By Iain Blair

Cinematographer Larkin Seiple racked up a ton of award nominations for his mind-bending visual work on The Daniels’ Oscar-winning Everything Everywhere All at Once. His latest project is Beef, the new Netflix comedic thriller about two Los Angeles residents from opposite ends of the economic and social spectrum — Danny (Steven Yeun) is a struggling contractor and Amy (Ali Wong) is a successful lifestyle guru. Their lives become inextricably linked after a road rage incident in a parking lot that quickly escalates into a full-blown feud.

I talked with Seiple — whose credits include Gaslit (which won him an Emmy nomination), Swiss Army Man (also for The Daniels) and Cop Car — about shooting the show and how he collaborated closely with Lee Sung Jin, the show’s creator, on the look.

What were the main challenges of shooting this?
With TV shows, it’s always time. It doesn’t matter what your budget is, you generally have five or six days per episode, so it’s on par with an indie film in terms of schedule. I think we shot the whole season in just 65 days. But the main challenge is trying to create a visual language that helps the audience understand the main characters and relate to and appreciate all the terrible choices they make.

It’s basically trying to woo them. But I always thought this story was about two villains. A villain never sees themselves as a villain, but from someone else’s perspective, they’re the worst human being on the planet. I found that compelling, trying to get people to relate to them.

How did you work with the show’s creator, Lee Sung Jin, to find the right look?
Sunny and I did a whole day of testing where we shot Danny’s apartment and day exteriors. We tried a couple of different lenses — master and anamorphic Supreme Primes — and tried to figure out what the texture was and what the sharpness meant. We were shooting large format as well and trying to figure out what depth of field we wanted, as it could get too shallow.

Once we finished the tests, we took them to colorist Alex Bickel and built a bunch of looks based off different film stocks and reference photos. We ended up going with something I’d call “very American,” with very ruddy skins and very snappy highlights.

We built this idea of what it feels like to be in LA, where there’s a harshness to the light, but it’s very punchy and also bleak in a way. It’s very different from the East Coast sun, which I call “juicy.” So we had our baseline, and then we built the look in the grade by leaning into that concept and using an overexposure to the LUT, which makes the image feel like film or like something that’s been overexposed and then printed down. So you get really clean blacks and really rich skin, and we kind of discovered that while grading.

There’s a workout scene, all in direct, hard light, and we’d referenced the original Top Gun and how great it looked with hard light. So that scene became our muse, as it felt great and very real. We wanted to avoid that modern TV look, where everything’s a soft key and very commercial and feels very touched. We wanted to keep a sense of realism in it, in terms of harshness. So that was our approach.

The only big challenge was that Ali has these amazing glasses that basically see 360-degreees, so suddenly you couldn’t just light Ali. You had to light the room. That changed our approach. Suddenly, you couldn’t have raw sources. We had to use much bigger, softer sources around her. For Steven’s scenes, we just lit the right way and lit the space.

How did you make all your camera and lens choices?
We shot it on the Alexa LF but with the Sony Venice 2 for the night car crash scene, and we used Zeiss Supreme Primes. We ended up going with sharper glass because in our testing, we found out that in post we could degrade the image with more control. We also shied away from lenses that were super-flary or vintage, as we felt it was too affected for the story and put too much emphasis on the filmmaker instead of keeping the audience with the characters.

Alex Bickel is your go-to colorist, right?
Yes, he’s done every movie with me for at least the last five years, and we always start talking about a project way in advance. As soon as I get a script I like, I start nudging him, and we spend a lot of time developing looks. Very early on I’ll start sending him stills and talk about the difference in film stocks. Then we’ll work with his color scientist, breaking down what defines each stock and what changed between stocks in the late ‘70s and the early ‘80s. Was it the stock, or was it the lab and how it was printed? Now you don’t see magenta in skin work, but in the ‘70s and ‘80s, you saw a lot of it. So it’s stuff like that… a lot of minutiae.

How many LUTs did you build?
Three or four different options, then we’d take the test footage, run it through, print it out and show it to Sunny and the other producers to see what Sunny liked about the look. For testing the daytime lighting, the apartment would have fluorescent lighting and warm practicals with daylight coming in, and we’d try to create messy environments to see what he responded to. In the end, I went with something that was pretty punchy with strong skin tones, and I avoided some of the more cliched imagery.

How was the shoot?
We had a lot of locations and only built two sets: Amy’s house and Danny’s apartment. The other days we were just running between locations. We spent a lot of time searching for locations and didn’t have a lot locked in until the end. The final scene in the state park wasn’t locked until two weeks before we shot there.

Were there a lot of VFX involved?
Yes, we did all the phones in post, which was very scary because there’s a lot of it in the show. Sunny was adamant that all of it felt real. I was very happy because when you’re watching the roughs, there’s nothing on them, and you’re thinking, “Dear Lord, that doesn’t look good, just cheap!”

 

Then we had the car crash in Episode 9, which had post work on it and a lot of small things. We probably spent most of the time removing stuff, like with Ali’s glasses, which had a million reflections we were constantly fighting. We didn’t do too much greenscreen, apart from a pickup of Steven in the tree before he falls. We opted to do the cars on a large, high-density LED wall. We shot the guys driving to Vegas with Vegas plates, Ali driving at night, and so on. We also did the car crash that way too, instead of using green- or bluescreen.

Tell us about the DI.
I did it remotely at Color Collective. Alex Bickel was the supervising colorist and the one I built the LUT with, but the main colorist was Alex Jimenez, who I graded each episode with. He and I worked on all the episodes remotely over about four months. As they came in, he’d do a pass, then I’d sit in and we’d do another and finish it up. That’s my favorite thing about COVID — we can now color remotely, and I’m very involved in the whole process.

What’s next?
I’m just finishing shooting Wolfs, a thriller with George Clooney and Brad Pitt for Jon Watts, who I shot Cop Car for. It’s a very different scale from Beef.

What was the appeal of this project?
Probably the story. It wasn’t something that jumped out to me as a visual feast right away. It’s kind of a story about the mundane and the insanity that can ensue, and it was about responding to that and seeing how we could enhance the characters and the beats that happen through geography. I was excited because it wasn’t a movie that involved magical realism and had a million different looks. I wanted something I could really sink my teeth into character-wise and explore.

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Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.