Cinematographer Andrew Wehde’s episode guide to The Bear Season 3

When a television show is a success and is renewed for multiple seasons, the age-old Hollywood question comes into play for its creators: How do you keep things exciting while staying true to what made the show a hit in the first place? Or for a show like The Bear, which is set in the restaurant business, how do you freshen up your most ordered plate, while maintaining its taste? For cinematographer Andrew Wehde — who joined the series for the first episode after the pilot and has been behind the camera for every episode since — the answer has been found in close collaboration with creator and director Christopher Storer. Together, they’ve evolved the show’s visual language in step with the growth of its ensemble cast of characters and with the transition of a humble family sandwich shop into the fine-dining restaurant The Bear.

Panavision previously caught up with Wehde following The Bear’s hit first season. In the lead-up to the show’s fourth season, which is now available for streaming on FX on Hulu, we reconnected with the cinematographer to revisit Season 3, which has since been nominated in multiple Emmy categories, including Outstanding Comedy Series. “It’s interesting to look back at because while we’re making it, we’re in so deep, and all we’re thinking about is that moment,” Wehde shares. What follows is an episode-by-episode breakdown, in the cinematographer’s own words.

Episode 1, “Tomorrow,” directed by Christopher Storer

Season 1 was a hodgepodge of H Series, and we loved what was happening with them. When Season 2 came around, I had another conversation with Dan Sasaki [Panavision’s Senior Vice President of Optical Engineering and Lens Strategy]. I talked about the serial numbers that I loved, and he started adding lenses we didn’t have previously. That’s when Season 2 visually took a huge step up. A lens upgrade itself doesn’t necessarily give you exactly what the show is, but this set of lenses is such an important asset to The Bear. Season 3 was a continuation of that.

I was so proud of Episode 1. Because it wasn't a dialogue-based episode, so much of it was us going into spaces and just shooting. It was a very small, intimate team: me, operator Gary Malouf and 1st AC Matt Rozek. I control the look, Gary controls the way it's moved, and Matt controls what's in focus. They're touching the image. Gaffer Jeremy Long and key grip David Wagenaar were obviously part of that situation, along with some other help. We would roll into The French Laundry or wherever, and we were harnessing what these places already are, finding the most beautiful way of capturing them.

The episode lives on three lenses: the H Series 28mm, 35mm and 55mm. We needed the audience to go on this journey with Carmy [played by Jeremy Allen White] in all these places, and what we captured came from the power of light and the power of these three lenses. I use no filters. The lenses are so powerful that if I added any filtration, it would only change the natural beauty of what the lenses are doing.

The portrait work on our show has this sharp, crisp focus on a singular spot, whether it's Jeremy's eyes or a piece of the food. But the organic, natural falloff around them doesn't feel like a portrait that you would normally see on a 75mm or a 135mm. It has this dreamy quality to it, and it never feels harsh. We always talk about the fact that the most beautiful cookbooks around the world have their food photographed in a way that's soft and bloomy, and it makes you love what you're looking at versus making it something sterile.

The H Series has an incredible tack-sharp focus, though it never feels like a modern lens because of the way Jeremy's face falls off and the background blooms into something dreamlike. It's something I haven't been able to replicate without the Hs. Most modern lenses have a character that happens in the first couple stops, and after you stop it down to a 2.8 or a 4, the lens becomes clinical again. With the Hs, you have full character regardless of what stop you're at.

The biggest difference between Episode 1 and the rest of Season 3 is that Episode 1 is shot to feel large-format. We shot it as wide open as possible to give us that isolation of Carmy, because that dude is in his own world. We wanted everything to be focused just on him.

Episode 2, “Next,” directed by Christopher Storer

What I wanted to do in Season 3 was introduce sunlight. In Episodes 1 and 2, with Carmy working at the island [in the kitchen] by himself, we were using large-source tungsten lights to bring in that sunlight as if it's reflecting off the high rises. It looked like the sun was a big orange light blooming through the front window, and it felt like it was pushing all the way into the back of the restaurant. That was the big change, adding that warm sun into the restaurant, knowing that Carmy's changing, he's evolving, and that time is moving forward.

