The Big Picture

The hit Netflix series Beef scored 13 Emmy nominations including one for Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series. Director Jake Schreier discusses his experience collaborating with show creator, Lee Sung Jin, and stars, Steven Yeun, Ali Wong, and Young Mazino. Schreier also goes into detail on crafting the episode that earned him a nomination for Outstanding Directing for a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie, Episode 9, “The Great Fabricator,”

Beef became a very buzzy title the moment it dropped on Netflix. The show begins with extreme road rage — some very aggressive honking that turns into a suburbia car chase involving Steven Yeun’s Danny Cho and Ali Wong’s Amy Lau. Even when that specific incident ends, Danny and Amy just can’t let it go and the two get caught up in a relentless rivalry that sends both of their lives spiraling, taking quite a few family members and friends down with them.

The show is a creative feat in every respect. It’s brimming with style and technical prowess, it features a downright stellar ensemble that successfully makes the most of the show’s dark comedy without ever undermining the troubling complexity of the situation they find themselves in, and it’s all shepherded by a creator, showrunner, writer, and director with a firm handle on Beef’s unique style, tone, pace, and thematic heft, Lee Sung Jin. The show scored 13 Emmy nominations and deserves every single one of them — and then some. (Particularly one for cinematographer Larkin Seiple.)

With Phase 2 voting now underway, I got the chance to celebrate Beef’s nominations with Jake Schreier. Not only is Schreier nominated for Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series as part of the producing team, but he also scored a nomination for Outstanding Directing for a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie for his work on Episode 9, “The Great Fabricator,” an episode that happens to feature one of the best death scenes of 2023.

Check out the video at the top of this article to hear all about the behind-the-scenes discussions that went into creating that especially unforgettable moment as well Schreier’s experience directing Yeun and Young Mazino in one of the episode’s most emotional scenes, and loads more. You can also read our conversation in transcript form below.

Image via Netflix 

PERRI NEMIROFF: You’re nominated for Outstanding Directing for a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie individually, but in addition to that, Beef also wound up with 12 other nominations. This feels like a bit of an unfair question, but of all the other nominees for Beef, which one surprised and excited you the most? Someone where, when their name was called, you sat there and said to yourself, “Yes! I am so incredibly thrilled that they got the recognition they deserved?”

JAKE SCHREIER: Oh, don’t make me do this. I don’t know. Look, I could also talk about Larkin [Seiple] and Grace [Yun] who weren’t nominated. I think when there’s that many nominations for a show, what just feels really good is it feels like the show connected with people. I don’t think that any one specific nomination over another – everyone that day, we wrote up everyone who had worked on the show and said thank you and how much everyone had been a part of it. I know that’s highly diplomatic, but I do mean it. There wasn’t one shock or anything that happened.

It’s appropriate. Fair enough!

One of my favorite nominations that was called was your sound team because I believe they were nominated for the same episode you were and I just like to think that their nomination was solely for a certain death in that episode.

SCHREIER: [Laughs] A certain bone-crunching sound, and door sounds.

Beautifully crafted!

To have our viewers get to know you a little more, you’ve had a bit of a unique journey in terms of the types of things that you direct. You directed Robot & Frank and Paper Towns, and then from there go on to direct a slew of music videos, and then after that a whole bunch of series credits, and now you’re gonna make your way back to features with Thunderbolts. How much of that trajectory was determined by what you were interested in creatively on a personal level versus going with the flow of a constantly evolving industry?

SCHREIER: I think probably mostly going with the flow. Obviously, it’s always determined by what interests you, but the flow changes where that interest is gonna come from and what format it’s gonna be in. Yeah, there was never any plan that, “Okay, now it’s time to do TV,” or, “Now it’s time to go back to a superhero movie.” I think it’s just what comes in that feels like it grabs you and expresses something that you wanna work in or get better at or learn something from. That’s the nice thing about all of these projects. I mean, I also started in commercials, and I did music videos way back when. I think there’s almost never a project that you don’t learn something from.

Lately the thing I think a lot about is just that fit and collaboration and who you work with and just how lucky it is when you get something like Beef. I’ve been friends with Sonny [Lee Sung Jin] for years, but also with Larkin who shot it and Grace, the production designer. It’s new friendships and old friendships, just what a great fit that was and how much that fit contributes to making something that feels unique and special, that feels like a thing to kind of take and think about going forward in the business.

Image via Netflix

Along the way, is there any particular project that you gained more from than you ever could have imagined where, when the opportunity came your way, you might have said, “I don’t know if now is the right time for this,” but you opted to commit and wound up getting more from it than you ever could have anticipated?

