How ‘I Love LA’ Director Lorene Scafaria Channeled Tarantino, David Lynch for HBO Series’ Tribute to Los Angeles

Note: This story contains spoilers from “I Love LA” Episode 7.

In the penultimate episode of Rachel Sennott’s “I Love LA,” Sennott’s Maia accidentally drops a knife on her foot while rushing to get to an important business meeting for her best friend and rising social media star, Tallulah (Odessa A’zion), prompting Maia and Tallulah to huddle into Tallulah’s girlfriend’s truck to get to a hospital.

As the trio rushes through Los Angeles traffic, the next scene opens with Maia’s bloody and bandaged foot on the dashboard as the “I Love LA” title card rolls in shot, emulating the shot of Margaret Qualley’s feet up on the dash in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood,” which director and EP Lorene Scafaria revealed wasn’t first intentionally captured.

“I remember our B camera operator, Brenda Zuniga, just put it on that frame — we weren’t even rolling. I was like, ‘roll, roll. This is incredible,'” Scafaria told. “I remember just saying, ‘oh my god, can you imagine if we were allowed to do a late title card?’ And I’m just so happy that stuck.”

Tarantino is just one of the prolific filmmakers who captured Los Angeles that Scafaria aimed to channel as she directed a trio of episodes, including the pilot and Episodes 6 and 7, also pointing to inspirations from David Lynch, who Scafaria said made our “eeriest LA movies,” as well as Paul Thomas Anderson and his love for Jonathan Demme and Sofia Coppola. “Everyone’s favorite filmmakers have made such great LA movies,” Scafaria said, adding that the city as also been highlighted in several series, including “Entourage,” which Sennott has cited as a reference point for the HBO comedy.

Scafaria pointed to Coppola’s “Somewhere” as “a gorgeous reference for natural lighting and just using real locations,” noting that she and Sennott discussed how special and specific the light in Los Angeles is, and how they hoped to emulate that both while shooting on location as well as shooting in a soundstage.

“Everyone who worked on the show was so excited about using as many real locations, and even when you couldn’t get the real location, you could refer to it,” Scafaria said, pointing to a mention to East Side staple Courage Bagels. “There were just so many fun discoveries along the way.” The director noted that while filming at the hotel used for Maia’s birthday party in the pilot, the team happened upon the split stairway that Scafaria used to reference Damien Chazelle’s “La La Land,” for Maia and Josh Hutcherson’s Dylan as they walked up opposing sides of the stairs.

As Scafaria helmed the pilot episode and set the scene for the LA shenanigans to come, filming brought the director all across the city, including Erewhon, which marked the first time any production had shot in the designer grocery store, as well-known locations from the East side to the beach.

“That was some of the most fun I ever had, just running in and out of a van on a on a day zero, and getting to shoot as much of the East side as possible, and, of course, getting out to the beach,” Scafaria said.

With “I Love LA” using Sennott’s tumultuous move from New York City to Los Angeles as the jumping off point for the half-hour comedy, Scafaria resonated the experience having made a similar move herself years ago. “Even though so much time has passed, and we’re obviously in a completely different generation than the one I’m in, I felt like I really recognize these people and and felt I was … endeared to them in some way,” she said.

When Scafaria first met with Sennott, whom she applauds for both her “fearless writing” as well as being “the most watchable person,” she brought up how Sennott’s generation — and the characters in “I Love LA” — are at the tail end of a 100 year cycle, explaining that boomers started the cycle and set the stage for an awakening for Gen X, an unraveling for millennials and a crisis for Gen Z.

“I was thinking of this codependent friend group clinging to each other in uncertain times, and it made me think of Depression Era dance marathons, which were the Jazz Age equivalent of ‘The Hunger Games,'” Scafaria said. “The sky is falling, so why not dance till you’re dead? … the future is uncertain, but life can be beautiful [with] love and friendship.”

Sennott resonated with the visual language Scafaria proposed, which included Madame Yevonde’s colorized photos from the 1920s and 1930s to bring a cinematic feel in spite of the modernness of the show, while leaning into the real-life feel of “letting people talk over each other” from Pedro Almodóvar, Hal Ashby and Robert Altman.

“I was really hoping to achieve something cinematic,” Scafaria said. “There were certain choices made for the pilot, like anamorphic lenses, that just gave us these like landscapes of faces … you see Rachel and Odessa — It’s like all the micro acting they’re doing — every flicker and nuance of it. And Adam Silver, our DP on the pilot, thought that the two-one aspect ratio would give it a little more of that filmic buy, which I love. We added some grain.”

With Scafaria serving as an executive producer for “I Love LA” in addition to a director, she shared her vision for the general approach to the show — “anchoring scenes in someone’s POV, allowing it to be messy sometimes, and leaning into the comedy” — with the other directors, but “never wanted to dictate anything more than that to them.”

As Scafaria returned to direct the penultimate episode of the first season, Maia’s knife wound set the tone for the episode: pain, with Scafaria joking, “diva down, obviously.” “I just wanted to feel that theme as much as possible in the way that we shot it just pain and just infuse it all from that knife drop to the end with that energy — just never stop and rest only, only when it seems like all is lost,” Scafaria said.

That pain intensifies when Maia and Dylan get into a fight at the end of the episode once Maia arrives home and realizes she missed dinner with Dylan’s parents, leading to Dylan to suggest the pair take a break while Maia heads to New York.

“I cried when we were filming that … I remember Rachel saying, ‘God, you know the blocking works when it makes you really feel things,'” Scafaria said, noting that compliment meant a lot coming from the creator, writer and star. “That’s just real collaboration … it was also so nice that she felt comfortable enough to really just lean into being Maia instead of just needing to concern herself with too much more than the crazy load of just having to act all day too.”

With “I Love LA” already renewed for a second season, Scafaria revealed she’s definitely staying on as an EP and would love to continue directing should her schedule allow it, as she gears up to write and direct a Sabrina Carpenter-led iteration of “Alice in Wonderland” as well as direct A24’s “Jonty” from a script written by Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain. While Scafaria deferred to Sennott for any teasers for Season 2, she would love to direct an episode centered around True Whitaker’s Alani.

“I Love LA” premieres Sundays at 10:30 p.m. ET/PT on HBO and HBO Max.

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