Light pollution is normal in what we do. We have a matte box, and that's it. We don't do any top flags, side flags, or mattes. It's part of the design and style behind the lighting of these spaces, whether it's the restaurant or a location, to give an opportunity for the actors to have almost 360 degrees of lighting or movement. We want freedom of exploration, freedom of blocking to allow an actor to improvise and change mid-shot. That to me is part of the life of what the show is. It never feels choreographed or rehearsed.

The kitchen was lit all practically, which gives the actors and our camera operators that freedom of exploration. Once you start releasing the manic control of 'this must be perfect,' and you enjoy the process and let these things be what they are, something happens that feels right for our show.

Episode 2 was almost entirely shot on 11:1 [Panavision SLZ11P 35-400mm T4.8 Primo Plus] zooms. There are one or two moments upfront when Carmy's by himself and the sunlight's coming through, and we're using the 50mm that Dan Sasaki made, but the rest are zooms. Chris wanted to bring back some of the energy and chaos from Season 1. He also wanted it to play differently than what we showed you in Episode 1 [of Season 3], because that was nonverbal, more visual storytelling, where Episode 2 is the opposite - it has heavy dialogue, one location, people coming and going.

We designed the episode to be shot in an efficient way. I believe we did it in maybe two days. Essentially there were three natural breaks in that episode. The first part was with Jeremy and Ayo [Edebiri, playing Sydney], and then people started to come into it. We're almost reacting to their play, their performance. Chris and I have a background in comedy specials and live performances, and we treated this episode as a live performance in a sense of, 'We're going to shoot this side first, and we're going to let everyone come and go, and we're going to go through the whole dialogue - we're not going to stop. After we do that, we're going to do the same thing one more time as tight as we can and chase dialogue. And then we're going to flip to the other side.' It was about creating those energetic handoffs and those moments that felt true to their tone and what was going on.

It goes back to the roots of Season 1, which is maximum flexibility with the camera, and that is possible with our dolly grips and the power of an 11:1 zoom. The episode is a great example of the power of that Panavision 11:1.

Episode 3, “Doors,” directed by Duccio Fabbri

Episode 3 goes back to using the H Series for almost everything. Our 1st AD Duccio Fabbri was our director on that episode, and he loves the Panavision lenses. He's always like, 'Give me that special 50.' We spent a lot of time on the 50mm, as we do for most of our show.

We did this episode in probably three or four days, but we were shooting inserts for it for a long time - we would constantly be shooting bits and pieces here and there. It's the power of running two cameras. B-camera operator Chris Dame is the contributor to the B-roll behind our show, and he has done an incredible job of taking on that responsibility. Duccio would be like, 'I need inserts of the dish pit,' and Chris would go in and grab it with the 11:1.

Early on, I had a conversation with Guy [McVicker, Director of Technical Marketing at Panavision Woodland Hills] and Dan. I asked, 'If I'm going to use Hs, how do I incorporate a zoom into that world?' They explained to me that the 11:1 [SLZ11P] would cover our format, give us the range and stop we needed, and match the color temperature of our Hs. They said, 'We'll pick the ones that best match the Hs, and we can customize from there to make it an even closer match.' And it's true. There still is a beautiful falloff, and it feels very cinematic. I remember Chris telling me at one point, 'Those zooms, man, I feel like I'm shooting on film.' If you look at the history of films that Chris and I love, you realize these lenses lived on every Tony Scott and Michael Mann movie, and that's why it makes sense.

Episode 4, “Violet,” directed by Christopher Storer

'Violet' is, I think, one of the prettiest episodes of the season. It feels like a nice mini film. The first half has some of my favorite stuff we did that season. There's a shot of Marcus sitting down in his mom's house, and the shadows are crossed into the wall. He stands up and goes out the door, and there's a beautiful blooming white flare when the door opens. There's another moment between Sugar and Pete [Abby Elliott and Chris Witaske, respectively], where they're in the window looking into the mirror, and there's great intimacy. The scene where Richie [Ebon Moss-Bachrach] meets his ex-wife's fiancé is just so sad. And at the end of the episode, there are some beautiful shots of Ebon and Jeremy in the kitchen at the island, which was the 11:1.

