Warning: the following article contains spoilers for season four of Succession.
The big tragic day has finally loomed over the Roy family as its ruthless patriarch, Logan Roy finally drew his last breath three episodes into Succession’s fourth and final season. Now, we finallky arrive at the penultimate episode, and Logan’s funeral – and Director Mark Mylod has meticulously shown every character’s emotional outburst in the episode especially their attempts to come to terms with this bitter reality.
On the subject, Mylod shared the special directorial techniques he adopted to showcase the various events that were happening at the funeral in an interview with Deadline. This is the ‘roll and reload system’ where every camera focused on any specific event rather than capturing multiple shots at the same time. Speaking on the subject, Mylod explained:
“So we devised a four film camera system. So the cameras wouldn’t be shooting into each other, so that one camera could be on whoever’s eulogizing, one camera could be on the siblings, one camera could be picking up reactions. And again, we did that roll and reload system that I spoke about earlier in Episode 3.”
The technique has proved effective in capturing the diverse challenging situations that the characters were navigating while they dealt with their grief.
The viewers knew that the tensions (which the episode demanded) were building in the air when Kendall directed his anger at both his assistant, Jess, and former wife, Rava, and Shiv decided to break the news of her pregnancy to the family exactly at that moment. Whereas Roman was more conventional in expressing his sadness when he began to weep pointing to his father’s casket and asking, “Is he really in there.”
Mylod explained how balancing the characters’ emotional fragility with the numerous other events going on during the funeral was a challenging endeavor for him. Nonetheless quite intriguing,
“I thought that structure was so intriguing and so emotionally fraught. With those hyper emotional scenes, there’s just a trust that’s involved. The challenge was getting the right combination in the church of the epic and the emotional, and a very real logistical challenge of just getting it all shot. We had a huge page count in the church. We had very, very limited availability…with our normal two camera way of shooting, there was just no way we could get through this fast page count. There’s so many incredibly important beats. Unless we did something extreme.”
While episode nine successfully tested the emotional strength of the show’s fans, the creative directorial skills adopted by Mylod added to the effectiveness. Succession is currently airing on HBO and HBO Max, and its grand finale will arrive next Sunday.