SCHREIER: That’s a good question. I don’t know if it was something that I didn’t want to do. I think there was a time when work wasn’t coming as easy where, yeah, I did start to focus on the music videos a little bit more and music videos with my friend Francis [Farewell Starlite], whose band I was in, Francis and the Lights, and just getting to really work on something even if it was in such a small bite-sized form that felt like you could really take it all the way from the beginning to the end and keep a sense of singular purpose. That was very fulfilling and rewarding in a time where you don’t always get that on some of these other projects, or where it takes much longer to get there.

And I think that led to a thing that we were exploring about really using long takes to capture a moment in time and really see something, and also how to kind of work with the rest of the music videos that I went on to make, trying to kind of replicate that collaboration with Francis where it feels very much like his music video as much as mine, and trying to do that with other artists, and letting them bring a lot of their own ideas. I wouldn’t just write treatments and send them off. It would have to be an artist that was willing to talk to me about what they wanted to see and then me try to translate that somehow cinematically. And I think that ends up being valuable in all kinds of ways, especially when you’re making something like Beef. If you look at Episode 3 in the church, I had no personal connection to the Korean church, but the people who were there did, and really leaving the room open for Steven and then for Sonny and all of the people there to kind of bring themselves to that scene and really make something that feels personal, and leaving the space for that, that was something that I picked up in music videos that felt like an important lesson to learn.

That’s a beautiful answer. I love hearing about how things build along the way.

Image via Netflix 

Jumping into Beef full force, we’ll start with your leads here, Ali and Steven. Clearly the two of them work together very well, but can you maybe tell us something unique about each of their approaches to their own work, maybe even something that calls for something different from you as an actor’s director?

SCHREIER: Yeah, with Steven, he’s just so incredible. He will not give you a false moment. But I think for the kind of writing that Sonny does and the kind of directing that I do, which is not necessarily entirely as observed, there’s a sense of purpose to it, and there’s something that it’s driving at. So there’s a real value in having someone like Steven who can hit all of his beats and he can be a very technical actor, and he can do action very well. But then also, he gives you something that is not at all what you expected out of a moment. I think about in Episode 8 when he’s yelling at Edwin (Justin H. Min), “What you did was not nice! It’s not nice to do that!” That was a line that I loved in the script that Sonny wrote and pictured in an entirely different way. I never really go in with a preconceived notion of, “You have to do the line this way,” or, “We’re gonna run it until this is what we get,” but either way, I just never pictured that, but it’s just surprising and great. I think that combination is something that is so special. Really, the height of what you can do is when you can exist within a system of filmmaking that is technical and has purpose, but then you are still bringing that level of reality and spontaneity to those moments where each take might function along the same parameters and hit these beats and hit these timings but never actually be the same take or be the same performance. That felt really, really special with Steven.

And then with Ali, she just had this great level of excitement about getting to do something different than she had gotten to do up until that point, and maybe came in with one notion of what that would be and then very quickly adjusted to something entirely different, and really, really made it personal in this way. To watch someone kind of attack that with so much energy and excitement, it was just really, really beautiful to watch. And for her to keep hitting these moments within some of those therapy scenes that you’re like, “Okay, wow, that was more than anything that we had seen in rehearsal.” But just to see her kind of embrace that over the course of the season was really, really special.

For each of them, I think – and Sonny’s definitely talked about this – there’s so much, even before I arrived, that they had brought to the series in just the conversations that they had had with Sonny in the development phase of putting themselves into these parts and pushing the narrative forward so that by the time you got there, not only were they acting it well, but they really understood it on a level that you didn’t even have to discuss necessarily with them because they had already put those ideas into the storyline, and that’s pretty special.

Image via Netflix

The two of them are something else in this. I’m gonna follow that up with yet another unfair question so I can tease someone else in the ensemble. Of all the other characters in Beef, which one wound up being more creatively fulfilling to direct than you ever could have imagined?

SCHREIER: You’re trying to make me pick favorites, and I won’t do that. I can’t do that. I just want to be clear, I’m not saying this above anyone else – there’s something very exciting when someone is in one of their first parts, at least at this scale, and to watch Young [Mazino] kind of grow into that and how real he was from the first moment, but also develop an approach in an acting sense because they just haven’t gotten to do it that much before and be that good, not his first time out, but in one of his first times out, I think that that’s fun for everyone to watch. I think that was something that just felt really nice to see happen in front of your eyes.

But everyone just brought so much of themselves. That was the thing I noticed from the very first table read was just how important the show felt to the actors that were involved. And once you see something like that, it makes you want to really be there for them and be at the top of your game because you know how important this is to everyone involved, and you don’t want to be the one that lets that down in any way.

