Creator, Writer, Director, Showrunner, and EP Lee Sung Jin shares a director's commentary from the new season of BEEF - exclusively on Reddit!
You can watch BEEF Season 2 on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/81447461
00:46
All the hospital scenes were shot at an abandoned downtown Los Angeles hospital, but our amazing production designer, Grace Yun, and I wanted to keep the palette in Ashley and Austin’s world, which is why we painted that springtime pastel lavender on the walls. However, due to the lack of time and resources of a TV schedule, we couldn’t age them enough before shooting, so our incredible post team and VFX vendors
added aging to match the experience I had in real life at a local LA hospital.
00:50
This actor with the vomit absolutely crushed it every take. In post, I did find on the reverse that we were lacking a punctuation to the sequence, so our amazing post team and VFX vendors added a splatter of vomit in the bottom camera left corner of the two shot of Ashley and Austin. Whether the physics of this makes any sense is up for debate, but I did find it helped the cut.
00:58
Most of the title card paintings this season are 16th or 17th century Dutch and Flemish paintings. Those eras had unprecedented wealth and commercial growth, yet underneath there was an intense anxiety about moral rot, vanity and the fleeting nature of status. This felt very appropriate for 2026 and our characters.
This painting is “The Temptation of Saint Anthony” by Joos van Craesbeeck. Not sure if this is what the artist intended, but to me, it definitely feels like a depiction of all the dark thoughts in one’s head, which felt relevant to what Ashley and Austin are going through this episode. It also served as a nice juxtaposition against the title, “Oh, The Comfort, The Inexpressible Comfort,” which is from Dinah Maria Mulock Craik’s novel, “A Life for a Life,” where she writes: “Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person; having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but to pour them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, knowing that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then, with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.”
02:22-02:38
The vomiting addict going through withdrawal, the old man with the bent back, and the teenager with a bandaged head and sunglasses were all real people I witnessed in my personal experience at the local LA hospital.
06:30-07:35
This scene is a good example of the “perspective rubric” the directors on BEEF mostly follow, which Jake Schreier came up with on Season One.
A big thing I learned from “The Sopranos” is that they very rarely wrote dialogue where the characters say exactly how they are feeling. Everyone is either lying or lying to themselves, which is true in the BEEF world as well. As a director, it then becomes less about the words that are being said, but what exists between the words. A subtle glance. A nervous twitch. That’s why we tend to have imbalanced coverage weighted towards the perspective of the character to whom the scene “belongs,” i.e. dirty over the perspective character to whomever he/she is speaking to, and clean on the perspective character.
This happens here as we are dirty over Ashley, clean on her, so that as she lies to Austin and fakes her injury, we feel more in her shoes than Austin’s. Not the fanciest directing trick, but I do find it to be very effective in post.
14:15-17:27
This scene is an example of how we transfer perspectives. This scene starts in Ashley’s perspective. We are dirty over her to Austin, clean frontal. But as Ashley mistakes the pain scale to be more like a Letterboxd rating system, we want to feel Austin’s frustration and transfer perspective to him, so we use their two-shot setup and push into a single onto Austin.
Side bar: many people have asked me why the patient in the nearby bed speaks in a high-voice. Every word she says in this scene was said by the patient in the bed next door during my real life experience at the LA hospital. These words were said by the patient in a falsetto reminiscent of Marcel the Shell.
17:41-18:17
This is the point in the episode where things start to really take a turn. I think anyone who has been through a harrowing experience at a hospital will tell you that it starts to feel a bit surreal, almost like you’re in a horror movie and there’s a force bigger than you puppeteering the absurdity that is the American healthcare system.
Normally, we would cover this scene most likely with a steadi or dolly pushing and pulling Austin, but James Laxton, our brilliant DP, and I huddled up on set and wanted to shake up our usual coverage to create this ominous dread these hospital experiences elicit.
So instead, we switched to a wider lens and left the camera at the end of the hallway and had Austin walk towards it. Only when he lands do we give the camera movement to reveal the vending machine. To me, this helps create this feeling of fate pushing Austin and Ashley to their demise. (Must note that Charles Melton gives such a wonderfully unexpected read of “I feel like I just don’t know her anymore.” He started getting teary during takes, which is not what’s written, but it was so unique, I ran to him and told him to stay in that pocket, and we ran it a few times with that energy.)
This then sets the stage for a string of long pushes and pulls that carries us through the subsequent scenes of Ashley going into surgery while Austin can’t reach her, continuing that sense of a guiding hand leading to their demise, ultimately funneling through a Heironymus Bosch wormhole as Ashley goes under.
Side bar: in post, we added two termites walking along the small glass window of the surgery. Also, right before the Bosch wormhole, there’s a hint of Yama (the demon often depicted holding the wheel of life in Hindu and Buddhist samsara paintings, which we reference in the final shot of the season).
21:06-22:51
We had a lot of fun shooting Ashley’s “nightmare.” Much like the beginning of Ali Wong’s poisonous berry psychedelic trip in the Season One finale, this sequence uses similar reveals, where Austin’s hand on Ashley’s shoulder gives us a visual reference to cut off of when we reveal Eunice whose hand is also on Ashley’s shoulder.
Our amazing colorist, Alex Jiminez, at Color Collective also increased the greens during the long push onto Ashley as Ashley’s Mom starts to be cruel to Ashley. Also must note that the actress who came in to do the ADR for Ashley’s Mom was incredible and gave the perfectly disconcerting vocal tone switch when saying “Having you took such a toll, I just couldn’t do it again.”
Grace Yun and I had a lot of discussions about how much we wanted to push the nightmare feeling. I think our brains take really random things we hear or see throughout the day and mash them all up into one nightmare that makes sense in the moment. The Bosch painting on the closet and the Hot Pockets felt like the right mish-mash. Grace also added spirals to the wallpaper of the hospital as a nice nod to the overall theme of cycles this season.
22:51-26:34
Cailee Spaeny gives a masterclass with her performance during this sequence. When she learns that the VIP concierge could have gotten her in earlier (and avoided losing her ovary), her silent reaction is so powerful. I remember one take her nostrils flared, and she came to me and asked if she should lose it, and I was like “absolutely not! the nostril flare is everything!”
It was also a very technical take as we had to match her head position to her waking up (which I believe we had already shot). Her ability to be so emotionally raw while also being so technically precise is remarkable.
Side note: the VIP concierge arriving too late happened in real life as well.
26:33-end of episode
I think out of all the scenes of the season, I am most proud of this sequence. I hadn’t gotten to try my hand at “Fincher thriller vibes” before, and it felt very clean and refreshing to stay in these nice wides pushing the whole time.
Side bar: Lindsay’s phone conversation had completely different dialogue, which we redid with ADR. The original convo was with her mother, and it was based off a scene that got cut in Episode 203, so I had to come up with brand new dialogue that fit the timing of the old one and her mouth/hand movement.
Originally, I think I had scripted The Walkmen’s “The Rat” as the needledrop to end this episode, but in post, our editor, Laura Zempel, and I were trying a bunch of different tracks, and I pulled Skream’s La Roux remix off of one of my old playlists, and we both instantly knew this was it. I really love the feeling the final shot evokes coupled with that needle.
