Teenagers don’t do extravagant makeup like this, and so on. I know we get that criticism quite a bit. It holds zero interest to me, in so much as we’re talking about realism in a cinematic sense, in terms of the aesthetics and the look of the world. But it sounds as if realism isn’t at the top of your to-do list. I’m sure you’re aware that some people criticize this show as being unrealistic. The ceiling is actually just on hinges, with ropes, so that the ceiling could come off and the camera could get above them.
If you look at the last shot of the pilot, we start kind of far back, you see the two of them lying in bed, you see the ceiling, and slowly, our camera moves up and over them. There should be no ability for any kind of harsh light to seep in. We decided that set ought to be a nest, it ought to be cozy, it ought to exist outside of space and time. So they let us build just Jules’s bedroom. On the pilot, which was directed by Augustine Frizell, I think HBO was reluctant to allow us to do that to the fullest possible extent. You mean you don’t want to be out there in the streets and locations, just up close and dirty?” I was like, “Not really, no.” I told them I wanted to design it all from scratch, so it all feels like an extension of the individuals and characters that populate this world. I said to them, “I really want to build everything on soundstages.” There was this long, pregnant pause, and I could tell they were confused. It’s hard to explain, but we settled on an approach that takes into account all aspects of a given scene in terms of wardrobe, makeup, lighting, set design, and how they’re all going to work together to produce this non-realistic effect we’re after.Įarly on, I had gone into HBO to discuss the look and feel of the show.
A question that Marcell Rev, our cinematographer, and Michael Grasley, our production designer, talked about a lot about is, “How can we create a world that reveals the hopes and wishes of the characters that exist within it?” We established early on that each scene ought to be an interpretation of reality or a representation of an emotional reality. How do you decide what a scene or sequence is going to contain? Is the filmmaking written into the script? Do the images, sound, or music ever dictate what happens in the story? The opening shot of Euphoria, shown as Rue narrates her life. You might call it too much if too-muchness wasn’t the whole point.Īfter the season finale, I talked to Levinson at length about building this world, raiding his own life experience, achieving those wild flourishes, and drawing on a lifetime’s worth of influences, from The Passion of Joan of Arc to My So-Called Life. (Levinson wrote all eight episodes in the first season and directed five.) The medium-size town in which the tale is set was mainly built from scratch, the better to allow for expressionistic lighting and acrobatic visuals. Every episode starts with a speedy prologue outlining the backstory of a recurring character shot, cut, and scored like a “previously on” recap of someone’s life. The colors are bold, the score and needle-drop songs are loud, and the camera rarely sits still when it can glide, swoop, whip-pan, or spiral.
The look and feel of the show are as superheated as adolescence itself.
Loosely based on a same-named Israeli series by Ron Leshna and Dafna Levin, and drawing on his own experiences with teenage drug addiction, Euphoria is a kaleidoscopic look at the lives of troubled, yearning teenagers on a journey of self-discovery that happens to involve tons of sex, drugs, and cathartic weeping. Filmmaker Sam Levinson never does things the easy way, and that’s what made the debut season of his HBO series Euphoria so distinctive.