That’s a big part of the reason why I ask a question like that. You have a rather large supporting ensemble here and it’s not easy to make characters like that feel full and real and like their worlds are whole and lived in, and every single one of them manages to do it. I think that’s a big reason why you see so many Emmy nominations for the show in the acting categories.

I’ll stick with Young for a minute more. Jumping into the episode you’re nominated for, I wanted to ask you about directing him in one particular scene. It’s the conversation between Paul and Danny in that walled-off area. Can you walk us through the conversations you two might have had in terms of navigating Paul’s building reactions to all of the things that Danny is confessing? In particular, why he is so quick to brush off the wiring error, but then also making sure that it’s justified when the switch flips when he mentions the college application situation?

SCHREIER: I wish that I could say that there was some brilliant thing that I told Young to get into that place, but he just nailed it. I mean, he was just there. Something that was nice about Episode 9 is whereas most of the show is shot entirely out of sequence, we cross-boarded it, [Episodes] 9 and 10 happened where they happened within the storyline, so there was a wealth of that relationship that had been built up between him and Steven at that point.

We did talk about how there’s an amount of this that’s understood between these brothers about the dynamic and a certain amount of rivalry or wanting to keep each other down, and he understands a little bit about Danny and what he’s messed up, but something that deep he maybe doesn’t know. And I think there’s also an element of it, which for Steven, obviously, he’s trying to reach this moment of honesty in part to be selfless and push Paul away from him to save Paul’s life, and I think that there’s an element to which Paul even might understand that in a way. Even if there is a ton of anger at that, there’s a sense that a break is made between the two of them in that moment. But again, the two of them were just so there and so ready for that moment when they played it that mostly you call action, you call cut, and you maybe say one thing, and then you watch.

Image via Netflix

One incredible moment of many in this particular episode. Going into filming Episode 9, which scene or story beat did you think was going to be the toughest to capture, and then ultimately, was that indeed the hardest of the bunch or did something else catch you by surprise?

SCHREIER: Look, there’s different kinds of hard, right? I mean, there’s certainly a resource question; we knew that we didn’t have an actual massive SWAT team outside and we didn’t have a ton of time to film the episode for having a lot of action, so there certainly was an amount of nerves just about being able to pull off the kind of scope and scale of it. But I think that moment [that] Steven got to with, “You gotta get away from me, man. You gotta get away from me.” That line was so beautiful in the script, but that’s not exactly how it read. Steven brought that in that moment. And so when you’re in the midst of this chaotic melee and then you still have actors finding moments that are real amidst it, that I think was the biggest question, “Can we pull off an episode like this that is so heightened that hopefully we’ve built to on a tonal level, but can we still find all of these really beautiful character moments that Sonny has been building up to in his writing amidst that?” And once I saw that on set, I was like, “Okay, yeah, I think we can do it. I think we could get there.”

You very much did. I’m gonna touch on one particular character moment that you built towards especially well. I’d to know a little bit about the conversations you had with Ashley [Park] when filming this particular scene. Of course, it’s the button-pressing scene. What do you two have to talk through so that the intentions that you want her to convey are clear, if there are any deliberate intentions behind the timing of the pushing of the button at all?

SCHREIER: That was a big discussion about what level of intent is in this button push. We went back and forth, and I mean I think viewers can make of it what they will. Certainly she’s been pushed to run on her own by the fact that Jordan has been so cruel and pushed her away, so that break is there between their two characters. I think it’s a mixture between fear and a reaction, and then also maybe just a recognition that this person does not have your best interest at heart and probably would not wait for you if they were in the same position. But I don’t think, and we never wanted it to be some sort of cruel, diabolical turn that she makes to turn on Jordan. It’s more just that a break has been made between those two characters, and in that moment, that’s what it leads to.

You feel it when you’re watching it. I’m a horror lover. That is my number one genre. I’ll watch anything, but that is my favorite. You 100% delivered one of the best, most memorable on-screen deaths of 2023.

SCHREIER: [Laughs] Hey, I’ll take it. Again, it’s all [our] team because the way it was written, she didn’t get cut in half. It was just she got crushed in the door and then it was like, “Alright, how are we gonna show that? We probably don’t want to show too much of it because it’s better imagined,” as you said, and the incredible sound design. And then we were talking with Larkin Seiple, our DP, we’re going back and forth on these reaction close-ups, which was what was gonna tell us that she was dying, it was gonna be on their reactions, and then he was just like, “You know, if the door’s in the foreground, you could just have it close,” and it was just too good an idea not to do. I think everyone when they heard that was like, “Okay, yeah. I don’t care how messed up that is, we have to do it.”