It's amazing how well all these scenes go together, because we shot most of it spread apart in actual shooting timelines. I think the reason they fit is because with every scene, we're doing what feels right in everyone's own moments. I think that's where you get a lot of that special beauty.

The thing that I get from Chris is that each season it’s important to not be doing the same thing, not to repeat the trick. It’s a weird thing because television’s all about consistency, but he finds consistency through storytelling and characters and allows each episode to live and breathe as its own little film. I think the best thing you can take away from The Bear is understanding that these are all their own mini movies. They have different music, different pacing, and the emotions are different, but they connect so well because of repeat locations, the tone and who the characters are.

Episode 5, “Children,” directed by Christopher Storer

You start off with Sugar in the church, and you have that beautiful light coming from behind her, which goes to her waking up and the silhouette in the kitchen and all the blue. It's like we're doing these vignettes of their inner lives.

When we go back to the restaurant and they're buffing the floor, I'm pretty sure that was impromptu. Chris was talking with Matty [Matheson, who plays Neil Fak] and Ricky [Staffieri, playing Theodore Fak] and said, 'You guys are going to go on the ground and do this.' And they're just so good. They love that moment. I think we shot it on an H 28 from pretty far back in the corner. There's not a lot of room for anything longer than that.

For the rest of the stuff in there, I think Gary was roaming and chasing on a 50, and Chris was on the 11:1. It was a tough scene because we had a lot of characters, a lot of movement, and the falloff of light from the front door. If they're standing by the front door or the front window, they're bright compared to just five feet away. You have a bit of practical lighting going on inside, but we try to do daylight in the front of the restaurant so it feels like the sun is lighting everybody. We shoot the [Alexa] Mini LF at 3200 ISO, so it's giving me two extra stops of highlight protection. Some of the highlights that might look like they're being lost on set, we can pull them back in color.

A great moment in this episode for the Hs would be when Richie's ironing. There's this beautiful light coming through, and the way it wraps around him and his head, you can see the quality of the lens, the bloom and flare. With these lenses, when pushing the camera higher into the ISO range, you get dancing highlights and dancing midtones. It does start to feel a bit more like film.

Episode 6, “Napkins,” directed by Ayo Edebiri

Ayo directed this episode, and she did an incredible job. The collaboration we had was fun. She wanted to move the camera a lot. She wanted to make something that felt special on her own. And you can see it. You can really see how this episode stands out. I love when Tina [Liza Colón-Zayas] goes into the restaurant for the first time and it immediately transports you back to Season 1. The way the zooms are flying in and the camera's flying around the place and everyone's screaming - that was so fun.

When Tina's talking to Mikey [Jon Bernthal], I think the lens on Mikey was an H 50. It's a medium shot with the city coming through the windows, and you can see the sunlight and the halation of it. We did passes with primes and with the 11:1 zooms for the Mikey-Tina conversation. They looked great, the way the sun was coming in and hitting them.

I've never seen anything like the way the H Series renders out-of-focus backgrounds. There's nothing about it that's distracting. Even though you have shallow depth of field, it never falls off and disappears, and you don't have that bokeh where it's distracting in the background. It feels painterly, or people call it 'creamy.' There's a sophistication and softness to the way the lens handles things that are not in focus. And it doesn't even matter what stop you're at. You can go to a deep stop and the background still stays magical.

That's what we love about it, because it doesn't distract you from the thing that you are focused on. It gives a show that has such a realistic approach an authentic, natural feel. When I talk about filmmaking, I often say you're transporting a viewer into this world. The fewer distractions that we give you, the more you're going to be absorbed.

Episode 7, “Legacy,” directed by Joanna Calo

Jeremy has always gotten the really close-focus lenses. There's something about being present with him, in his face, wider and tighter, whether that's a 50 or 40mm. He has these piercing blue eyes. When we did "Forks" in Season 2 with Ebon and we were giving Richie another point of view, Richie started getting a lot of it too. Right away in "Legacy," one minute in, you have this close-focus shot of Jeremy and his eye, and he turns to look past the camera. We match-cut that to Ebon doing the same thing in the dining room, on his ear, listening, and he turns to the camera and it's on his eye. It's a match frame, the first moment where these two are kind of equals. It tells you everything about these characters and what they're going through and the chaos around them. This is when the pressure really sets in that it's up to them to succeed.

