‘Succession’ Director/EP Mark Mylod Describes the Importance of Drama that Takes Place Off Camera

Awards Daily’s Megan McLachlan chats with Mark Mylod, director and executive producer on HBO’s Succession, about taking a crash course on American politics, the Robert Altman movie that serves as his biggest influence, and how and when Kendall decided to betray his father in the Season 2 finale.

Mark Mylod is no stranger to family drama. The British filmmaker has worked on a variety of TV projects dealing with tribal dynamics, including Entourage, Shameless, Game of Thrones, and now HBO’s Succession.

In Season 2 of the HBO series, the Roy family faces the mishandlings and repercussions of sexual harassment on their cruise lines, resulting in testifying before Congress. Someone needs to take the fall in order for the family to survive, and while Kendall draws the short straw in the season finale, every Roy family member sacrifices themselves in some way over the course of the second season.

I had a chance to chat with executive producer Mark Mylod, director of episodes like “DC” and “This is Not for Tears” (the season finale), about how he gets so much story out of everyone in the large cast, Shiv’s Godfather moment, and the importance of the drama they don’t show on screen.

Awards Daily: What has it been like to see this show completely blow up in the last year? It’s gone from critically acclaimed to full-blown phenomenon. 

Mark Mylod: It’s one of those lightning-in-a-bottle things that you just can never predict obviously. It’s not that I’m surprised. At the risk of sounding arrogant or something, I thought the writing was so extraordinary. Just sublime writing. And sublime performances. Those are wonderful ingredients. There was a sense that there’d been this space for that kind of show. As the amazing Game of Thrones came to its close, with its family and power dynamics on an extraordinary operatic scale, it seems there was a space to explore those themes through a different lens. The simple answer to your question, Megan, is that it’s fantastic—we go to work and it’s fantastic that people get to see that work, and it’s appreciated and enjoyed.

AD: You utilize a lot of different locations for this show. Does that come in the writing process or later? How do you decide where to go and why? 

MM: 95% of it is in the script. Early on, when we’re putting it together, and Jesse [Armstrong] and the writing team are starting to plot out the outlines. The actual locations are kind of a negotiation between all of our wish lists and the primary driving force, outside of where we can afford to go and logistics—whether it’s the right place for the characters. Every creative choice is driven by an obsession to try to be as authentic as possible, on almost every level. For a wedding in the UK, where would these characters go? If it’s a private yacht, where would they go and what kind of yacht would it be? It’s driven by what the characters do, and then we get as close to what our budget will allow.

So it’s like fantasy casting when you start a project, and there are fantasy locations. As soon as we finished last season, I said to Jesse, “Okay, let’s go to Tuscany next year.” (Laughs) I desperately tried to go to Morocco in Season 1. I was quite obsessed with them [Tom and Shiv] getting married in Morocco. So I did all this research into these extraordinary, beautiful palaces, and then one day, I was in a conversation with Jesse, and he said, “I really think it should be Wales.” Which was like saying “Instead of going to St. Bart’s, we’re going to go to New Jersey.” (Laughs) Of course, I protested, but his argument was that it was a place where that character [Shiv] would go. Authenticity won out, as it kind of always does.

AD: That makes perfect sense. I wanted to ask you about the “DC” episode, which you directed. It seemed to have a lot of layers. What was it like filming that episode?

MM: I had big holes in my knowledge in terms of staging the D.C. event, which wasn’t really possible budgetarily to do in D.C., which was my preference. We couldn’t afford to, so we went to Albany, because the state government buildings have a great similarity to some D.C. government buildings. Then we built the actual Senate hearing room. My approach was to try to overcome my ignorance by doing a crash course in American politics. We spent a couple of days down in D.C. and talked to incredibly helpful people in judicial committees, who gave up so much of their time taking us around. So this helped me feel like I had sufficient knowledge to tell the story, to be factually correct. The next thing is that we really just fell back on the characters and the storytelling instincts. In that instance, doing what I try to always do, which is to see the world through the eyes of that character and find humanity in them. They are wonderfully despicable characters and wonderfully entertaining because of that. But my job is not to try to augment that. Their actions speak for themselves. My job is to find the humanity and understand their actions.

Sarah’s [Snook] character, her arc in that episode, was particularly fascinating to me. Her character is more troubled by a moral compass than the other members of the family, and she finds herself being asked by her father to witness tamper. She makes a Michael Corleone-type of decision. She came to this crossroads; she can either walk away and stay true to herself in this moral sense or do what she needs to do for the survival of the family. Of course, she chose the latter. And that for me was a very important threshold for that character to cross. Again, I’m aware it’s grandiose to compare it to The Godfather, which is such an extraordinary achievement, but to me, that was a pivotal moment in that episode.

