Maxance Vincent
Jake Schreier is one of the main figures behind the success of the first season of Beef, with which he closely worked with showrunner Lee Sung Jin. The two have once again collaborated on Schreier’s latest film, Thunderbolts*, before reuniting on this second season of Beef. Different in tone and visually distinct from the first, Schreier discusses with Awards Radar during a Zoom press day on how this season was developed and the process that went into directing the season’s first and last episodes.
Read the full conversation below, which has been edited for length and clarity:
First and foremost, congratulations on the second season of Beef. Does it feel rewarding for you to see the reception it’s received from audiences worldwide after working on it for so long?
Yeah, I think the main thing is that it’s just great to get to work on a show like this with people that you care about and who you love as collaborators. You come to care about them through the process, put it out there, and end up with something you feel everyone can be proud of.
You and Sonny have obviously worked together in the first season of Beef and on the movie Thunderbolts*. When it came to collaborating once more on this season, has your creative partnership with him evolved, and have you developed a shorthand over the years?
There’s definitely a shorthand, but we also make fun of each other and know our quirks. Sonny has such a unique eye for story and the characters he builds. I think it’s really nice to have had that shorthand to go into this season, watch new actors come in, and try to understand his goals. We now have that relationship where it’s easier for me to get a sense right away of what he’s going for, and then start talking about the cinematic ways we can achieve that.
Was it important to visually set this season apart from the first, or did you also want to maintain some aesthetic similarities between seasons one and two?
Sonny always wanted to make it different. Something so cool about the initial idea for this show was that it was always meant to be an anthology. Each season would follow a different beef. Sonny is someone who never wants to repeat himself. It was an interesting discussion about what that meant for the way the show was filmed, since the look is very different.
Obviously, Larkin Seiple is an incredible director of photography, and James Laxton is amazing as well. Bringing James in for a different approach to the look and making sure to talk about that was not only allowed but encouraged. There are some things that you do want to carry over. Obviously, the lighting, production design, and costumes are different. The approach to shot structure is probably the thing we brought over most from season one: the idea of enforcing perspective.
The way beef works is so much about these little slights that get elevated to a conflict. You really need to be clocking people’s faces. Often, Sonny’s writing really lives in between the lines of dialogue, and the way people react to things is more important than what’s being said. It does depend on close-ups and ways of bringing you closer to certain characters than others within scenes. What we found challenging this season is that, in season one, it was very easy to figure out which character to focus on. Any scene that Amy’s in is Amy’s scene. Any scene that Danny’s in is Danny’s scene.
When they come together, the photography becomes more balanced. In this season, you’ve got four, maybe even six, perspective characters. There were many more discussions about how a scene should be weighted toward the characters. For example, in the golf course scene in the pilot, it starts as Josh’s scene, and then the camera travels over closer towards Cailee Spaeny’s character at the end of it, and we get to live in her response to the way that she’s seen the situation that just happened, which is very different than the way that Josh sees it.
The season begins with this incredible cold open, where you really get a sense of what the show is about, as it introduces the two main couples, where they work, and it reveals their different lives, while also setting the stage for what the season will be about after Josh and Lindsay find out they’re being recorded by Ashley and Austin. It’s such a great way to start the show, too, because you immediately want to watch the rest of the season after that. How do you tackle such a massive sequence where you have to make the audience aware of so many things, while also giving us a hook to see where this will build to seven episodes later?
Honestly, it starts mostly with an incredible cast, with people that you want to watch. We were so blessed with such an incredible cast this season. I know Sonny really struggled with the hard work of interweaving those stories and trying to make a cold open, obviously, after season one. How could we do something that felt different, but still gave you that same need to keep watching? I think it’s fun to play the balance of the two couples, and even to an extreme degree, this very lovey-dovey young love couple versus a couple where you can kind of see the cracks underneath it. We also had to be careful when building it, because we knew where the season was going. We knew there were shots and ideas that could be mirrored for the end of the show, because we knew that Sonny was always going for this idea of cycles, and that would be explored in some way. There was a lot of attention paid to duplicating that photography for episode eight when we eventually got there.
Yeah, I was actually wondering how important it is to parallel that scene once we get to the finale and the perspective flips from Josh and Lindsay to Ashley and Austin?
