Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1545081
E U P H O R I A S E A S O N 3 | P E R S P E C T I V E 5 5 And woven through it all, a thread of opulence and excess—particularly in Cassie and Maddy's storylines, set against the backdrops of Hollywood glamour—that felt inseparable from the world Sam was building. There is still an underlying beauty to all of it—that intersection of beauty and grit, glamour and rot—a poetry in the decay, in the way light falls across a sun-bleached parking lot or the way a desert horizon holds its composure against a tableau of strip malls and tangled utility poles. That tension felt like the visual soul of this season. Realizing that vision required a production of mammoth scale, season 3 was shot exactly like an eight-hour film—one director, one cinematographer, one crew—over the course of one hundred and seventy-six shooting days, with three weeklong hiatus breaks scheduled so we could literally catch our breath. Most of the Art Department worked for over a year on the production. Marcell Rév, the cinematographer, shot on a custom Kodak stock, utilizing both 65mm and 35mm cameras. There was something thrilling about being on set with those large cameras and their giant film magazines, hearing the stutter of celluloid running across the gate. Sam's approach as both writer and director demanded a certain flexibility—a jazziness, really —because he wrote continuously throughout production, adding scenes and rethinking whole sets and sequences as the story deepened. The show ultimately finished with one hundred and seventy-five sets, but the more revealing number is the one hundred and twenty-six that were omitted. That means one hundred and twenty-six sets that were researched, scouted and in many cases designed—only to give way as the story evolved. It was a process that required the entire department to stay nimble, to hold their work loosely, and to trust that this restless creative momentum was in service of something larger. The physical footprint of the production was substantial. At various points, we were spread across six different stages at Warner Bros., each B. FOR SEASON 3, AUDOUY PROPOSED THAT RUE WORK AT A VAPE SHOP CALLED "THE SMOKE SHACK." PRODUCTION STILL. C. DESERT BORDER LOCATION NEAR PALMDALE. SET PHOTO. C B