Although the pair have worked together for 10 years, Euphoria creator, writer, director and EP Sam Levinson and cinematographer Marcell Rév are still finding new ways to bring scenes to life.
“We really trust each other, and we both have a similar sort of restlessness when it comes to how we want to work and our creativity. The starting point is always to evolve or die. And whatever we’ve done, we’re not interested in doing it again.” Levinson told Deadline on the latest episode of The Process video series.
Season 3’s opening in the first episode, titled “Ándale” (a Spanish verbiage for the exasperated expression of “Come on!”), sets the tone for a different kind of Euphoria experience. Taking inspiration from Jurassic Park and classic Westerns such as Rio Bravo and The Wild Bunch, the cold open sees Rue (Zendaya) five years after graduation, relatively sober, and getting into dangerous hijinks, like getting her car stuck on the Mexico-U.S. border wall while attempting to complete a sale of fentanyl.
Rue’s crawl through the desert is framed underneath a rich blue sky and wafts of occasional dust that are reminiscent of the Western genre that Levinson and Rév paid homage to. “We moved away from the subjective emotionality of seasons one and two, where there were a lot of closeup singles. We wanted to be inside the characters’ heads. We wanted to take a step back. We wanted the aspect ratio to be wider, and we wanted to experience these characters in this wider world,” Levinson explains.
Initially, Levinson had different plans for the opening of the season that involved Rue in a much more perilous situation. But, after a research trip to the DEA federal branch in Los Angeles, inspiration opened up a new avenue. “What’s interesting is that they have all these photos on the walls of drug busts that they’ve done. And then I saw this one photo of a Jeep stuck on top of a border wall,” Levinson says. “And I said to one of the guys working there, ‘Well that happened here?’ and they said that someone tried to drive a car loaded with drugs over the Mexican border and it got stuck. And I thought that’s the kind of dumb idea Rue would have.”
From there, the production team ended up building a five-foot wall just four hours outside of Los Angeles to create their Euphoria Mexican border wall.
“We shot this mostly on a big telescoping crane,” Rév adds. “[The daylight opening] is a really good display of this new Kodak stock with blue skies that renders these colors really well. My [inspiration for this scene] was the first Jurassic Park movie, where they’re stuck. We were thinking about how Spielberg would shoot something like this, which is as exciting as it gets.”
Another visual challenge came from Nate (Jacob Elordi) and Cassie (Sydney Sweeney)’s dimly lit candlelight dinner. “This scene was one of our longest scenes in the script. It’s when we start to realize how cunning Cassie can be at times in terms of getting what she wants,” Levinson says. “It also starts to reveal the pressure and stress on Nate financially with his business.”
To ramp up the intimacy and manipulative underlying tension of this scene, Rév wanted to use real candlelight. “It feels like a lot of candles in the frame, but if you would have seen the candles we had offscreen… we were pretty strict about not mimicking candlelight. We had 200 candles on a table moving around to put it in the right spot for [Jacob and Sydney] to light their faces,” he adds.
In building a fresh start for Season 3, Levinson also had to consider the loss of one of his cast members, Angus Cloud. Levinson attributes Cloud’s spirit for the emotional throughline of the season which features a cast of characters stuck in the life of narcotics while also trying to better themselves in the process.
“When Angus overdosed, that was a shock to a lot of us, and it stirred up an anger in me. The year he died, in 2023, 73,00 people died of fentanyl overdoses in this country,” Levinson explains. “It’s very different from when I was growing up that fentanyl wasn’t what it is today. And I just couldn’t get over how our country was allowing this to happen. If you look at Europe in 2023, 153 people died of fentanyl overdoses. So, it’s specific to this country. And I think that became the idea that you can lose someone… the throughline of this piece in the sense that I think we’re ultimately looking at as storytellers is that life is precious. The moments we share with one another, the little deeds we do, the way we treat people matters.”
Levinson added: “This whole thing is fleeting. So, if we have gratitude for the little things in life, the big things in life, it helps us. It at least helps me kind of stay optimistic. And I think that and also a belief in something greater than ourselves. That’s a big part of what this season is. Rue coming to understand the third step in Narcotics Anonymous, which is [about making] a decision to surrender our will and our life over to the care of God as we understand him… I think that’s what this story is about. I hope we did a good job honoring Angus.”
To find out more about how the Euphoria team put together more aesthetically challenging and complimentary scenes, watch the video above.