A lot of thought goes into those kinds of things. Even in the cold open of one, it’s really Lindsay’s scene after Josh has forgotten her birthday, and the camera is weighted towards her. We’ll mimic those shots, but at the end of the season, we don’t want them weighted towards one character. In the finale, it’s a two-shot through the window for Austin and Ashley’s last moment. Sonny always talks about this idea of story map, and he’s so careful in plotting these things out that you just want to bring as much as you can to the directing and the photography to honor those intricacies in the writing.
I assume the collaboration with the editors is quite close to building that tension, not just in this cold open but throughout the show as well?
Absolutely. There’s a structure that these things are supposed to go in. We start from that structure and build from there. It’s really about pairing away how much you linger in between the lines, and what moment is the most important for us to be looking at? It’s not always what you would initially expect, but Laura Zempel and Lauren Connelly did an amazing job on the season.
As you mentioned, you’ve got a really great cast to work with, and everyone is delivering incredible performances. I really like how the show goes through so many tonal shifts. It can be really funny, but it can also be extremely serious as well. I’m wondering, as a director, what your process is for collaborating with the cast on these tonal shifts? Is it important to give them some room to play and experiment a little bit so they can perhaps bring some ideas to the table on how they perceive their characters, and then collaborate with you and Sonny in figuring all of that out?
One of the things that Sonny’s really best at is that once the cast is there, he lets them bring so much of themselves to the parts, and he integrates that into the writing. Like you would even find these moments where you know they’d be saying something, and realize that Sonny had perceived something in them and wrote it into the screenplay.
Suddenly, there’s this overlap between who they are as actors and who their characters are, and trying to draw sides out of them. On the day, we leave room for that, while also achieving the specificity of Sonny’s story map, the beats that have to be hit. There’s always room to play, there’s always room around it, but there’s also a very strong map of where we’re trying to go. There’s a push and pull of discussing that and leaving room for those ideas while making sure to hold on to that structure, because there’s a precision that you expect from Beef when you watch it unfold, where it feels like you’re being told to pay attention to certain things, and you want to make sure that it dovetails with what the actors are giving you.
I think what I’ve paid most attention to in this season, compared to the last one, is how the characters look at one another and how they say more with their faces than they do with words. In terms of directing performance to highlight these very specific expressions in an actor’s face, what is the process like with the actors and the cinematographer in achieving these moments where we, as an audience, might get a better understanding of who these characters are by simply observing them?
Again, not to be too simplistic about it, but most of it is just having great actors. They’re the ones giving it to you. We have the privilege of watching them. You get to see them simply work through the reactions to the way we shoo them, and what’s so great about our cast is that they really are in those moments, and they really are reacting to those things. What makes Beef so special is how we’re often more interested in those moments than in what’s being said. It’s more of an editorial choice than what’s on set directly.
There’s always a huddle between Sonny, me, and the actors. We talk about each of those beats, and we’re certainly aware of them. It’s easy for me to read what he’s writing at this point and figure out what reaction he’s looking for in a character, what that’s meant to trigger, where that sends the story, and what needs to be clocked. We certainly had that discussion with the actors when we started the season: that Beef is as much about what’s happening between the lines as what’s being said. Once the actors latch on to that, they know there’s a look to be given, a beat to be shown, and it’s exciting to really think about that, get to work within the dialogue, and know that it will be captured and actually used.
Was it also important to highlight some common threads between Ashley and Austin, and between Josh and Lindsey’s story, especially in the first episode, as we really get to spend time with the characters and see where the show is building up to?
There’s a really careful plotting of that writing, where it’s fun to watch, like in episode six and seven, some of these lines that Lindsay has said, or that Josh has said, start to be picked up. There are a lot of mirrors throughout the season that you want to make sure to clock and highlight, so that they’re planted there for the end.
When you reflect on your time working on both seasons of this show, and also your long-standing creative partnership with Sonny, especially as the two of you are about to begin collaborating on this little movie called X-Men, is there one thing that you take away from your time in bringing such an incredible show like Beef to life?
It’s a very fortunate thing to get to work with Sonny. We were friends before we ever started working together, and I think getting to work with your friends is a really lovely thing, especially when you make new friends through it. In Beef season one, dinners and hangouts with people, a lot of my best friends were made during that season. The opportunity to keep making work that pushes you where you feel challenged by the writing and pushed by these incredible actors, and to get to do that with people you care about, is a very special thing that I don’t want to take for granted.
Season two of Beef is now available to stream on Netflix.
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