‘Beef’ Directors on the Mayhem and Metaphysics in Final Two Episodes: “It’s Hinting at This Idea That This Is Universal”
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[This story contains spoilers through the ninth and tenth episodes of Beef season one, “The Great Fabricator” and “Figures of Light.”]
In retrospect, it was perhaps only a matter of time that Danny (Steven Yeun) and Amy (Ali Wong)’s escalating feud would lead to life-and-death stakes. The final two episodes of Netflix’s Beef open with Isaac (David Choe) freshly sprung from prison — thanks to a tip from Amy that Danny was actually the one involved in the road-rage incident — and pissed. He makes a beeline for Danny’s place, accompanied by henchmen Michael (Andrew Santino) and Bobby (Rekstizzy), looking for both money and revenge. What he finds is an opportunity: Danny has accidentally kidnapped Amy’s cheerfully curious daughter, June (Remy Holt), so Isaac decides to call Amy in exchange for a $500,000 ransom. Unable to come up with that much cash by Isaac’s deadline, Amy offers a counter-proposal: She’s at Jordan (Maria Bello)’s estate, full of millions of dollars worth of culturally appropriated artifacts for the robbing, and she’ll help him gain access in exchange for June’s safety.
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Thus sets up the action-packed penultimate episode, “The Great Fabricator” (named after the Simone Weil quote, “Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be obtained only by someone who is detached”), the most violent episode of Beef yet. Amy calls George (Joseph Lee) and tells him to come to Jordan’s place to pick up June. She begs him to trust her and not get the cops involved. Isaac and Michael break into Jordan’s place and hold her, Amy and Naomi (Ashley Park) at gunpoint while Bobby stays behind in the getaway car to watch over June, Danny and Paul (Young Mazino). The Cho Bros escape from Bobby and carefully secure June back in her mom’s SUV, but before they can make their clean break, everyone hears sirens in the distance. Having lost all trust in Amy, George called the cops — and that’s when all hell breaks loose. By the time the violent mayhem settles, Michael and Jordan are dead — the latter gruesomely so — and Amy and Danny have both been abandoned by their loved ones: George has left with June and been granted emergency custody, and Paul has run away from Danny after the latter finally reveals that he was responsible for sabotaging his little brother’s college ambitions. All alone, Amy and Danny once again meet on the road — this time, the winding, darkened trails of Jordan’s remote neighborhood — and get right back in the chase, ending on a literal cliffhanger as both vehicles plunge off a rocky slope.
After nine increasingly intense episodes, the finale, “Figures of Light,” takes a surprisingly philosophical and metaphysical turn. Amy and Danny, having spent most of the series apart, find themselves in a Waiting for Godot-style two-hander as they spend a day and a night wandering through the wilderness with no cell phone reception and no idea how to make it back to civilization. The pair go from being at each other’s throats to begrudgingly cooperating for survival — thanks to a berry-infused hallucinatory trip — to finally seeing one another for the kindred spirits that they are, complete with a middle-of-the-night conversation in which Amy and Danny can no longer tell where one ends and the other begins.
Beef creator Lee Sung Jin tells The Hollywood Reporter that the Carl Jung quote that inspired the finale’s title — “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious” — was a North Star for the entire series. “They have seen the true versions of themselves, and there’s something very freeing about that, when someone sees you as you actually are and there is no judgment there,” he says. “We have to stare at ourselves and at reality and all the non-light parts of it. And if someone can see that in you and not be repulsed and be like, ‘Actually, that’s me, too,’ that is true connection and the only thing that can help us move forward and grow.”
Lee, who made his directorial debut with the finale, and Beef producing director Jake Schreier — who helmed six of the show’s 10 episodes, including episode nine — spoke with THR about how the themes of the series informed the writing and directing of the pivotal final installments.
At what point did you know how you were going to resolve Beef and structure the last two episodes?
Lee Sung Jin: We actually knew the end scene even before we pitched the show, because I knew mood-wise, there had to be something that felt like these people are really connecting. The idea that here’s the person who’s seen the worst of you and they’re still there was always the North Star, but we didn’t quite know how to show that. It was actually Ali Wong who pitched Amy crawling into the hospital bed. Once she pitched that, me and Steven and A24 were like, “Oh, that’s it,” so we incorporated that into the pitch. Having that as the ending really helped the writing, because then you can kind of reverse-engineer it. I knew that because the finale was probably going to be kind of quiet, I wanted the penultimate [episode] to really go off.
Jake, what was your process of breaking down all of those complicated action sequences in episode nine, particularly with cast members who haven’t done a ton of dramatic acting, like Ali Wong and David Choe?
Jake Schreier: What was nice is that nine did shoot pretty late in our schedule even though most of the show was cross-boarded, so we had really developed the familiarity [among] the cast and the crew and we had talked a lot about what we were aiming towards. The way that I approach working with actors in general, even when we’re doing comedy, we don’t really talk about it like it’s comedy. You’re always trying to find what’s real about the moment. For David, we had talked a lot about how much he connected with this character in different ways and I knew he was ready to go to a place for those moments, and he really went there. It’s nothing that I guided him into; it was a place that he had been preparing to go and he really got into it, and Ali felt the same. It’s obviously fun to have a series that has moments as delicate as this does and at the same time the opportunity for action. When you have writing that aims that high, it’s very exciting to get to block that out and put it together.
What was the most challenging element of directing episode nine that you’re the proudest of?