AD: I love that correlation. Also in the “DC” episode, we don’t see what happens to Roman during the Turkey kidnapping. But in the final episode, he’s definitely a changed person because of it. What do you think happened to Roman? And why did you choose not to show it?

MM: Episodes 9 and 10 are linked on some level. The decision not to show it was a question of where we end the story and where we pick it up again in Episode 10. We did shoot a scene where the character was released, but we decided not to do it because it didn’t advance the story. But the negotiation of how he got out of that, it would feel like we would then have to repeat it in Episode 10 when Roman is explaining the situation to his family. Even though thematically, one could say that seeing Roman negotiating for his life would on the surface be the more interesting thematic choice. From a time point of view, it was more interesting to see him evolve as a character and be able to actually be a realist and start to have a place at the table.

AD: Speaking of other things not known, when do you think Kendall decides he’s going to betray his father in the season finale? Do you think he knows when he boards the plane? We never see how or when, which is why the blind side is so effective. 

MM: That’s a great question. The absolute honest answer is that we don’t really know. When we were shooting, there were two specific triggers. When he’s talking with his father on the boat, he talks about sacrificing himself, and his father responds to him, “There’s no real person involved” [pertaining to the waiter’s death in the Season 1 finale] and he says, “You were never really a killer.” I don’t believe that in that moment he was like, “I’ll show you.” At one point in the script, there was a phone call with Naomi, which could have been part of the trigger, but ultimately we felt that would have been too superficial or simplistic. There’s that moment with cousin Greg on the jet that maybe stayed with Jeremy’s character. There were a lot of things falling into place. We certainly tried to avoid a specific public moment for two reasons. One, out of authenticity. When one comes to such a momentous decision, it’s not always a monumental switch. And of course, the other thing is we didn’t want to tip the audience off. We have an incredibly smart audience and just the slightest wink is going to really show our hand far too clearly.

AD: The show has such an incredible, relatively large cast, but you never shortchange anyone. And I think it’s often through the way it’s filmed and the reactions, the way the family plays off of each other. Is that something you’re very cognizant of? And how do you get the right reactions at the right time? 

MM: I think that’s literally my favorite question I’ve ever been asked. It’s the one conscious move I make. On one hand, what I do is completely copy Robert Altman. (Laughs) If you watch Gosford Park, which is a huge influence for me, Altman was a master at those, and his way of shooting with Gosford Park was not telling the actors where the camera was. Of course, these were seasoned actors, so they could smell the lens from a mile away, but there would never be a sense of “we’re going to go wide and then go south.” Everybody has to act all the time. And his direction between takes would be along the lines of, “Great take, except for one of you. Let’s go again.” So everybody was just forced to be on their toes, like it was theater the whole time. That almost captures live theater. That became the way to do it really. And what is on the page is brilliant writing, but a good percentage of what ends up on screen is reactions, which are so informative. The characters are listening and plotting, which are as important as the spoken word.

[When it comes to Succession] The actors really just understood that they needed to be on the whole time. And the quid pro quo from that, is that I’m watching, watching, watching. I’m trying to capture genuine spontaneity of a fleeting moment. The actors would watch the cuts on the first season and see that those efforts weren’t wasted. We were looking out for it. We’re trying to capture all of that gorgeous performance. Even an actor that doesn’t have many lines, they hopefully know they can walk away with that scene sometimes. It’s play time for everybody. I get excited talking about it because it’s an extremely adrenalized, wonderfully spontaneous, fun way to work.

AD: In the episode “Return,” which you were EP on, we learn a bit more about the dynamic between Kendall, Shiv, and Roman and their mother. I have a theory that their stepmother Marcia Roy has an interesting backstory that we haven’t gotten to yet. Will we see some of that in the future? She has a really interesting dynamic with Logan.

MM: Me, too. We’ve hinted at that early on, right back in the pilot episode. As Season 2 progressed, that distance developing between Marcia and Logan, and we didn’t really find the way to explore it then. But I’m hoping at some point that we’ll see more of Marcia in the future.

AD: Finally, I think one of the most iconic images of the season is that look Brian Cox gives the camera in the final scene of the finale. Did you give any kind of direction to Brian Cox on how to look at the camera? And if so, what was it?

MM: In this instance, I did not give any direction. What was in the script was more than clear enough. He actually nailed it on the first take.

Succession Season 1 and 2 are streaming on HBOGo.