Making A Scene
Succession director Mark Mylod and cinematographer Patrick Capone break down the Roy family boardroom brawl.
By Chris Murphy
It was the boardroom scene to end all boardroom scenes. In the series finale of HBO’s Succession, Roman (Kieran Culkin), Shiv (Sarah Snook), and Kendall (Jeremy Strong) chew each other to pieces in a literal knock-down, drag-out fight which spells the end of the Roy family empire as well as the Roy siblings.
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“The whole structure of the series is the cruelty of hope, isn’t it?” says frequent Succession director Mark Mylod, who helmed the finale and three other episodes this season. “When I’m reading it, even though I know where it’s going, I’m still thinking, Oh, actually, they could be happy. There is a life where they can escape the gravitational pull of Waystar and actually live free and independent lives and have healthy relationships. Of course, all of which is totally futile.”
To capture this futility, Mylod and Succession cinematographer Patrick Capone leaned into the voyeurism of the Roy siblings’ final showdown, captured through the glass walls of a boardroom. After Shiv hurriedly exits the boardroom with the final vote for control of Waystar Royco still hanging in the balance, the three siblings convene to hash out whether she should vote for Kendall to take over as CEO or sell the company to Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgård). Their conversation quickly devolves into a wrestling match between Roman and “eldest boy” Kendall, as Shiv ultimately decides to sell the company to Matsson rather than let Kendall take over as CEO.
“We wanted to use the reflections and the glass bowl within the glass bowl within the glass building,” says Capone. The result is the Roy children on full display, putting on a show of their worst qualities and deepest insecurities in front of both board members and their employees. “With camera placement and the actors blocking, we were able to make their fight kind of on a little bit of a stage where the board members can see it and yet they can’t hear it,” continues Capone. “Only we can hear it until it really gets vocal toward the end.”
“It was probably the most important scene of the entire series,” says Mylod. “It’s hard [for the actors] to wake up in the morning and think, This is what we’re going to explore today. There’s a dread that goes with that and a fear, but also, coming home from work after those days, a sense of almost elation when one has a feeling that we’ve captured the essence and the intention of the writing and the intensity of it and done it justice, hopefully.”
Both Mylod and Capone tried not to get in the way of the action that unspools, letting it unfold as naturally as possible. “That’s the beauty of our style,” says Capone, “It's just so subjective and the camera has the ability to really point the audience where we feel they should go to get what’s being told, like a fly on the wall.”
THE SCRIPT
Mylod reacted with “wonder and awe” when he finally received the script for the series finale which lays waste to the Roy siblings. “The actual final scripts come in very late and then there’s a number of drafts that come in,” Mylod says. “So it’s not like, bam, there’s your script and go.”
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Mylod already had an idea of the shape of the episode before the final table read, which was done in person and, according to Mylod, “absolutely heartbreaking.” “The atmosphere in the room was thick,” Mylod said. “I've never seen [creator] Jesse [Armstrong] so emotional, just trying to hold it together. It was a really lovely but also very emotional time.”
As for the ending Armstrong plotted out for the Roy family, Mylod was struck by how devastating it was. “There’s a level of sadism in the writing and staging, isn’t there? To make it as painful for those characters and totally humiliating as we possibly can.”
THE LOCATION
To properly capture the end of an American dynasty, it was important to find a location appropriately devastating and stately. “We found these two offices. The main boardroom, and we found this other office that I had never shot in,” says Capone. “It’s one of the World Trade Center buildings. I want to say it’s number seven. And it’s about 35 floors up.”
The location, several stories high, in the heart of Manhattan’s financial district, dictated the order in which the scenes in the finale were shot. “We knew that the one big boardroom where Roman would sign the company away would look great later in the day overlooking the harbor,” says Capone. “So the [assistant directors] and Mark and I kind of scheduled that to try and make that the last thing we did up there before we left the building.”
THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT
The floor-to-ceiling glass windows in the boardroom created a “greenhouse effect,” says Mylod, and amplified the tension in the scene. “The greenhouse effect was on some level symbolic, obviously, of the characters being trapped,” says Mylod.
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Capone says they always imagined the “voyeuristic idea of a fishbowl” for the scene, homing in on how the glass allowed him to play with reflections of the characters.
