How the horror movie The Menu connects to Game of Thrones and Succession

This interview with the director of The Menu was initially printed at the side of the movie’s theatrical launch. It has been republished to coincide with the movie’s launch on HBO Max and digital platforms.

On the floor, Mark Mylod’s thriller The Menu seems to be like a cold, high-end horror movie. The trailer shapes it as the story of a profitable chef who baits a entice for his wealthy, spoiled patrons, drawing them into an unpredictable life-or-death sport the place he and his devoted followers outline all the guidelines. Bloody mayhem follows. But Mylod sees the movie in another way — and his interpretation ties straight into what drew him not simply to this movie, however to his different most high-profile work, as an everyday director on the hit TV collection Succession and Game of Thrones.

For Mylod, the connection between these three tales is the method they take care of household — actually on Game of Thrones and Succession, and extra symbolically in The Menu, the place the antagonist, mysterious, aristocratic Chef Slowik (Ralph Fiennes), has constructed his kitchen employees right into a slavishly devoted crew that his fanatical apprentice Elsa (Watchmen star Hong Chau) particularly describes as a household.

“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 The 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

In Game of Thrones, bloodlines are successfully future — everybody concerned in the titular quest for energy and dominance is each boosted and restricted by the household they have been born into. In Succession, the complete story revolves round the connections and competitors inside a wealthy household. In The Menu, although, there’s extra of a way that Chef Slowik’s patrons — together with characters performed by Anya Taylor-Joy, Nicholas Hoult, John Leguizamo, and Aimee Carrero — have been trapped by a household that resembles a cult.

“Part of the attraction of The 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.”

Literal household does come up in The Menu, with Chef Slowik’s mom as one of the patrons at his life-or-death dinner, although their relationship and intentions towards one another are one of the movie’s greatest mysteries.

“We hoped you would fill in some of the blanks,” Mylod says. “[The question is] always How far does one go with exposition? How far does one go into Chef’s backstory? We walked a tightrope with that. The choice we made was to kick into the intelligence of the audience. They can fill in those things 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.”

An extra connection between Game of Thrones, Succession, and The Menu is that every one three tales deal closely with rich individuals weaponizing their energy and getting punished for his or her hubris, however all three tales humanize these characters as properly.

“That chess game was always at the heart of it,” Mylod says. “With Bong [Joon-ho] in Parasite, he never intended for the poor people to be the goodies, and the rich people to be the baddies. 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

For Mylod, the connections between Succession and The Menu are stronger, each thematically and in phrases of how he labored behind the scenes to encourage improvisation and full-immersion forged participation.

“Something I did bring to The Menu very specifically from Succession 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 Park, and I was always pummeling them with questions about how he worked. He really was pretty much the first director in the West to get two sound mixers and get everybody [on a set] miked up.”

Altman was well-known for his naturalistic, overlapping dialogue, captured on the set from individuals inspired to keep in character always. Mylod used that method on Succession and The Menu to give his units what he calls “a Darwinian sense,” the place everyone seems to be performing all the time, quite than simply briefly setups the place the digicam is pointed at them and they’ve particular 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 Succession, and I used it on The Menu. It takes a really particular, courageous, clever, intuitive actor to embrace that. We have been very particular in our recruitment to obtain that. [With The Menu], the outcome was the happiest seven weeks you could possibly probably have on set, as a result of we have been all locked in collectively in our bubble with COVID at the moment. All the extras would come on set in the morning, all people’s miked up, and in the event that they occur to be off digicam, they’re nonetheless supporting, they’re nonetheless improvising, holding the ambiance 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

As far as themes that join Succession and The Menu, Mylod says the “eat the rich” concept of highly effective individuals being punished is “part of the fun,” however that he’s extra desirous about how each tales deal with warped creativity and the disintegration of characters’ beliefs.

“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] on that. With The 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 finish, that sense of tragedy in a personality is a component of what defines Mylod’s favourite characters in all three of these tales. While he hesitates to expose his fandom for one character over one other in these three ensemble tasks — “That’s like asking me my favorite child,” he says — he admits that he’s drawn to villainous characters who see themselves as heroes.

For Game of Thrones, that meant being pulled towards Cersei Lannister. “[Actor] Lena [Headey] was so the opposite of that character,” Mylod says. “She’s so unfastened and pretty and enjoyable, and then she simply completely morphs into this completely different human on digicam. It’s simply extraordinary to see the transition. It 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. Looked at just from that point of view, it was a revelation to me. 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.”

For Succession, Mylod is drawn to Roy household hanger-on Tom Wambsgans (performed by Matthew Macfadyen), additionally as a result of of the distance between actor and character. “Same argument, really,” Mylod says. “There isn’t a finest character, however in phrases of who adjustments the most from themselves into the character, it’d be Matthew, as a result of he’s such a beautiful, quietly spoken, mild 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 identical holds true for Mylod’s favourite character in The Menu: inevitably, its tormented villain, Chef Slowik, who additionally doesn’t see his seize and torture of his patrons as evil. Instead, he sees them as having captured and tortured him, main to every thing that occurs in the movie. “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 is in pain. He’s just trying to stop the pain.”

The Menu is now streaming on HBO Max and is accessible for rental on digital platforms like Amazon and Vudu.