James Laxton, ASC Frames Class and Generation Gaps in Beef 2

The Cinematography Podcast Episode 359: James Laxton, ASC

Academy Award nominated cinematographer James Laxton, ASC enjoyed season one of the Netflix series Beef as a fan. He felt a kinship with the filmmaking, crafted by creator Lee Sung Jin and DP Larkin Seiple. Writer-director Lee loved Laxton’s cinematography in Moonlight, and approached him to shoot Beef season 2. “Within the first 10 minutes of the discussion, it really felt like there was a filmmaking collaboration happening,” Laxton recalls. “It felt like he saw the show in a very similar way and had similar goals about what we thought season two could be like.”

One of Laxton’s first priorities was establishing what Beef would be in its second season before deciding where to take it. It had to be a season-long storytelling journey of color, light, and framing built to carry the weight of some genuinely big ideas. “There was a real passion on both of our sides to find that basic structure of what the show is,” he says. “And then, of course, deviate from that position for what season two wanted from us as well.”

Two things from season one were essential. First was the show’s ability to move between genres of comedy, thriller, horror, and drama within the same scene. Second was a rigorous attention to perspective: whose scene it was, and how the lens choices and camera placement align the audience with that character. “There’s a real sense of perspective that’s really important to Lee’s writing,” Laxton explains. “Which perspective the scene is in, which character we’re trying to align ourselves with, and how that manifests itself into the details of lens choices and how far the subject is to the lens.”

The structural backbone of season two’s visual language is its seasonal color palette. Each storyline was assigned a season. Spring belongs to the young couple, Ashley and Austin (Cailee Speany and Charles Melton), summer is represented by the exclusive private club, autumn is the middle-aged couple, Josh and Lindsay (Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan), and winter belongs to the elderly Korean couple, Chairwoman Park and Dr. Kim ( Youn Yuh-jung and Song Kang-ho).

Season two was shot on the ARRI 265, a large format full-frame camera system, which may seem excessive for a streaming series. But for Laxton, it was a direct response to the material. “When I read the scripts and started talking to Lee about the concepts he was writing about, there’s a lot of really big ideas,” he says. “These characters almost stand in for something much greater. They are symbols or metaphors for these generational topics.” Laxton wanted the imagery to reflect that scale, and going as large as possible with the sensor was one way to accomplish it. The 265 also offered something valuable on a television schedule. Even though it’s a full-frame camera, it’s relatively compact, with an adaptable build that could move quickly between handheld, Steadicam, and sticks without the need to break down the camera and rebuild it between setups.

Beef season two is also about class. The exclusive Montecito club is a monument to wealth and also a gilded cage for many of the characters. Laxton made conscious choices to let the architecture do some of the work. In wide shots inside the club, he would foreground the grandeur of the structure, pressing the characters into its geometry. “I would try to take these very symmetrical symbols of opulence and try to lift the frame up a little bit,” he says. “The hope there is to create a frame that speaks to this bigger, grander structure that’s ever present around the characters and forces them into certain framing structures.”

The Korean health clinic fight sequence in episode 8 was shot entirely in one take. It took several days of choreography, first in Los Angeles and then continued in Korea. For Laxton, it crystallized everything he loves about Beef as a filmmaking project. “With a show that’s about so much, there was a pressure to deliver a finale that felt like it had some real sense of scope and excitement and energy,” he says. The sequence is also a tonal high-wire act: genuinely thrilling, emotionally fraught, and at points very funny, sometimes all at once.

Deciding how to end a show about multiple couples, multiple generations, and interlocking cycles of human behavior was a challenge at first. Lee chose a top-down view of a samsara, a circular, four-quadrant wheel that symbolizes the cyclic process of life, death, and rebirth. For the giant symbol, shot in a field, each couple was captured in a rotating drone shot. The drone pulls up to reveal each quadrant, a set piece of one of the season’s storylines. The idea was both logistically complex and conceptually elegant, with the camera emphasizing the cyclical nature of the character’s lives. “It was a technical mirror of what the show is intending to express,” Laxton explains. “It presents a breadth of a shot that would allow the audience to take time to reflect upon the story.”

Find James Laxton: Instagram: @mrjameslaxton

See Beef s. 2 on Netflix

Hear our previous episode with James Laxton on Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk.

CAMERA: ARRI Alexa 265

LENSES: ARRI DNAs, Hawk 150-450mm zooms

Close focus: The box office success? of The Mandalorian and Grogu.

Alana’s short end: The Apple TV show, Widow’s Bay.

Ben’s short end: Stephen Colbert’s appearance on Only in Monroe– Monroe, Michigan’s Public Access channel.

Illya’s short end: The Cinematography Podcast is number one in the film podcast category in Iceland, Ghana, Malaysia, Greece, Uganda, Latvia, and Malta. Thanks!