We originally thought the show was going to be shot widescreen, 2:39, like the pilot. But we started realizing the pilot lived in its own world. The show was going to be its own thing. We shot tests before principal of Season 1, and we were pulling grabs of widescreen and 1:85. It started to feel timeless at 1:85. We felt 1.85 worked great.

Chris doesn't love hard-framed, off-centered stuff. He doesn't love a lot of headroom. So whenever there are singles, they're almost always center-cut or just a little to one side. It's also a bigger conversation that involves eye tracking. You as a viewer are being guided by editorial where to look. If you're cutting from here and then you're cutting to there, your eyes are doing a lot of work to reestablish where to look. We keep everything in the center, which feels easier for the viewer, more continuous and flowing, and less abrasive.

For the scene with the restaurant crew taking a smoke break, we shot it all on the 11:1. Traditionally you would do coverage over each shoulder to each person, so you're doubling your setups. We do the triangle in our show. You have an actor, a second actor, and a third actor, and we put a camera in the middle of each one. We will do them clean and shoot them straight down the middle so their eyes can go to each side. And if we do that for each part of the triangle, then everyone's covered correctly, and you have freedom. We do that a lot where we have this big circle of people.

When Sydney goes to the restaurant Doma, we wanted to feel that she was hiding. She didn't want to tell everyone that she's meeting another chef. We wanted it to feel voyeuristic, so we used the 11:1s here, two cameras, cross coverage. We were on their back patio, and we threw the cameras as far away as possible and lived at 300 to 400mm. You get the foreground, but it doesn't feel like it's obstructive. It feels like you're also there listening in and watching this conversation. It was the first time in a restaurant that we've gone to that we aren't highlighting the restaurant. I'm so used to being in their kitchens or their dining rooms that are decorated or designed. This is the first time that we actually felt like we also were hiding because of the scene. I remember Ayo being like, 'I didn't even know where the cameras were in there.'

Episode 8, “Ice Chips,” directed by Christopher Storer

Before Sugar gets to the hospital, there's an experience she's going through with her contractions that is hyper-intense, hyper-realistic. We wanted it to be direct sunlight, we wanted it to be harsh, we wanted it to be handheld. Everything we might do as filmmakers to make it look pretty, we got rid of it. From the parking lot to walking up and Donna [Jamie Lee Curtis] entering the frame, there's a barrage of overwhelming information for the senses. Then you see Sugar in the hospital room, and there's a level of peace.

Outside, we used the H 50 because it's shallow focus. I wouldn't normally do that shallow of a daytime exterior, but because of what was going on, we wanted it to feel more extreme. Gary could then go in and get those singles without having to change a lens.

Inside the hospital room, it’s a 22-minute scene, and we did it twice with three 11:1s, with no light. They basically performed a play from start to finish in that room. We had one going across to Jamie Lee, one going across to Abby, and one in the front of the bed to be able to do the two-shot. Chris said that we’re going to do two takes, maybe three. First take would be ‘safe,’ which in our show isn’t necessarily how you would describe ‘safe’ in other shows. It meant we’re not going to do any chasing. He was like, ‘You’re on Jamie, and don’t leave Jamie. You’re on Abby, don’t leave Abby.’ After that first take, Chris said, ‘Okay, that’s 100-percent airable; that’s our episode. Next take, you guys are free to do whatever you want.' That's where we really started to get some dynamic stuff, the shots that feel like The Bear, the big zoom-ins, the focus transitions to Abby, things like that. It was a tour de force from the actors, and all we had to do was capture it.

I've worked with really good focus pullers. Our A-camera 1st is Matt Rozek, and the B 1st is Sam Knapp. Matt has pulled focus on every episode, and Sam came in on Season 2. They know the lenses better than anybody. We're not wide open the whole time, but it certainly is a challenging show for focus. We're making the creative choices that are correct for each moment, and when you have focus pullers who embrace that and are this good, you're not worrying about it, which opens up a level of freedom.

