How ‘Euphoria’ Turned Sydney Sweeney Into a Modern-Day Godzilla

Production designer François Audouy and visual effects supervisor David Van Dyke tell IndieWire how last week's episode used miniatures to create Los Angeles landmarks, a skyline at dusk, and a pair of extremely destructive, gigantic breasts.

On this week’s episode of “Euphoria,” Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) comes into her own as an internet superstar who rakes in cash with her provocative, explicit posts. To convey the degree to which Cassie feels as though she’s taking over the world, series creator Sam Levinson came up with an ingenious visual metaphor: a fantasy sequence in which Cassie grows into a 50-foot woman and stomps through the streets of Los Angeles like Godzilla rampaging through Tokyo.

In keeping with Levinson’s omnivorous cinephilia, the sequence is audacious and innovative but looks back at earlier films for inspiration — in this case, the 1958 cult classic “Attack of the 50 Foot Woman,” the 1961 kaiju landmark “Mothra,” and other sci-fi films that relied on miniatures and old-school practical effects to achieve their sense of spectacle. The set piece required close collaboration between Levinson and his department heads, including production designer François Audouy and visual effects supervisor David Van Dyke, who worked together to create forced-perspective sets that Sydney Sweeney could stomp through with minimal digital enhancement.

“In Japan, there’s this Tokusatsu miniature tradition that started in the late 1950s with ‘Godzilla,'” Audouy told IndieWire. “They continued creating these city destruction miniatures for decades, in movie after movie, and we looked at some of those movies for inspiration.” To create a miniature downtown Los Angeles for Cassie to conquer, Audouy worked with J.C. Backings to build a 90-foot Translight that would cover the entire back of the soundstage.

“We wanted the whole sequence to have a twilight, pre-dusk look, so the lighting had to be very consistent,” Audouy said when explaining the purpose of the Translight. In front of the Translight were models built by John Merritt Productions, a company that has been creating miniatures and practical effects for decades; among their credits are now classic films like “Kill Bill,” “Speed,” and “Dick Tracy.”

“It was really amazing to work with a team of model builders who don’t get asked to do this kind of stuff anymore,” Audouy said. “They’re like the last knights of another era.” Merritt and his team spent six months building structures like the Eastern Columbia Building and the Orpheum Theatre sign, the latter of which featured thousands of miniature incandescent bulbs — “the smallest incandescent bulbs that are made,” according to Audouy.

The city set was built in forced perspectives, with different buildings created at different scales that required Audouy and Van Dyke to solve complicated mathematical problems to make sure everything would match the way they wanted on camera. “We built the foreground at 1/24 scale, and then it goes to 1/48 scale in the background buildings,” Audouy said. “Then we had some close-ups that were done at 1/12 scale. When you’re mixing scales and things like that from shot to shot, it requires a lot of complicated physics.”

For a scene shot from inside one of the buildings, in which the giant Cassie approaches from outside while an office worker watches one of her videos on his computer, Van Dyke had to figure out how to combine disparate frame rates and camera positions to give the illusion that a giant Cassie was moving through space toward her “fan.” “You have two different plates lining up with each other,” Van Dyke said. “We shot the foreground and the background separately.” The footage of the man in the office was shot at a normal frame rate, while the plate showing Cassie was photographed at a higher frame rate to give her more weight.

The interaction between Cassie and the office worker then ends with Cassie pressing against the building and her giant breasts crashing through the glass — an idea Levinson and Sweeney brought to Audouy late in the game that entailed KNB EFX Group’s Mark Byers building a giant chest appliance that could push through the window. “It was built at almost the last minute, and KNB sculpted it the old-fashioned way and did a terrific job,” Audouy said. “Mark put the whole thing on a sled and timed it so that when the rig hit the glass, the glass was squibbed to shatter at exactly that moment.”

The set pieces for the entire sequence were built on wheels, so that when it was time to reset for new angles, the entire camera department didn’t have to move — the set just had to rotate to accommodate the new setup. Audouy described the choreography that was required of cinematographer Marcell Rév and the show’s ADs as a ballet designed to capture an insane amount of shots — although the set took months to build, the actual sequence was shot in only a couple of days.

Van Dyke saw his job less as someone creating CG imagery — of which there was almost none in the sequence — than as a sort of additional set decorator, adding physical elements to sell the illusion. His crew shot various plates of smoke, explosions, and models like toy helicopters flying through the air that were combined to give the sequence volume and texture, all the while making sure the details were convincing in the high-resolution film stocks (much of Season 3 was shot on 65mm celluloid) Rev and Levinson employed to capture the images.

“It really gives it a natural cinema feel, an old Hollywood feel that fits in with the rest of the show,” Van Dyke said, with Audouy adding that the whole idea was to find a visual language to express Cassie’s interior experience. “Cassie’s inner life is one of the most heightened things on the show,” Audouy said, “so going back to an old Hollywood craft tradition was a way to lean into her storyline.” For Van Dyke, the satisfaction of the sequence came from the fact that he felt there was a real sense of purpose behind the methodology.

“Sometimes people want to use miniatures just because they think it’s ‘neat,’ but there’s no real meaning behind it,” Van Dyke said. “When François and I read this, it just made a lot of sense; it was exciting. When I do effects, I want to know what I’m doing and why I’m doing it.”

“Euphoria” airs Sunday nights on HBO and is now streaming on HBO MAX.