Schreier: There’s a moment with Steven and Young in the courtyard that I think is up there on the list of heartbreaking moments in the series. It’s a moment that is scripted but there’s a little bit of a twist that Steven put on it from what’s in the script, and to have a moment like that work in the midst of everything else that’s going on is fun. In the same way that the show is not what you would expect off of just a simple logline of people in a beef because of a road rage incident, what was great about it is that Sonny writes action that is very specific to what’s going on with the characters and pays off beats that have been set up much earlier. You’re not just trying to think of, “What’s a cool set piece, what would look cool?” It’s really, “How does this connect to everything that we’d been seeing that leads up to it?” In the car chase scene, Sonny had written in that Björk’s “All Is Full of Love” was playing even in the earliest drafts of the script, and that really guides you in a different place in terms of how you shoot a car chase. It can’t be just your regular high-octane thing. We talked a lot about the show starting with a car chase, and how is this one different? How has it shifted over the course of time? I don’t know if it’s a challenge but more like an opportunity.
What did you want to convey in bookending the series with the car chases?
Lee: This theme that’s running through the whole show is these cycles that we’re trapped in. A lot can change in your life: You can be where Danny was at the beginning of the show or even in episode seven, or where Amy is. The environment can change, but ultimately you’re still stuck in a trap of having to deal with the same shit. And so there is something appropriate about putting them back into cars, and they’re almost similar cars: She’s in a white Benz, but she’s souped it up, she’s got a G-Wagon now. And Danny’s had to steal a car, but even when he’s stealing it, he’s in a red Hummer, which is kind of a souped-up version of his red Tacoma. And so there’s something interesting visually to putting them in the similar trap that they’ve always been in. And it’s also a little bit of flipping it here, in the beginning Danny’s chasing after Amy, and now Amy’s chasing after Danny. We’re trying to say something about, you can move around the musical chairs all you want, but until you actually deal with the shit that they deal with in [episode] ten, it’s going to be the same outcome.
Schreier: On a camera level, in episode one, we’re heavily, heavily in Danny’s perspective because he doesn’t know who he’s in a beef with. Perspective was something we tried to enforce with cameras throughout the show, always being much closer to Amy and Danny with the camera than someone that they’re in a dialogue scene with. We’re always imbalanced in that way. We talked about that with the chase in nine that now that we know both of them, it isn’t the same. I also always felt reading it that there’s this sense that this will go on forever if something doesn’t change. That idea called for stepping outside of the chase a little bit. There are a few wide shots that we wouldn’t do in some of our earlier episodes where we get distance from them, and obviously it ends on this incredibly dramatic wide shot that feels like it’s hinting at this idea that this is universal, this is forever until we get to episode ten.
Lee: Piggybacking off that, that really sets up for ten. It’s the first time we introduce top shots into the show, and at that point, going off of what Jake said in terms of making it a little bit more universal, now you’re almost introducing this God POV and there’s crows involved, and so it’s like, there’s almost a bigger thing at play.
Was it perceived as a risk to go so quiet and experimental with the finale?
Lee: Yes and no. There is a little bit of an expectation in a finale to go bigger, but I think everyone was ultimately pretty supportive because everything hits the fan [in nine] that it just made sense. You can’t go crazier after nine, so I think the coupling of the two helped everyone get on board. And honestly, from a production standpoint, it also was a good selling tool. At the end of the season, we’re running out of money and time, so having people stuck in one place together, from a production standpoint, the studios like, “Great! Cool.”
What was it like directing with COVID?
Lee: I got COVID as I was writing the script and then we actually had to shoot the first scene, which was the hospital bed scene, while I had COVID. So the first scene I ever directed I had to do via iPad where my assistant was carrying around my face on a tablet. And luckily Jake was on set as our EP and producing director so I really had the best, biggest training wheels one could ask for in Jake and Larkin [Seiple, the cinematographer] and Grace [Yun, the production designer]. It’s hard to mess up when you have the most talented group of people surrounding you. It was borne out of harsh conditions, much like what the characters were going through. So it was very easy for me to tap into what the characters were going through because I literally was also vomiting and going through a fever dream at the time.
Sonny, you told me there’s a line in the finale that made Ali emotional during filming — when Steven tells her, “You poor thing. All you wanted was to not be alone.” Was that when Danny and Amy were still body-switched?
Lee: It is at the tail end of the body-switch scene. I intentionally wrote it open-ended in terms of how that scene could be interpreted. One could argue, are they snapping out of the body switch at that point? Are they still? Does it even matter? Is that even the point – maybe it doesn’t matter who’s saying what because they are so the same? These are all different ways that one could look at the scene. There are versions of the edit where it was a little clearer, but I intentionally stripped that out because some of my favorite things are a little bit more oblique and open to interpretation. I’m really curious to see what people think of that scene.
Tell me about the decisions behind who dies. It occurs to me now that it’s the two white people in the cast.
Lee: I’ll let you take this one, Jake. (Laughs.) Yes, that is correct. The two people that die happen to be white, but I will say that there is an early outline of that episode where there were so many more deaths. Just anyone you could imagine dying, died. Again, I was writing under duress, we were in the middle of shooting. I was just pumping out some of these outlines, and I turned that one in and everyone’s like, “Hey, Sonny, are you ok? Does everyone have to die?” Thankfully I got walked back. Again, great collaborators. I started focusing on, what is the story ultimately about? For Danny, it’s ultimately about Paul, and for Amy, it’s ultimately about George. The natural byproduct of some of that revising was more people staying alive. So I don’t know that it was necessarily intentional that that happened, but it’s certainly an interesting outcome.
Interview edited for length and clarity.
Beef is now streaming on Netlfix.
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