How The Menu connects to Succession and Game of Thrones

On the surface, Mark Mylod’s thrillerMenu This movie looks more like a high-end, chilly horror film. Trailer reveals that it is the story about a wealthy chef who lures rich and spoiled customers into a game of life or death. His loyal followers will set all the rules. Bloody mayhem follows. But Mylod sees the film differently — and his interpretation ties directly into what drew him not just to this film, but to his other most high-profile work, as a regular director on the hit TV series Succession And Game of Thrones.

For Mylod, the connection between those three stories is the way they deal with family — literally on Game of ThronesAnd SuccessionMore symbolically, Menu, where the antagonist — mysterious, aristocratic Chef Slowik (Ralph Fiennes) — has built his kitchen staff into a slavishly devoted team that his fanatical apprentice Elsa (Watchmen Hong Chau), is a star who can be described as a part of the family.

“If I have any throughline in my work — going back to my British work, when I first started directing back in the late 1500s — it’s family,” Mylod joked to Polygon in an interview after Menu’s premiere at the 2022 Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas. “I realized that power and family are symbiotic, especially in the formative years. I’m really fascinated by that. You’re trapped in the space where you dwell, and you can’t escape, really, until you can leave home. And so there’s endless potential for dramatic conflict.”

Photo: Searchlight Pictures

Game of Thrones, bloodlines are effectively destiny — everyone involved in the titular quest for power and dominance is both boosted and limited by the family they were born into. You can find out more at In SuccessionThe entire story centers around competition and connections within the rich family. You can read the entire story at In Menu, though, there’s more of a sense that Chef Slowik’s patrons — including characters played by Anya Taylor-Joy, Nicholas Hoult, John Leguizamo, and Aimee Carrero — have been trapped by a family that resembles a cult.

“Part of the attraction of Menu was that idea that you put all the characters in this one box with that quasi-family, and you trap them in this space, and there’s endless potential for dramatic confrontation and dramatic conflicts,” Mylod says. “And out of that, you get that lovely relationship between tension and comedy, which the writers take so much advantage of.”

Inliteral families do exist Menu, with Chef Slowik’s mother as one of the patrons at his life-or-death dinner, though their relationship and intentions toward each other are one of the film’s biggest mysteries.

“We hoped you would fill in some of the blanks,” Mylod says. “[The question is]Always What is the limit of exposition? How far does one go into Chef’s backstory? With that, we had to walk a fine line. We chose to tap into the intelligence and knowledge of our audience. The audience can answer these questions for themselves. Audiences are so sophisticated these days, we didn’t feel we needed to delve into that too much. They could feel the emotional connection.”

There is a further connection between Game of Thrones, SuccessionPlease see the following: Menu All three stories are heavily concerned with wealthy people who use their power and get punished for it. However, all three stories portray these characters in a humane way.

“That chess game was always at the heart of it,” Mylod says. “With Bong [Joon-ho]In ParasiteHe never meant for the rich to be the villains and the poor to be the treats. That’s trite, and it starts to undermine the authenticity of the emotional story he’s trying to tell. We found ourselves in the same place — we wanted to have an emotional connection to these characters. We could see how they do stupid things, but I certainly didn’t want them to just be cardboard cutouts, two-dimensional stereotypes. We wanted them to have emotional lives, and we wanted the audience to feel their jeopardy.”

Photo: Searchlight Pictures

Mylod is interested in the interconnections between them. SuccessionAnd Menu They are more powerful thematically as well as in the way he managed to get behind-the scenes participation and improvisation going on.

“Something I did bring to MenuParticularly fromSuccession was my ongoing lifelong admiration of Robert Altman, and the way he works,” Mylod says. “I was lucky enough very early in my directing career to work with two actors, Charles Dance and Michael Gambon, who’d worked on [Altman’s masterpiece] Gosford ParkHe was so open to my questions and always asked them how they worked. He was the very first West director to obtain two sound mixers, and got everybody. [on a set] miked up.”

