Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
The look and feel of the show are as superheated as adolescence itself.
(Levinson wrote all eight episodes in the first season and directed five.)
You might call it too much if too-muchness wasnt the whole point.
How do you decide what a scene or sequence is going to contain?
Is the filmmaking written into the script?
Im not interested in realism.
Im interested in an emotional realism.
Early on, I had gone into HBO to discuss the look and feel of the show.
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.
And they said, But its gritty.
I was like, Not really, no.
So they let us build just Juless bedroom.
There should be no ability for any kind of harsh light to seep in.
Im sure youre aware that some people criticize this show as being unrealistic.
But it sounds as if realism isnt at the top of your to-do list.No.
I know we get that criticism quite a bit.
And yeah, its not real.
Teenagers dont doextravagant makeuplike this, and so on.
Did you feel a connection?
This show gave me flashbacks to what it felt like to be a teenager.
Every friendship is tight yet at the same time susceptible to being destroyed by stupid misunderstandings.
Whats the genesis of the project?I tried to write a version of this when I was 21.
Can we talk about the shows portrayal of addiction and drug use?
Its a major part of the show, along with the characters sex lives.
There are moments in which other characters experiment with drugs, but thats a very different experience.
Sometimes I read [reviews] that say shes doing cocaine and stuff like that.
I always imagine that shes crushing up benzos or opioids and snorting them.
Juless night out at the nightclub is influenced by the fact that she experiments with drugs.
But otherwise, in terms of our kind of movement and lensing and stuff, its pretty consistent.
We shot the entire show with one lens, so its very consistent that way.
But its more a general feeling of wanting it all to feel subjective.
But, for example, when the camera is moving, its always on tracks or on a dolly.
We do very little handheld camerawork.
And probably 70 percent of the show is shot on sets.
Including the sequence at the fairgrounds?Yeah, the fairgrounds, too.
That was the first episode that we started shooting after we did the pilot.
The whole thing ended up being about 125,000 square feet.
The whole thing took six days.
How do you know that all your bits and pieces are going to fit together?
We dont pre-visualize anything, except the [rotating] hallway in the pilot just for engineering purposes.
I have a rough feeling of how long a particular shot or even a scene is going to last.
You cant really go over in any meaningful sense.
That tracking shot in the carnival sequence lasts over two minutes and goes all over the place.
That [tracking shot] wasnt really scripted, with the exception of the dialogue.
Were you handing the camera from person to person like a hot potato?Not totally!
It just looks that way.
Can you me walk through that shot?
Its like a microcosm of the show.We knew we wanted that shot to start inside of the pretzel stand.
So that first part of this long shot is actually two individual camera moves.
We did a stitch on that little ticket booth.
Shots like that require a lot of coordination, and theyre a testament to our crew.
You also have a shot later in the sequence where she gets released from the hospital.
Both of the ones you mention happened to be storyboarded.
That shot was about set construction, rigging, that kind of stuff.
The other scene you mention was originally just a shot through the window.
How can we drive the scene forward emotionally in a way thatgetsus to that window?
So we put a clipped-off bracelet on the bed, and kind of piled up the sheets.
Even thoughthe actors are all older than that, you still have to worry about sensitive issues.
Age aside, its not particularly comfortable for anybody to shoot a sex scene because its awkward.
And you cant do that if every shot has a sheen to it.
And of course, early Paul Thomas Anderson, particularlyBoogie NightsandMagnolia.
In my notes on the carnival episode, I actually wrote, Paul Thomas AndersonsMy So-Called Life.Exactly!
Dont you specifically name-check that show inEuphoria?Yeah, we do, in episode three.
It really, deeply affected me.
I revisited that show a number of times because theres a sensitivity and humanity in it thats incredibly rare.
I dont mean to turn this into aMy So-Called Lifegeek-out, butNo, go ahead!
The camera moves above a classroom and goes over a light at one point!
The backlighting of the trees, the light streaming out.
Its hard for me to express how much that show meant to me.
