'Succession' Director Mark Mylod Says He's 'Kicking Himself' Over One Moment from Season 4
Mark Mylod is getting candid about Succession.
In a new interview with Variety published on Thursday (August 17), the director revealed that there was one moment from the final season that he was still kicking himself over.
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Mark began by saying that there was one thing from season 4 that he still can’t stop thinking about.
“I will do the kicking myself thing. And I’ll take no pleasure in the stuff that maybe has worked well,” he revealed. “It’s the mistakes you’ve made, or the things you could have done better in the moment that you’ve missed. There’s something I missed in one of the episodes in Season 4, it’s not necessarily a mistake, but it’s an opportunity to have taken a moment further. And it kills me. It eats me up and it genuinely is too raw now to kind of admit it.”
With that said, Mark noted that the positive reception to the final season was a “massive relief.”
“Jesse [Armstrong] and I, with each kind of new season just have a conversation of, ‘OK, is this the year we get found out?’ Is this the year unconscious complacency creeps in and we just slip our standard? Just the fear of that and the insecurity of that, I suppose that’s also been a spur to both of us. And I think speaking for the whole team, when you’ve got writing that good you really want to do it justice,” he said.
He went on to discuss Connor’s wedding and singled out Matthew Macfadyen‘s performance in the episode, noting that he used more footage of him on the plane because it was so compelling.
“I remember watching it back in the edit and just thinking there’s almost a version of this an alternative cut you could do this episode where you just stay on the plane with with Matthew and and his colleagues the entire time and you only hear the siblings off camera,” he said. “It was such almost an embarrassment of riches having all that material.”
Mark shared that he was happy that the show ended when it did, adding that episode 3 felt like the “zenith” of the series.
“In that particular scene or chunk of the episode, from the moment the siblings first get that call from Tom on the plane to when they tell Connor and they migrate upstairs onto the top deck for more privacy, it was such an unbroken kind of stream of consciousness in the writing beautiful writing from Jesse as ever, that in my head kind of cried out for that total immersion for everybody, particularly the cast obviously. And so just working the problem with all of the crew — and everybody made a contribution to kind of solving the problem of how to shoot a half hour unbroken take when when a roll of film only lasts 10 minutes. on over three levels of the deck — it was so incredibly satisfying not just to kind of solve the puzzle but but going into the edit afterwards and seeing that flow of performance in the immersion of the cast in that. It felt like like the craft and the whole way that we make the show was really servicing the script in the best possible way,” he explained.