I’m Christopher Rosen, deputy editor at The Ankler and co-host of the Prestige Junkie podcast. My special Art & Crafts series this week celebrates the talented artisans behind Emmy season’s top contenders. First up, the cinematographers behind Beef, Euphoria and Hacks.
It took hundreds of people to make HBO Max’s Hacks across its five-season run, but just a dozen to pull off its final day of production at Paris’ famed Louvre Museum — including stars Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder, showrunners Jen Statsky, Paul W. Downs and Lucia Aniello (who also directed the series finale) and cinematographer Adam Bricker.
“It was very special and very emotional to wrap together,” Bricker says. A producer on the Emmy-winning comedy starting in its fourth season, Bricker shot every episode of Hacks and worked closely throughout the seasons with the show’s other lifers — like camera operators Joel Marsh and Jamiel VanOver and first assistant director Jeffrey Rosenberg. “The core group that had been there since the beginning wrapped in the Louvre. They were there seven years ago at our first camera test with Jean. It was a really wonderful full circle moment for us all to be together and to see this thing through the finish line.”
The acclaimed series about an aging comedian, Deborah Vance (Smart, a four-time Emmy winner thus far for the role), and her young protégé, Ava Daniels (Einbinder, an Emmy winner for season four), concluded with a season that frequently referenced its past — including an unbroken take at the start of the series finale last week that directly echoed the opening moments of the pilot.
“That was a fun element for our team and me on the cinematography side — all the breadcrumbs that had been laid previously, and answering a lot of those questions visually,” says Bricker, a four-time cinematography nominee for Hacks so far.
So perhaps it was no shock that Hacks ends back where it started — in Las Vegas, where Ava and Deborah’s first meeting went as poorly as possible. The final shot, conceived by Aniello from the show’s earliest days, is of the duo walking arm-in-arm down Las Vegas Blvd. before a drone pulls back to reveal the entire Las Vegas Strip.
“It’s a bittersweet shot,” Bricker says. He intentionally avoided knowing how Hacks would end – with Deborah deciding to undergo cancer treatment and continuing her comedy partnership with Ava — preferring to experience the scripts as an audience member first.
“I’m happy knowing that the two of them are going to go on and collaborate and be a part of each other’s lives,” Bricker adds. “But I get a little somber thinking about how I’m not going to be able to witness that.”
Euphoria Goes West
Euphoria cinematographer Marcell Rév and the show’s creator, Sam Levinson, have a shorthand together that comes from years working together. Rév shot Levinson’s features Assassination Nation and Malcolm & Marie, and also nearly every episode of HBO’s polarizing drama about California high school students, including the pilot (directed by Augustine Frizzell).
“The first conversation is always Sam telling me his idea,” Rév says. “This season, he had a lot of them.”
Euphoria was never a traditional high school coming-of-age story — its graphic depiction of underage sex and drug addiction often played more like Requiem for a Dream than Can’t Hardly Wait. But season three exploded the show’s central premise, picking up years after its central characters — including Zendaya, Sydney Sweeney and Jacob Elordi, all of whom experienced an explosion in fame during the four-year break between seasons — have graduated high school. The result is an amalgam of genres — part Quentin Tarantino crime thriller, part Bret Easton Ellis satire on the dangers of fame, part Neo-Western that feels like a lost film from Joel and Ethan Coen.
“One of his big inspirations was Westerns, especially older ’50s Westerns from Howard Hawks and John Ford,” says Rév, a two-time nominee and Emmy winner for the show. “What it ultimately became is more like an homage to classic American cinema, rather than just Westerns.”
In keeping with those cinematic aspirations, Rév shot the majority of Euphoria on 65mm, which — according to HBO — makes Euphoria the first television series to use the film format, typically reserved for film auteurs like Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson or Jordan Peele. (Perhaps that’s why, in conversation, Rév calls Euphoria a “movie.”)
Season three of Euphoria included several memorable episodes and sequences, including a cold open where Sweeney’s character Cassie becomes a 50-foot woman and stomps through the streets as part of a fetish dream (don’t ask). But a standout episode was the wedding between Cassie and Nate (Elordi), which had Rév thinking of another Hollywood classic: Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter, which memorably opens with an elaborate wedding (although one without Alanna Ubach singing “Get Low”) and was shot by Vilmos Zsigmond, the legendary Hungarian cinematographer.
“He used to teach at the university I went to,” says Rév, who was born in Hungary. “So The Deer Hunter is a movie I constantly think about.”
Released in 1978, the best picture winner about a group of friends whose lives are torn apart as they head to Vietnam is widely considered one of the all-time greats. “At the time, that movie was a great homage to American cinema — because it sums up so many things in one movie,” Rév says. “I don’t want to compare Euphoria to The Deer Hunter or anything, but our approach had something similar to it. Let’s use the accomplishments of American cinema from the ’50s to the ’90s, and let’s try to pay homage to that.”
Love’s Labor Lost
Like so many others, cinematographer James Laxton watched the first season of the Netflix anthology series Beef and became an instant fan. “There was a perspective,” he says, “and — just speaking selfishly as a cinematographer — a visual language that I felt a kinship to.”
Created by Lee Sung Jin and focused on a road rage incident that spirals with deadly consequences, Beef season one touched on multiple genres — black comedy, crime thriller, family drama. For season two, in which a clandestine argument between a husband and wife reverberates across generations and countries, Lee (or Sunny to his friends and collaborators) wanted to enhance the show’s tonal flexibility while broadening its scope.
“We wanted to maintain some of season one’s foundational language, but we certainly wanted to branch off to something different,” says Laxton, who is best known for his multiple collaborations with filmmaker Barry Jenkins, including best picture winner Moonlight and the limited series The Underground Railroad.
Beef season two kicks into gear when Gen Zers Austin and Ashley (Charles Melton and Cailee Spaeny) see an ugly argument between millennials Josh and Lindsay (Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan). The inciting event forces the central foursome to reconsider their thoughts on love, relationships and status — while also twisting into an international conspiracy involving Chairwoman Park (Youn Yuh-jung), the billionaire owner of the country club where Austin, Ashley and Josh work.
“There are some differences in how we handled each of these generations,” Laxton says. “Austin and Ashley’s storyline has a lot more energy to it in terms of visual movement — that’s indicative of the chaotic lives those kids live, because everything’s new for them. There’s a wildness to the energy that happens when you’re in your youth.”
For Josh and Lindsay, Laxton says, the vibes were slower. “We’re there in middle age, and you can see those characters sort of push and pull between the two extremes (of youth and age).”
That’s readily apparent in the South Korea-set finale — after Josh and Lindsay’s marriage has crumbled, and Josh is arrested on fraud charges. As he’s being hauled out by South Korean police, Lindsay runs up to her estranged husband, and they kiss passionately for the first time in the entire show.
“The camera spins around in this swirl of love and the tragicness,” Laxton says of the scene. It was director Jake Schreier who suggested the 360-shot, and even after executing it on the day, it still makes Laxton cry.
“It’s this sweeping love shot that we’ve all seen in movies for decades now. But the knowledge that it will never work for Josh and Lindsay, to me, is why that’s that approach makes the most sense,” he says. “It pulls on all the associations we know from cinema past, and yet, at the same time, under the surface, it’s not going to happen for them. It’s too late.”