To create that fishbowl effect, Capone had to change some of the overhead lighting in both the boardroom and the adjacent room where the siblings fight, filling the overhead with Astera lights. “When you show up at these buildings, you have no idea what kind of day it’s going to be,” Capone said. “It could be a very warm, sunny day, it could be a very cool, cloudy day. So that was important to us and to be able to use as much negative fill as we could.”
The result enables the cameras to be able to move around and follow people down the hallways and shoot through the layers of glass. “There’s times when you have dancing shadows and silhouettes within the glass in front of these people, which I love,” says Capone.
PRIVATE IN PUBLIC
The Roy siblings were not alone when their screaming match about who should control Waystar Royco devolved into a literal brawl. Dozens of extras were scattered about the office floor, watching the Roy children tear each other to pieces in their semi-private chamber. Mylod wanted the “denouement really to be as humiliating and public for those poor characters as possible,” hence the extras peering in through the glass windows.
“It’s a big event and all of these board members have aides and lawyers and all of that,” says Capone. “We wanted to make it seem as true to a real company takeover as we could. So there were tons of extras. We tried to obviously keep them out of the room, but always have a sense of them, again, eavesdropping.”
By the end of the scene, striving Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen) has emerged victorious as the American CEO of Waystar Royco, officially acquired by Lukas Matsson’s GoJo. “You want to be able to see the reactions of all these people and the emotions of Tom and Greg,” Capone says. “It doesn't work if the room is void. As a result, we always tried to shoot through them or had a sense of them in the background.”
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“Some of my favorite shots are very low depth of field, and the figures in the background through the glass are almost ET-like,” Capone continues. “They're very, very thin slivers of line out of focus, and with the light from outside just wrapping around them. And I love stuff like that. It gives it a lot of depth.”
THE BIG FIGHT
For the larger boardroom scene,Capone says they used three cameras. However, when they reached the sibling showdown in the smaller conference room, they decided to pare down to just two cameras. “With reflections and everything else, we were just getting in each other's way,” says Capone of the decision to use fewer cameras for the Roy fight scene. “Sometimes it really helps to have three cameras, and sometimes the third camera takes some of the physical space away from the main two cameras that they can't make the kind of moves that we normally make sliding across or on a butt dolly.”
The space was needed given how physical Jeremy Strong and Kieran Culkin got with each other in that smaller conference room, ending the scene in a somewhat-impromptu brawl. “That escalated as the takes went along,” Capone said. “When they wrestled themselves to the ground maybe it was only the last two takes.”
“Each take, which we run from the beginning to the end, has different choices camera-wise, and certainly acting-wise,” Capone continues. “We don’t know what’s going to happen. We have the pages, we know the words, but when [Kendall] grabs Roman’s neck, I mean, that didn’t happen every take. It just all escalated. And then as you see it, the camera operators quickly adjust to it. And the next take, we’re in a better position for it.”
Normally, Mylod would stage a scene “through stealth” but with Sarah Snook “heavily pregnant” at the time, he had to be more deliberate about staging the action of the scene. “There was obviously the concern that she was physically safe,” said Mylod. “So unusually for us, we did talk about parameters and safety parameters, which of course everybody embraced to make sure that Sarah was safe.”
Beyond that, though, Mylod and Capone refrained from giving the actors or camera operators too much direction.
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“We kind of like mistakes,” says Capone. “If we're a little late on a focus, or if we're a little late coming to a reaction, we think it adds more to the reality of the show.”
The most important thing for the Roys was “to give them no way back,” says Mylod. “There had to be a finality to it beyond just the outcome of the vote, There had to be an emotional finality to it as well—to go beyond that to a place of where there’s no coming back without going melodramatic or just too screamy or violent. You’re walking a tightrope there to still keep it emotionally true and still be suitably devastating. I hope that the combination of that staging, that beautiful writing, and those incredible actors that we hopefully did it justice.”
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Staff Writer
Chris Murphy is a staff writer at Vanity Fair, covering entertainment and popular culture for the HWD section. Prior to joining VF, he wrote for Vulture/New York magazine. Chris is also an actor and comedian who performs all over New York, where he resides. Follow him on Twitter at... Read more
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