Episode 9, “Apologies,” Christopher Storer

When Marcus [Lionel Boyce], Tina and Gary [Corey Hendrix] walk into the restaurant, the camera doesn't move. If this was Season 1, we would've tracked back with each person to get the energy of them entering, but this calmness is one of the things Chris wanted to implement this season. Due to the growth of the characters, the camera in Season 3 only moves when it needs to move. We told Lionel, 'This is it. They're going to come in, and they're going to leave, and this is your world.' You need these moments of calm, these moments of reflection, in order to get the high-intensity moments.

This follows up with a long conversation between Cicero [aka Uncle Jimmy, played by Oliver Platt] and Carmy. We shot the conversation with 135s for the close-ups and a 50mm to establish. I'll ask Chris, 'Are you going to want to move in, or do you want to live here?' For this, he wanted to live there. If he does that and doesn't need the flexibility, I'm putting a prime on.

I started my career with one lens, a 50mm, and through that I learned to move the camera. I learned to do close-ups with it. I learned to do establishing shots with it. It teaches you how to understand what a field of view does, and if you don't change a field of view, then the perspective of the film is going to stay consistent. Even before filmmaking, when I was doing fashion photography, I never shot with more than a 50. There's something about a 50mm lens on a full-format camera that's the closest representation of what we see with our own eyes, perspective-wise.

We had a rule in Season 1 that we never shot wider than a 50. The Season 1 look is so specific and consistent. We used either 11:1s tight or 50s. Season 2 is when I started showing Chris 35s. We were more exploratory, and then we started adding a couple 28s and 24s for very specific moments in Season 2, one or two times. Here comes Season 3, and now we're full range.

Episode 10, “Forever,” directed by Christopher Storer

At the beginning of the episode, when Carmy's with Thomas Keller at The French Laundry, that was 50mm. Gary was handheld, riding a butt-dolly so he could roll. The movement's beautiful. To brag about Gary, he's been with me forever, since eighth grade. He was nominated for an SOC [Society of Camera Operators] Award three years in a row for this show. He gets Steadicam operators who send him messages like, 'What's your rig?' And he's like, 'It's all handheld.' He's just that guy. We always talk about how you don't need all the fancy tools to tell a story. You don't always need to be on a Steadicam. You don't always need a crane. Put the camera on your shoulder and move it.

In the restaurant Ever, we wanted to shoot it like a comedy session that Chris and I have done in the past, with long lenses from far away, eavesdropping into everyone's world. When Carmy's sitting at the table and Sydney's sitting at the table, we're a table or two away, and we're shooting through people in confined moments. Then, for the conversation between Joel McHale [playing David Fields] and Jeremy, the stuff in the kitchen, the tableaus, we were back to primes to distinguish the difference between the spaces.

When Carmy goes outside, that's all H Series. There's a two-shot in silhouette in the loading garage where we're doing a super-slow push-in - that was an H 28, and then we used H 75s for our cross-coverage. We put up our own sodium-vapor light, so we got that gold look and the blue shadows. It's simple filmmaking. Once you get into coverage, all that matters for them to tell the story is their faces, so we matched H 75s at close focus, in studio setup, not handheld.

When Sydney steps outside, we used the H 50, close focus. The power of that lens in low-light situations is amazing. Being able to get in close with her felt right. It mimics when Carmy was in the fridge in Season 2, with the same 50mm close-focus lens following him.

Our hero lens for the second half of Season 2 and all of Season 3 was the H 50. It's a T1 with a 14-inch close focus and covers large format - it's a unicorn lens. We asked Dan [Sasaki] to give us a lens that gave us close focus for food and could go up to someone's face and then back down to the food. The 2-foot close focus [on the standard H Series 50mm] was just a hair not close enough. So that's when Dan sent us three or four 50mm lenses and asked that we tell him which one we liked best, and that's the one he used as our lens to make it work for our specs. For Dan and his team to take that time to understand what we were looking for, to be able to find a lens with that character within the inventory and fine-tune it, it makes for such an incredible collaboration. He's such a major part of the show.