For its penultimate episode, “Succession” gathered every major cast member — past and present — for Logan Roy’s funeral, and presented a unique challenge for director Marc Mylod when all the actors were required to play a limited role. It came to the point of covering the window. availability. Its solution? Shoot it like a multi-cam comedy with lots of cameras and one long, extended take.
“With those over-emotional scenes, there’s only one belief involved,” Mylod said behind the scenes. Video for the episode. “The challenge was getting the right combination in the church of the epic and the intimate, and it was a very real logistical challenge to accomplish. We had a huge page count at church and very limited availability. But that meant we had to shoot, even by our standards – and we can sometimes shoot quite fast – but with our normal two-camera way of shooting, so incredibly fast that There was no way to meet the huge page count of Vital Beats unless we did something extreme.
Mylod pulled from his early work as director in order to properly cover everyone and everything.
“The solution for me was to go back to my early directorial days. I’ll do multi-camera sketch shows and even a big live variety show with eight cameras and lots of external broadcast feeds, and that’s training for me with lots of cameras to cover a lot of ground very quickly. Was able to shoot with ,” They said.
The filmmaker revealed that from the moment Logan’s casket is brought into the church, all through the eulogies are all in one take, which they ran several times. And since “Succession” shoots on film, they had to use a “rolling reload” system to get more film into the cameras, which was used for a long take in Episode 3, after which the Roy siblings It was learned that his father had fallen. plane.
“We devised a four-film camera system so that the cameras didn’t shoot into each other so that one camera was on whoever was praising, one camera was on the siblings, one camera was picking up the reactions, and again we did that rolling reload system that I talked about earlier in episode 3 so that I could run effectively, as we did with Logan’s death and the siblings being revealed, we ran multiple times in a row,” he explained.” From the moment the coffin is brought into the church, through its procession through all the eulogies, we run through all of that as one big part. It was an attempt to give the cast as much emotional flow as possible, which in my opinion they always benefit from.
Myllod previously stated that since film cameras could only shoot for 10 minutes at a time without reloading, for Episode 3 he hid rolls of film around the set and hid an extra camera body. So that one camera is always on while the other is on. Reloading. The same system was used for the final episode of the series to capture the eulogies delivered by Evan (James Cromwell), Roman (Kieran Culkin), Kendall (Jeremy Strong) and Shiva (Sarah Snook), all on a larger scale. .
The “Succession” series finale airs Sunday, May 28 on HBO and is streaming on Max.
