Production: Euphoria

Centred around a group of now twentysomethings, Euphoria has never played by the rules. We catch up with DOP Marcell Rév, HCA, ASC who expanded this season’s aesthetic to match its widened scope

Words: Katie Kasperson | Images: HBO 

When Euphoria premiered in 2019, it did so loudly. Filled with sex, drugs and social media – as well as some outrageous outfits that definitely wouldn’t have flown in my high school – Sam Levinson’s contemporary coming-of-age drama simultaneously represented teenage reality while taking it to an extreme. The show became known for its moody, experimental, life-is-but-a-dream aesthetic, and Marcell Rév, HCA, ASC was the man responsible.

Now in its third season, Euphoria’s characters have graduated to the real world. The scope is wider, no longer confined to a single school in a single town. Rév made sure the visuals evolved alongside the story. 

Starting over

“Every time we start a new season, we are basically starting from scratch,” Rév begins. “That is a bit of a rule with Sam; we always say we don’t want to repeat ourselves. Also, narratively speaking, he came up with something completely new for this season, and we had to match that with how it looked.”

Season 3 follows Euphoria’s ensemble – Rue, Jules, Maddy, Lexi, Cassie and Nate – navigating early adulthood in the Los Angeles metro area. Set five years after Season 2, Rue is now a drug mule turned mole; Jules is a sugar baby; Maddy is a talent agent; Lexi is a production assistant and Cassie is an influencer married to Nate, who has taken over his father’s construction company. This season, Levinson wanted a more ‘objective look’ at the characters and American society as a whole, says Rév. “Our conversations were mostly technical, and we tried to choose our tools accordingly.”

While the first two seasons had POV shots galore and were mainly told from Rue’s perspective (as the series’ narrator), Season 3 goes wider. There is a larger focus on the landscape, from the sandy south-west to the California coast. “We watched a lot of westerns from the fifties: mostly John Ford, Howard Hughes, classic westerns but also classic Hollywood,” Rév describes. “I’m referencing Hitchcock when he started making colour films like Vertigo and North by Northwest. They have an artifice but in a glamorous, Hollywood way. It was a glorious time in cinema with beautiful, striking colours.”

In keeping with that theme, Rév worked with Kodak to create a bespoke film stock that would accentuate colours and skin tones, particularly during day scenes. “The key difference, technically, was that this season was written mostly for the daytime, which is the opposite to before. It was a nighttime show,” he says. “With night, you have many tools to make the mood of an image. You have a blank canvas, and you can put light wherever you want. With day, it’s different. You do the reverse.”

Around three years prior to production, Rév contacted Vanessa Bendetti, head of Kodak’s motion picture arm. After testing available film stocks, something was still missing – so they created VERITA 200D, “a more vivid, flavourful stock,” says Rév. “It’s daylight-balanced and has a little more colour separation. It has nice details and skin tones as well as beautiful, creamy highlights. That gave us the baseline for how this season would look.”

Girls on film

The biggest departure from previous seasons for Rév was not just the new stock. It was the decision to use a new format altogether. They shot on five-perforation 65mm film, which offers a ’significantly bigger negative and bigger resolution’, and adjusted Euphoria’s aspect ratio to 1:2.2. He filmed daytime interiors and exteriors with the 65mm VERITA stock on an ARRIFLEX 765; for night scenes, he used Kodak’s 35mm VISION3 500T stock with an ARRICAM LT camera.

“We had a set of lenses made for us, specially by ARRI, for this shoot,” Rév adds, which he paired with the 765. The prototype glass offered sharpness and contrast, making the sunlight harsh at times, particularly when the plot called for it. He swapped between Panavision’s E and C Series anamorphics, a Macro Anamorphic Panatar and a Primo Anamorphic Zoom on the ARRICAM LT.

As for lighting, Rév prefers tungsten and HMIs over LEDs. “Since we were shooting on large format film and I wanted to have saturated, rich colours, it was important to get the full spectrum of light,” he explains. He opted for Mole-Richardson Molebeams, since ’they have both tungsten and HMI versions’. When he did use LEDs, he prioritised ones with advanced colour science, landing on the ARRI SkyPanels and Orbiters.

Rév and his gaffer, Danny Durr, designed their own contraption called the ‘cooler light’ – a metal casket made of 20 150W Edison tungsten bulbs. “We used it a lot in the strip club, the Silver Slipper,” which is where Rue works as a floor manager. “That was a personal favourite of mine.”

Done differently

Euphoria has never been an action show. There is plenty of violence, sure, as well as the occasional police chase, but it is the drama and character development that prevail. This season, though, opens with Rue attempting to cross the US-Mexico border by driving her car up a makeshift ramp and over a metal fence.

“That sequence was technically challenging,” admits Rév. “It’s a big stunt. You have to work 15ft in the air. We were shooting over multiple days, and working in the desert is not the easiest thing. It is sort of an action sequence, so you try to make it as engaging as possible. We built two border walls – one a little lower, one its original height,” he continues. “We had two units filming at the same time. It was a big operation.”

Historically, Rév and his fellow Euphoria cinematographers (there have been five) filmed the show primarily on set builds and sound stages. This season, however, they broke that mould, shooting roughly 45% on location, Rév estimates. The team constructed the Silver Slipper and Jules’ apartment, and scouted Alamo’s house (where Rue’s employer lives), recreating some of it on a stage. “My favourite was definitely the strip club,” Rév reveals. “I liked the embedded lighting and the way we designed our set-up around it. There were so many angles you could find in that space – just looking through windows and door frames.”

Jules’ apartment, meanwhile, was “basically a big glass aquarium and we photographed the view,” Rév recalls, which the team then printed and placed beyond the windows. “Making that look real – and creating different moods – was not an easy one to pull off.”

Yet, unlike many other productions today, Euphoria isn’t trying to recreate reality, visually or otherwise. It is highly stylised: characters speak directly to the camera; it’s regularly intercut with dream sequences, flashbacks and fantasies. For audiences craving an escape, that is a major part of the show’s appeal. “It is intentionally different from most of what is on television. That was always our goal,” Rév shares.

It has been said that Sam Levinson approaches each season of Euphoria as if it may be the last, but it’s rumoured this one will officially bring the story to a close. Four years flew by between the release of Seasons 2 and 3, and while that time wasn’t altogether pleasant (besides the LA fires and Hollywood strikes, several cast and crew members sadly passed away), it did allow Rév to explore a fuller range of creative possibilities. By the end of the break, he was hungry to get back on-set – and fans are equally eager to see their favourite characters on-screen once more.

Euphoria is available to watch on HBO Max in the US and Now or Sky in the UK

This article appears in the June/July 2026 issue of Definition