This video contains spoilers from Netflix’s Emmy-nominated season of Beef.
Beef Season 2 comes with a ratcheted-up sense of drama as two generational couples face-off: Carey Mulligan and Oscar Isaac’s Lindsay and Josh, and Cailee Spaeny and Charles Melton’s Ashley and Austin.
Their lives coincide at a posh golf club, which has just been taken over by a nefarious Korean queen-pin, Chairwoman Park (played by Oscar winner Youn Yuh-jung). But there’s a lot of double cross in the young, poorer set of Ashley and Austin, trying to get what’s owed to them from Josh, who is corrupt manager of the club. Relationships are in peril, with plenty of morals for all on the give-and-take of worn romance.
On today’s Crew Call Live, we chat with Beef Season 2 Emmy nominees in the limited or anthology series category — cinematographer James Laxton, editor Laura Zempel, and supervising sound editor Christopher Gomez — on how their crafts enhance the drama at hand. It starts with excellent performances.
The key for all on the series from creator and showrunner Lee Jung Sin (aka Sonny Lee) was maintaining what Laxton calls “the Beef language” between Seasons 1 and 2 but also expanding the canvas to a greater number of protagonists.
Explains Zempel: “I think the biggest difference between Season 1 and Season 2 from an editorial perspective is, in Season 1, we had two main characters. We had Amy and Danny [Ali Wong and Steven Yuen], so we’re just tracking them, their lives. If they’re in a scene, they’re our main character. But this season we had an ensemble cast. We had four, maybe six main characters, and so we’re balancing six different characters, story, live storylines, their personal lives, their motivations, what they’re seeking, their obstacles.”
She adds: “Keeping that balance was a real challenge from an editorial perspective. We ended up moving a lot of scenes around within episodes to strengthen character arcs, and keeping everybody’s motivations alive at all times was a real difference from Season 1.”
When it came to the sound, “Season 1 was a little bit more rough around the edges,” Gomez says. “Everything wasn’t so polished. But going into Season 2, that was the big discussion that we had with Sonny. Everything needed to feel pristine.”
We discuss at length how the team worked with Finneas O’Connell’s score; one of his romantic cues, “Vicious Thoughts,” became a big inspiration for Lee, particularly when it came to the penultimate swirling, crane shot scene where Lindsay runs to Josh in Korea before he’s hauled off to jail.
Zempel says: “Sonny ended up writing this season almost to that piece of music. I’ve never gotten a script that had a piece of score from the composer written into the script. It was incredible, and it’s so integral to that scene in the way it was shot.”
In addition the final episode has a John Wick-like chase scene where Lindsay, Josh, Ashley and Austin face off with Chairwoman Park’s security thugs. It’s one long, winding shot thatr Laxton says “took weeks and weeks of planning” but in the end didn’t have an unreasonable number of shots (“in the teens or something” says the Oscar-nominated Moonlight DP).
While Beef Season 1 began promptly with a crash, Season 2 was intentionally a slow burn in the “ramping up of tension,” says Zempel.
“Sonny was very conscious of that, that we have to let the audience know that Beef is coming,” says the editor, “Don’t get bored, don’t tune out, because it’s going to be intense.”
