“The first thing you have to do is take ‘not annoying people’ out of the equation.” This is how UK director Mark Mylod and the Succession team approached the beginning of the end of their HBO show, a critical and audience hit that has won numerous awards including 13 Primetime Emmys and five Golden Globes to date. “As soon as you start chasing populism, then you’re fucked. You have to try to let go of that.”
Season four sees the Roy family rocked by the death of its patriarch Logan (Brian Cox), before three of his children — Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Shiv (Sarah Snook) and Roman (Kieran Culkin) — fight with and against each other for control of the company Logan has left behind, under threat of takeover from tech entrepreneur Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgard).
Mylod, who is also an executive producer on the show, helmed among others the final two of season four’s 10 episodes: ‘Church And State’ and ‘With Open Eyes’. Instead of creating a narrative finish line, the goal was “emotional honesty”.
“If we stay true to where those characters are at the end of episode nine and where we want them to be at the end of episode ten, it’s not working backwards from an endpoint, it’s exploring the destiny of what would really happen,” says Mylod. “It’s like an Aesop’s fable — if you stick to truth, you can’t go wrong. Even if people don’t like it, they can’t argue with its emotional honesty.
“There’s a disproportionate weight put on the finale episode of any show,” adds the director. “I’ve seen shows be brilliant with their last episodes; I’ve seen others be criticised. I was proud of the episode, but it’s an intimate episode. I was very nervous. To see a good response was a massive relief.”
With four in each season, Mylod has directed 16 of the show’s 39 episodes — almost three times the total of any other director. “There were so many key episodes in this season — I was greedy as ever to do them all,” he jokes. A back-to-back shooting schedule made more than four a season impossible, with “a bunch of brilliant other directors who do just as good a job if not better” taking on the remaining six.
Fulfilling promises
Continuing the tradition of him helming the first and final two episodes of each season, that left only one other slot for Mylod to take. Although he was “very keen” to do Norway-set episode five ‘Kill List’, there was only one real choice. Episode three, ‘Connor’s Wedding’, sees the death of Logan Roy — a choice Mylod describes as “taking the Death Star out of Star Wars”.
“We knew it was necessary to change the paradigm of the show from kids versus dad. We had to change that axis and fulfil the promise of the title. But that didn’t make us any less nervous of doing it.”
To protect the sanctity of the storyline, the production issued non-disclosure agreements for everybody on set for both that episode, and future episodes including Logan’s funeral in ‘Church And State’. That meant “multiple hundreds” of people, to whom Mylod and the HBO security team made speeches before filming asking for their secrecy. Mylod remains “massively grateful” that all followed his wishes. “It would’ve been so easy to stick something on Reddit anonymously, but nobody did. It would’ve been such a damn spoiler.”
The revelation of their father’s death plays out gradually to the siblings while they are aboard an enormous yacht, celebrating the wedding of their half-sibling Connor. It includes a 28-page scene that was shot in a single 30-minute take — although Mylod still is not sure if that was his idea. “There’s a bit of a Rashomon effect going on there,” he laughs. “I swear I remember a conversation with Kieran when I met him for a drink in Williamsburg in Brooklyn, where he said maybe we can have a go at it. That was quite a time before we shot it. But he swears it was my idea. At some point, I’ll just shut up and take the credit.”
Mylod balanced the schedule to allow “a couple of hours” at the end to try and run the one-shot version. Alongside Patrick Capone, cinematographer on 21 episodes, he started troubleshooting the practicalities for a show shot on film, including leaving camera rolls at strategic locations around the boat so it could be changed while the characters were close by.
“It involved a more extreme version of this ballet that we constantly have with the cast,” Mylod recalls. “They are accepting of that. They can tune out of this dance, of Pete [Deutscher] the boom operator and our camera operators, even though they’re right in their faces. On an indulgent level, I wish we could’ve had another camera in the corner to shoot the shooting of the scene.”
On their “limited time on the boat”, the production had already captured the 28 pages through separate takes. The one-shot was therefore “certainly in freebie territory”, according to its director. “We had already shot and honoured the scripts, so by that stage the actors can go where they want to,” says Mylod. “The spontaneity and the nuance of the performances was never the same twice, and certainly not in that oner.” He admits there was still “not an awful lot of improvisation”, due to the “extraordinary” writing. “There’s such a truth to it, that the imperative to explore another flavour was not as strong as it sometimes is. The writing was so channelled and specific. We felt secure and truthful in that zone.”
In addition to praise for Strong, Snook and Culkin, Mylod is keen to credit Alan Ruck’s performance as Connor who, after a lifetime of ostracisation, has his own wedding interrupted by his father’s death. “His reaction is one of my favourite moments ever in Succession,” says Mylod. “I didn’t give him a pre-chat — we just walked in to discover that character. I made sure I had the camera right in the actor’s face to harvest that first raw reaction. I remember him opening his mouth, and that extraordinary frankness and clarity — it was like being punched in the face. I felt my solar plexus contract with it. It was so difficult not to cry.”
Making sure the seven episodes after Logan’s death did not feel like ‘after the lord mayor’s show’ was “the thing that all of us, Jesse [Armstrong, series creator] and I specifically, were most scared of”, says Mylod. The season four timescale, with the 10 episodes occurring across “10 to 12 days”, helped in that regard. As well as “the funniest wake I’ve ever seen on television”, they wanted to “pile pressure and a ticking clock onto those characters. Process the grief of your father but also save your company and renegotiate the power dynamic between the siblings. Oh, and there happens to be a presidential election in the middle of it. To pile all those elements into the mixer made for such a heady, thick brew that allowed us to stay vibrant and not get too solipsistic.”
With the show finished, Mylod is taking a break to “reintroduce myself to my family”. Having directed 2022’s The Menu, another feature idea is moving along. But “to go charging into future projects” would be “inappropriate” in the context of the writers strike. “I stand in solidarity with my writer colleagues,” says the director. He hopes to reunite soon with Armstrong, who he calls “a generational talent. I don’t have words to explore my admiration and affection for him.”
In a post-finale HBO featurette, Armstrong discussed what this period in their lives will mean for the Succession characters. For Mylod, the decade he has worked on the show has been “life-changing”. “I made quite a bad film back in 2011, swore I would be bolder with my choices, and use that as a springboard to seek out work that scared the living daylights out of me,” he says. “I never want to put myself in a box. I’ve had this extraordinary decade of work that I’ve found so challenging and by extension rewarding that I’m just hungry for more.”
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