Interview: Mark Mylod Discusses Crafting “Connor’s Wedding” and the Legacy of ‘Succession’
HBO has given us dramas that will last through the years: The Sopranos. Six Feet Under. Game of Thrones. And now that it has ended, Succession. A series that kept the internet entangled in memes and deep dives into character motivations and their wardrobe choices, Succession is a drama that feels slow, but anyone that’s been tuned in from the beginning could easily give you a full analysis on any micro moment at the drop of a hat. While the writing and performances of the series have been exquisite, the directing is the unsung hero that holds the entire series together.
The direction of this series is specific: when to employ snap zooms, how to block certain scenes that feel Shakespearean in nature, when to give characters room to breathe and when to close in on them. The series has boasted a number of talented directors, but at the forefront is Mark Mylod. Mylod, whose feature film The Menu came out last year, directed 16 episodes of Succession across the series, including all four season finales. He directed four episodes of the final season including the finale, “Connor’s Wedding,” the premiere of the season and the penultimate that featured the Roys gathered to mourn the death of Logan. On top of this, he served as executive producer of the series for its entirety.
I spoke to Mylod about his time working on the series, choreographing different parts of “Connor’s Wedding,” the three eulogies delivered at Logan’s funeral, and how he hopes Succession is remembered.
Tyler Doster: Having directed 16 episodes of the show, did you always know it would end like this?
Mark Mylod: In terms of the siblings, in terms of the tragedy of their lives, yes. That I did know. The specifics of who would win, if you like, “win” very much inverted commas, that it would be Tom, I deliberately kind of stuck my hands over my ears for a while on that for reasons I always thought were directorial in that I didn’t want to unconsciously foreshadow anything. But I think actually, looking back on it, that’s more an excuse to kind of somehow delay the end of the show in my own head unconsciously, I think.
TD: Starting with episode three of Season 4, “Connor’s Wedding,” what were conversations and rehearsals like with both Patrick Capone, the DP, and the cast for choreographing the blocking and the dialogue of the episode?
MM: There’s a process that Pat Capone and I have honed over our years of working together, which of course starts with the script. But even before we got the script, we’ll get a kind of breakdown from Jesse as the script in his head is falling into place and we’ll basically identify zones. And so that’s the first thing, having found the boat and having decided that it would be great if we could situate it there on the South Street Seaport so that we got the whole expanse of Brooklyn Bridge to one side, New York Harbor the other way. Having worked out that that was our location, we’ll then find main zones. What’s the zone where they will get that call? What’s the zone where we can go and find Shiv? What’s the secondary zone where we can go with Connor? So we’ll try to identify and create a kind of logical gap with the right kind of distances so that we can keep playing that as fluidly as possible.
So we try to do the usual process of trying to marry creative interest and good light with the internal logic of the script. So it starts with mechanics, I suppose, and as the script evolves, then it becomes more of an emotional response once we’ve kind of got the technical foundations of, “Okay, we’re going to need to somehow get the camera up or downstairs here. We’re going to need to move through a bunch of extras here, and what time of day should we be doing this?” Once we get past, then it frees us up to be kind of more emotional, our responses. So it’s a graduated ongoing chat, really. And as we get closer to production, the actual idea of running that whole intense section from when the siblings first walk into that VIP room and Shiv is declining to take the call from Tom, from that moment up to the four siblings going up to the top deck cabin, the idea to run that as one unbroken take, that evolved gradually and became more concrete as… not a frustration but a sense of incompleteness that was growing in me as we…
We shoot on film, on 35mm, so even with a thousand-foot reel, we can only shoot 10-minute increments before we have to reload the cameras. So we were shooting big chunks, using a full kind of 10-minute take, and over a couple of days on the boat we’d worked through that whole section. But I really wanted to give the cast the benefit of just total immersion in the whole sequence. So it was only really then that Patrick and I started talking in earnest about how we could get over these kinds of three, four levels of the boat with 3D cameras, hiding magazines around, and try to run that complete.
And so we did, we gave the actors a couple of hours break. I knew I had to be finished shooting on the boat at the end of that day, so I tried to time it so we’d have time for that. And Patrick worked with the operators and the loaders, and we hid magazines and hid camera bodies and worked out certain cues at certain points according to the timings of when we would need to release a camera to get ahead or below to a different deck to receive a character or chase a character. And we just worked it through, worked the problem and worked the problem and there were a couple of real doozies. And then we went for it and it was one of the most thrilling, I think, half hours of my professional life to watch the absolute total immersion of the characters. And unsurprisingly, a massive proportion of that made it into the final cut.
TD: Do you think that immersion created an intimacy for the characters?
MM: Yeah, exactly. I think that’s the perfect word. I’ve worked with that cast since 2017. We know each other and there’s a mutual trust that’s built up. And as we’ve evolved and found the show and the specific tone of the show together, it has become very apparent that they, in almost every case, will benefit… The longer I can run a scene, the better. I can’t think of any major longer scene throughout the series, including those big Newmont scenes at the end of Season 3 in Italy. Or the “who’s going to be thrown overboard” on the ship in Croatia. Any of those big kinds of 11, 12-page scenes, I’ve always run those as a continuous take unless of course we just run out of film.
So yeah, it allows them to disappear into the character. There’s something that happens where you’re just not pushing on the same level. And that’s not to say that the other takes that we did, while more piecemeal, were not excellent. They really were. They’re brilliant, brilliant actors, as you know. But there was something about just being able to really live in it like that, which it just gave us an extra edge, I think.
TD: While we’re talking about this intimacy, one of the most searing moments of the season is in Connor’s wedding, when Roman tries to be vulnerable with Gerri after finding out and she rebuffs him, deservedly. How did you prepare with the two of them to get that moment exactly right in the middle of this chaos in that episode?
MM: I’d love to take loads of credit for that, but the truth is I just know those two actors [Kieran Culkin and J. Smith Cameron so well and they know each other so well, even predating working together on Succession. They’re so brilliant together, they know each other so well and they’re such great actors that we didn’t need to do that, “Let’s have a chat with the director, talk about what direction their scene is going to go in.” We’ll talk through all the normal stuff of… But no tonal adjustment was needed. They both found that and hit it immediately. They inhabit their characters so deeply by this stage that they just know where to be with it. So directorially, even though I would love to toot my own horn, I’m working in tandem with them. I’m not necessarily guiding them in terms of “let’s walk into this room and walk out of this room.”
And we’re talking. We’re refining it between takes and refining it in that way that we always do because we never do the same take twice. There’s always an exploration in each take, particularly those longer chunks, they take on a life of their own and therefore have a slightly different nuance, and it’s always surprising and enthralling to me how they can take on such a different element. Something can come to the fore, some emotion can suddenly come out spontaneously that takes you in a different direction, which is always just brilliant to explore. And we set that up. And I suppose from my point of view, that’s the point of my directing, to set the stage, to set the room up in a way that everybody feels empowered to do that, to freely explore the moment, but not in a way where I will say, “Be more sad.” We’re just kind of beyond that as a team. And I hope that doesn’t sound complacent. It’s quite the opposite. It’s just trying to set up the stage in a way that we can explore it with the utmost intensity.
TD: When preparing for the eulogies in the penultimate episode of the series, did you have a specific approach to give, like you just said, the space to those characters to air out their thoughts and feelings about everything that we’ve seen so far without it feeling too melodramatic?
MM: Yes, very much so. Melodrama is the arch-enemy that… I can’t speak for [creator] Jesse [Armstrong] directly, but it’s always a watch-word. It’s always a “beware the bear trap” of melodrama or over-pushing the moment. And when you’re eulogizing about your dead dad, there is a huge danger of that. And any worries I had about that, I think, were really pretty swiftly put away, just watching the first take. My directorial approach to that whole sequence was a combination of high and low brow, I suppose. Artistically I wanted to continue what I thought had worked so well for the actors in episode three, and that was to run a very, very long take. And that was also born out of the more kind of base present needing to be out of the church within two and a half days. I loved the location, and they were so lovely to us, but they could only spare us a certain number… I think maybe two and a half, maybe three days for a huge, huge… But the majority of the episode is there.
And that led me to think, “Okay, we’re going to run it like it’s a live event, like it’s a live funeral mass,” from the moment the hearse drives up and the casket is brought out to the moment the casket is taken out of the church and put back into the hearse, we’re going to run that as one 30, 40-minute chunk. And we’re going to use the same sequence, the same system that we worked out on the boat. Luckily it was all one big room this time, so there wasn’t the same kind of logistical element of going up and down levels.
There was the big just craft element of keeping four cameras out of one another’s shots, which was tricky. But again, as with our usual ethos and creed is that the cameras all start getting in there tight on the performances and getting that raw first-take emotion, which the cast are brilliant at. I mean, Kieran on his first take, Jamie on his first take, James Cromwell on his first take, they almost all… Almost everything that’s in our final cut comes from their first takes. Yeah, you walk them into that church and have that orchestra playing with the Vivaldi and they just drop into the zone. And they’re in that zone until I call “cut” half an hour later.
TD: Before the episode and before filming this specific episode, episode nine, did you have conversations with Jesse and with these characters in conjunction on the different levels of grief these characters are experiencing, and the different types?
MM: We’ll talk about specific nuances, but more on a practical level. Neither Jesse nor I want to kind of lead the witness. The writing is very specific and paints a beautifully kind of graphic picture in one’s head. So you’ve got that to start with. But neither of us want to cut off the possibility of these kinds of beautiful accidents that happen in the show by setting up this very loose structure or pseudo-loose structure. It appears loose. There’s all sorts of smoke and mirror tricks that Patrick and I do, and particularly to try to unconsciously influence movement, particularly in terms of blocking so that we can keep up hopefully quite high production values while still having a 360-degree set to play with. And to give the actors complete freedom of movement, but also to unconsciously make choices that we know that they, following the truth of the character, will follow. So it’s kind of, the staging is by stealth.
In terms of finding the tone of it, on the first take, we almost always let that go with the actors’ instincts. Firstly, as I said, to allow for them to surprise us, amaze us with something that hadn’t occurred to us, which they almost always do. And secondly, because there are tonal adjustments and things to explore on subsequent takes, which there always are because the text is so rich that of course you want to explore the nuances of it, that we can do that on the second take and the third take and not prejudge it. And the actors are so incredibly well prepped and intensely prepped that it would almost be insulting at this stage to start giving them “cry here” type notes.
TD: You’ve directed so many episodes [across the series]. Is there any one improvisation or anything an actor brought to Succession that still stands out in your mind, including from this final season?
MM: I can’t think of a specific improvisation moment apart from some very funny comedic moments. There are moments where we’ve just got so lost in the take. And that episode three, that half-hour take, just how lost we all were in that moment. And then there’s another kind of part of me that has to be apart from that and is talking to the cameras throughout it. And so it’s a really lovely, beautiful state to be in. And the same in the funeral, where I’m so lost in the emotion at the moment, but there’s another part of me, which goes back to my live television and comedy days, multi-camera days, which at the same time there’s a part of me that’s going, “Camera three go to Mencken, camera four move over.” So I’m treating it like a live event that I’m covering with multi-cameras, but that’s almost happening unconsciously because another part of me is just so immersed in the performances. And that’s so incredibly compelling to watch those actors.
In the finale of this, of the series, when we were just so at it in the glass box with the three siblings and the intensity of the fight, spitting mad, and just a level of immersion there and everything that I hoped it would be because there’s so much pressure, much of it put on ourselves, that disproportionate pressure of a series finale to make sure that that somehow did justice to what we tried to do over four seasons… But there was a moment when Jeremy walked out, and I can’t remember if I called or if he just walked in there, I can’t remember quite how it happened, but we basically walked back into the main boardroom completely unscripted, and that moment just out of the moment walked in there and Peter took up his cues brilliantly. Everybody stayed with it. And for that final moment of Kendall just trying desperately to salvage something from the meeting and Peter just saying, “You don’t have it, we sold to GoJo.” And that moment felt so powerful and so right, and then we followed the character off to the elevator, which was scripted. That was just a beautiful…
It really encompassed the whole reason why we work the way we do, so that those things can happen and we can capture them. There was another one down at the water with this extraordinarily intense 10-minute take we did with Jeremy where initially, partly because it was so damn cold, we were finding it frustrating trying to get the tone and the immersion of that last scene, to try and get a feeling out of it. And it just felt like we were just freezing and getting nothing else. And then when we moved right down to the water’s edge, and then just something came alive for Jeremy and for others with dancing around, with doing that ballet that we do with Peter on the boom and Gregor and Ethan on camera, and just found something that just fell. We dropped into a place of such empty tragedy and that felt amazing. And when you get into that zone… And you never quite know when it’s going to happen and if it’s going to happen, but when it does, then it feels really magical and I feel like the luckiest person in the world.
TD: Speaking of the finale, it turned out to be a whopping 90 minutes but still ended up breezing by. Did you have a specific structure to keep it tight with the same levels of Succession that we’ve always seen, but also really bring it to the audience in that last hour and a half?
MM: Yeah, the first cut of it was over two hours. And it was to the point where at one point… I mean, I loved it so much, the two-hour cut, that Jesse and I started talking about, “Do we run 11 episodes? Is this two one-hour episodes?” And that was a very real possibility in our heads to explore. We never took that idea to HBO or anything. We just kept working in the edit. And gradually through the process of, “Okay, is it two great one-hours or is it one incredibly intense 90 minutes?” That obviously won out. I was never worried about it being too long. I suppose the only concern I had about the duration of the finale was not the pacing or the content, which felt… Again, I hope it doesn’t sound glib or anything, or self-satisfied, but I did love it. I felt that we’d done justice to the beautiful writing and to the series, with that finale. But I was worried about experiences I’ve had of watching longer episodes of when an audience…
When I’m conditioned to watching a one-hour episode, there’s sometimes when you creep past the one hour 10 minutes, one hour 15 minutes, unconsciously, and despite how excellent the content may be and how excellent the pacing may be, there’s something in your brain, a Pavlovian thing that’s going, “Hang on, isn’t it time to be getting a cup of tea?” Or whatever. So I was worried about our kind of conditioning of watching one-hour episodes, if that might undermine the intensity of the last half hour on some level. I don’t think that happened, from friends and people’s reactions to it, but I suppose that was a small concern. Mostly I just found every scene felt good as we shot them, working the problems when we didn’t feel it was happening and getting it to the point… By the time we walked away from just about every scene, I felt, and I think Jesse would say the same, we both felt between us that we had it, that that scene at least was as good as we could get it. And then the rest is about obviously trying to get the flow in the edit.
TD: In the finale, was it in the script for Kieran to lick the cheese that intensely, was that your direction or was that of Kieran’s own volition to lick it like that?
MM: The intensity of it was entirely Kieran’s choice for that particular take. We had a load of takes. I mean, the “meal fit for a king” scene was such a lovely evening. We normally shoot any episode and particularly an episode of that intensity as chronologically as possible. In this instance, there was no way we could afford it, or time-wise, to go to Barbados and then come back. We had to shoot Barbados at the end. And I made sure that we scheduled the “meal fit for a king” scene as the very last scene that we’d shoot on Succession with that lovely indulgence that we, the Succession team, would have this illusion of a happy ending. Because I think the scene is delightful and it’s probably the most intimate and closest and most fun we’ve seen the siblings ever have together. Certainly going back to the boathouse at the end of season one, back at Shiv’s wedding, was the last time I can remember being that really loose around each other.
We did maybe 8, 10 takes of that sequence from start to finish. By the end of it, the room stank like you would not believe. Every time I called “cut” Jeremy would be leaning over and retching into the sink because Jeremy being Jeremy, he could not stop himself from drinking that God-awful concoction, including Sarah Snook’s spit. The cheese itself that I just can’t stop eating, Peter’s cheese, was totally scripted by Jesse. But the almost pornographic kind of licking of it was really Roman’s… Was Kieran’s particular interpretation of it. And that particular take is the one that made us laugh the most, frankly.
TD: What do you hope is the legacy of Succession?
MM: There’s so much to unpack there, it’s almost impossible to… Okay, so just on a character level, I would love on some level for the legacy to be what my legacy is, which is to continually, having spent so many years with all this team, to still wonder how the hell can I care so much about such despicable humans? And I love that paradox.
Mark Mylod is Emmy-eligible in the category of Directing for a Drama Series for the episode “Connor’s Wedding” of Succession.
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