowed Laxton to focus on one of the main creative challenges of “Beef” season two: finding intimacy with each character and providing a perspective through which we see their relationships come together and fall apart. Laxton also needed to connect the audience to each individual character’s perspective through the complicated web of emotions and goals they have.
Some of that Laxton achieved by sculpting the overall look of “Beef” Season 2 with an ARRI DNA ensemble. “They have this really beautiful feeling of modern glass meeting the character and fullness of the antique,” Laxton said. “It’s a mix of things and, in many ways, traveling between eras and that spoke to me in a sense of generations, of cycles that are very important. I didn’t want it to be old-fashioned or super modern, but to find a way to feel like you’re feeling each of these generations at the same time.”
That said, it’s never just about choosing the right equipment. Laxton is able to create a sense of generational clash and cycles moving into each other through careful composition, a mirror to how Lee’s writing shows how Austin and Ashley are not far removed from the problems Josh and Lindsay face; such is the fate, perhaps, of couples who love “Aftersun.”
Nowhere is that visual sense of cycle more clear than in the final shot of the season, which begins with President Park visiting her first husband’s grave and rises to a samsara that includes all the characters in the same image, each in a different setting but all part of a whole. “This show is a lot about these generations and how each of them connects and finds connection,” Laxton said. “We needed to see them all at the same time and find a way to get a perspective on each of their lives. It seemed like the best way to do that was to observe, in a way, and not be close to each one, but to stand back so we could absorb the stories we were witnessing.”
“Beef” Season 2 is now streaming on Netflix.