There can be no doubt about it anymore, Succession is the best TV series around right now (maybe even ever). The latest Succession episode was an absolute whirlwind of emotions and drama, and it turns out the production team on the show had some pretty cool methods to capture it all.
Throughout the four seasons of the drama series so far, we’ve seen countless crazy situations play out for the Succession characters. In Succession season 4 episode 3, things took an exceedingly dark and devastating turn, in yet another masterful hour of television.
In a clip shared by HBO Max, members of the Succession cast detail the process of bringing the latest episode to life and it’s revealed an exceptionally difficult method was used to capture the action.
Director Mark Mylod said: “In the planning of the shots it felt like the camera had to be almost sadistically voyeuristic. It had to stay really close without taking its eye off them. Because every time we cut away from the siblings it seemed to let them off the hook. So we worked on this idea of, ