Warning: This story contains spoilers for the Season 2 finale of Beef.
Much like the first season of Beef, the latest installment of the anthology series spends most of its runtime deep diving in the insecurities and indignities of modern life, mostly through the lens of class struggles, before a hard pivot into some insane third-act blood and guts.
This time, instead of Mario Bello getting cut in half by a panic room door, the characters played by Carey Mulligan, Cailee Spaeny, and Charles Melton battle their way across a South Korean skin clinic, attacked by the muscle of a billionaire country club owner (played by Oscar winner Youn Yuh-jung from Minari) and using surgical implements to make their escape.
Fairly standard stuff.
The sequence, shot as one continuous take, began as an idea of creator Lee Sung Jin‘s. Even before he had written the script for the third episode, he knew what Episode 8, the finale, needed. “I just wrote, ‘Oldboy-style fight in a skin clinic with pieces of skin flying around,'” Lee told Gold Derby. “And I wasn’t sure how we were going to get there, but I just knew that that’s something that this season deserved.”
Anyone familiar with the oner from the second installment of director Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance Trilogy knows that the fight featuring Choi Min-sik’s Oh Dae-su and a hammer against a hallway full of goons basically changed action movie language after its release in 2003, influencing everything from Netflix’s Daredevil series to the John Wick movies.
But what began as an homage quickly evolved into something entirely new and utterly Beef. “What I love about our the collaborators on this show is it can take that sentence, between Jake [Schreier], our DP, James Laxton, our production designer, Grace Yun, costume designer Olga Mill, they all come together and use that just as inspo, and we collectively vomit out something that is uniquely our own,” Lee said.
And if you’ve seen the sequence in question, you understand that vomit couldn’t be a more appropriate metaphor.
Preparation
Once Lee communicated to this department heads what the sequence was going to be in spirit, he and the show’s writers room at the time needed to figure out the moment-to-moment beats of the sequence in order to weave in character moments, like Lindsay’s punch to Chairwoman Park.
“Even in the fight sequence itself, we wanted to balance out having Charles, Cailee, and Carey, all have equal moments of triumph and laughable failure,” Lee said. “We had a lot of pieces that we had set up that we were trying to pay off, but in terms of how to connect all those pieces, that’s when Jake and James are so amazing with the camera.”
Schreier, having just directed Thunderbolts for Marvel Studios, understood two important things from the jump when it came to planning the oner: everything’s been done, and a TV production isn’t going to have the resources to outdo the movie. “We have great people working, but in the time that we have, we’re probably not gonna beat Mission: Impossible when it comes to out-and-out action,” Schreier said. “But what are the places we can win? What makes it different? What makes it feel like our show? Knowing our characters aren’t action heroes, what believably would let them win? What drives that sequence? The disgusting nature of it, the way people react to blood and skin and making that an element within the fight seemed like such a special opportunity.”
Once the plan for the sequence was in place, production created a replica of the Trochos skin clinic out of cardboard in the United States for rehearsals with the actors. Once filming moved to Korea, a warehouse was used for the stunt team to practice and teach Mulligan, Melton, and Spaeny the choreography at night, once shooting had wrapped for the day.
The choreography came naturally to Melton, who has a Taekwondo background with a second-degree black belt. “I’m actually really great with action choreography,” he said. “I love the pursuit of something maybe not as common, especially in a oner, where everything has to be pretty much perfect. There’s just something very enticing to my competitive nature in the sense of wanting to execute that.”
Filming
True to Schreier’s expectations for filming, the production only had half a day to capture the fight sequence, but the director wasn’t planning on making it any easier for the cast and crew. They were going to pull off the melee as a true oner — no hidden cuts.
“I was watching it the other day, and I was like, ‘Oh, I guess, technically, you maybe you could have stitched here,'” Schreier said. “There are a lot of oners these days, and at the point where you’re doing overt stitches, just cut. It’s OK. The oner of it all, doesn’t need to take the focus away from what’s actually happening within the shot. You want action that feels like you actually could execute it. The goal is to feel chaotic and you’re actually getting to watch something happen. Holding yourself to that standard is a good way to design the action to a level that feels right for what you’re shooting.”
Production ran the fight about a dozen times. Schreier recalls the second-to-last take being the one that made the cut, but some of the takes before then were only ruined by the smallest of details. One such shoot fell apart at the very end, as Melton, Mulligan, and Spaeny were joined by South Korean film legend Song Kang-ho as they attempted to push the door closed on Chairwoman Park’s security detail.
“I remember we had a take where everything was perfect, but the door was like, an inch too close, and we couldn’t see the guys faces,” Melton said. “We had to do it again, but it’s amazing when you’re chasing perfection in a oner in that regard.”