Altman’s naturalistic and overlapping dialogue was well-known. He captured it on set, where people were encouraged to remain in character. This technique was employed by Mylod. Succession And Menu to give his sets what he calls “a Darwinian sense,” where everyone is acting all the time, rather than just in short setups where the camera is pointed at them and they have specific dialogue in the script.

“Everybody was on and everyone was improvising, so everybody’s alive and present the whole time,” he says. “I used that on SuccessionI was given it and used it. Menu. That requires a courageous, confident, intuitive, and intelligent actor. To achieve this, we were extremely specific with our recruiting. [With The Menu]The result was one of the most joyful seven weeks ever because everyone was locked up in their COVID bubble. All the extras would come on set in the morning, everybody’s miked up, and if they happen to be off camera, they’re still supporting, they’re still improvising, keeping the atmosphere of the restaurant alive.

“That brilliant kitchen staff were there every day, after going through this bootcamp about exactly what they should be doing at any moment. They’re doing their choreographed dance, with that precision of Slowik’s world. So we ended up with a really loose and free way of working, which is an interesting counterpoint to the precision of the writing and the rhythm of Slowik’s world.”

Photo: Searchlight Pictures

Themes that are connected SuccessionAnd Menu, Mylod says the “eat the rich” idea of powerful people being punished is “part of the fun,” but that he’s more interested in how both stories handle warped creativity and the disintegration of characters’ ideals.

“The perversion of art through power, through exclusiveness, through money, is certainly something I’m personally interested in. It’s certainly what drew me to Succession,” he says. “I worked with [Succession creator] Jesse [Armstrong]That. With Menu, I think the theme of the pure beauty of creating good food for another human being, the pure elemental act of sharing and sustaining and nourishing another — it’s so beautiful. You can’t get more fundamental than that, except perhaps in childbirth. And for that to have been perverted by industry, by money — that feels to me like there’s a tragic element [for Chef Slowik]. That perversion of an ideal, I think, is really interesting.”

In the end, that sense of tragedy in a character is part of what defines Mylod’s favorite characters in all three of these stories. While he hesitates to expose his fandom for one character over another in these three ensemble projects — “That’s like asking me my favorite child,” he says — he admits that he’s drawn to villainous characters who see themselves as heroes.

Find out more Game of ThronesThis meant you would be pulled towards Cersei Lannister. “[Actor] Lena [Headey] was so the opposite of that character,” Mylod says. “She’s so loose and lovely and fun, and then she just totally morphs into this different human on camera. It’s just extraordinary to see the transition. This seems so easy.

“And [Cersei is a favorite] because I remember talking to Lena about her way of looking at the character — she just made a comment one day about ‘I’m just trying to protect my children here.’ Like Cersei wasn’t an evil person, she was just a woman trying to protect her children. This was an amazing revelation for me when viewed from this point of view. I was kind of romanced by how exquisitely bad she is, and at the same time, she’s just trying to protect her kids. So that was beautiful to me.”

Find out more SuccessionMylod finds Roy family hanger-on Tom Wambsgans attractive (played here by Matthew Macfadyen), partly because of the difference between actor and role. “Same argument, really,” Mylod says. “There isn’t a best character, but in terms of who changes the most from themselves into the character, it’d be Matthew, because he’s such a lovely, quietly spoken, gentle character, and then he morphs into Tom, this monster.

“And he just brings an emotional dimension to the character that breaks my heart sometimes, because he’s just a Midwest kid trying to make it big, following his dream. So if you look at him and say maybe he’s a baddie, he just thought he was doing a good job. Nobody thinks he’s a baddie.”

The same holds true for Mylod’s favorite character in Menu: inevitably, its tormented villain, Chef Slowik, who also doesn’t see his capture and torture of his patrons as evil. He sees them instead as the ones who captured him and tortured his body, which leads to all that transpires in the film. “That’s why I love him,” Mylod says. “He’s the essential, quiet tragedy behind what’s hopefully a really fun ride of a movie. Slowik feels pain. He’s just trying to stop the pain.”

MenuIt is now in theatres