Director Kitao Sakurai on Finding Connection Through the Deepest Tensions in Season 2 of ‘Beef’
Director Kitao Sakurai is no stranger to television, having cut his teeth on Dave, Twisted Metal and more than 60 episodes of The Eric Andre Show, for which he was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award. But the second season of Lee Sung Jin’s Beef was a different animal.
Among his directed episodes this season, “Those Blue Remembered Hills” (episode 6) finds Josh and Lindsay (Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan) trying to bring Austin and Ashley (Charles Melton and Cailee Spaney) back into the fold of trust. In my conversation with Sakurai, he talks about the challenges of tension-building to these final episodes and working with the actors to find generational connections and more.
Tyler Doster: How did you get brought on board to Beef?
Kitao Sakurai: I had worked on Dave on FX and I had directed one of Sonny’s episodes, who show runs Beef, and we just had a really good time working together and a really good collaboration and it felt like his vision really came through in that episode that I did. And so, we’d kept in touch and it didn’t work out to do season one for scheduling stuff. But then when season two came around, Sonny reached out and kind of made it happen. So, it was a great, really happy that I was able to keep with that collaboration and work with Sonny on that.
TD: What was your shooting schedule like on episodes five and six?
KS: Oh gosh, complex. There were a lot of scheduling difficulties because of the fires, and we had a huge, sort of like one of our main locations was inaccessible because of the results of the fires. And so, we had to do a lot of big scheduling shifts because of that. I was producing, director on the entire season and so I had pockets of, like windows to shoot some days and based off of location availability. It was a tricky thing to schedule for sure, but that’s just the way it goes sometimes, but I’m really happy with just how it turned out and what we were able to accomplish.
TD: Yeah. Like you said, you’ve directed some episodes of Dave, some pivotal episodes of Dave, including that season three finale. You did The Eric Andre Show. So, you’re familiar with pivotal moments inside of television show. And I wondered, do you think… Episodes five and six take a leap tonally into the darkness? Do you think that comedy and discomfort are two sides of the same coin?
KS: Well, yeah, absolutely. And I think all my career has been about exactly that. The Eric Andre Show is really about the tension between making people uncomfortable, but at the same time there’s a kind of… I like to think about it like sadism almost, where it’s like for me growing up in Japanese culture, there’s a different understanding of sadism and the humor that can come out of sadism, I think. And because those were sort of my early influences in childhood or because of the way my brain works or something, that connection between deep discomfort, and fear, and all these sort of very dark psychological things that can happen, there’s always a flip side to that, which is comedy. And comedy comes out of a disruption of something, or a reversal of something, or something that you expect to be turned on its head and what comes out of that experience. And so for me, those pivotal moments that you’re talking about with Beef or Dave, that kind of tension is what I look for as far as being able to make a moment bigger, right, both narratively and comedically.
And with Beef, the premise of the show really is also about that kind of discomfort and obviously it’s about class and in this season, much more about generational issues. But I think that tension between fitting in and feeling like you’re ascending and then butting up against things that are pressing you down, those kinds of things are really ripe for big comedic moments as well. And so that’s for me where I think I thrive, and that’s what I look for. And I think that’s why five and six felt like, for Sonny, appropriate episodes for me to handle, just based off of what we had done together in Dave.
TD: That makes total sense. How do you, as the director, facilitate the story while you create that tension, while you’re building tension as these episodes go on?
KS: I think as a director working in both film and TV, when it comes to TV and a story like Beef, what I look for story-wise is also what I look for comedy-wise, which is clarity. The thing about comedy is that as far as having a hard laugh or something that makes you feel something really unexpected, the clarity of storytelling is really, really important. What I look for as a director is a understanding of what these beats are and what the story’s trying to say and how the story is trying to move. And beyond that, how to tell that in a really compelling way that makes you lean in and makes you kind of just open your eyes to what’s happening in an incredibly compelling way. And so, my job as a director is to enhance the clarity of the story, and the clarity of what these arcs are, and what Sonny’s trying to say and make it really compelling.
So, it’s easier said than done, obviously. It takes a lot of work, and a lot of thought, and design to have something feel really clear. And for me also, I love visual storytelling. I think that’s a hallmark of my work, especially in TV, is how to infuse weird dramatic comedy with a heightened cinematic style. And so for me, I’m looking for ways to underline what these story points are in a highly visual way that’s unexpected as well, that also supports the comedy of it.
TD: I wanted to ask you, episode five, of course, brings the death of Burberry, Lindsay’s dog, which sends a ripple throughout all the characters’ lives as they start communicating a little bit more and unveiling a little bit more truths about themselves. Carey and Cailee have an excellent scene together talking about what they’ve both been through, what Lindsay’s been through, what Ashley’s been through. I wondered what your conversations were like with the actors while preparing for these scenes.
KS: Well, a lot of the conversations were about digging into the meaning of… I think Beef is about in a lot of ways where people are at in their lives, and where they expect to go and the feeling of being stuck. And especially for that scene that you’re talking about, it was a lot about understanding and relating in a personal way, both for each of their characters, like where they’re at now and where they expect to go and just connecting very deeply to, in a personal way, that kind of tension of these characters are at different points in their lives. And we feel like there’s going to be a connection, and in a lot of ways there are these connections, but there’s also this feeling of ships passing in the night.
And I think that’s the poignant thing that I saw in that scene and I saw with those characters, is that there is a sense of real connection, but there is also this profound sense of loneliness of thinking that you’re going to head to a place and desiring to be in a different place both financially, or age-wise, or generationally, but this sort of sorrow or pain at feeling like you kind of missed it, or it’s not possible, or you made the wrong choice. So those kinds of things of relating to where you’re at now and where you think you’re going to go and not really being able to go there, like that’s the fundamental key to that moment in that beat and what these characters are talking about. So ,it’s a very general kind of thing and I don’t want to step too much on the very personal process of these actors, but as a filmmaker and as somebody who’s connecting to this scene, that’s kind of where I was coming at it from and where I was relating to the actors.
TD: Beef is also known for its very long episode titles and I was wondering if you had any favorites out of the eight we’ve gotten this year.
KS: Oh gosh. That’s a great question because I did have one. I mean, for me, kind of relating to what we were talking about, I really always have loved the [Season 2, Episode 1] title, “All The Things We’re Never Going to Have.” I think that just speaks so well to certainly that episode, but also the themes of the season as a whole and the themes of the show as a whole. I think that there’s a very kind of oblique way that these titles are talking about the episodes and also a very direct way these titles are talking about the episodes, which I think is the beauty of the writing in general. And I think that the naming of a thing is a very important spiritual idea, I think. And I think that the way that title in a very sort of like, on the nose way in a great way talks about the themes of the show is like I love it because you know what you’re getting yourself into thematically.
I think that setting the table for the audience is always a nice thing. And I think that the titles do such a good job of spiritually setting the tone for what you’re about to consume. And obviously the Beef titles are very unique in that regard, but I think it does highlight the specialness of the writing and the specialness of the thematic work within the show.
Kitao Sakurai is Emmy-eligible in the categories of Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series for Beef and Outstanding Directing for a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie for the episode “Those Blue Remembered Hills.”
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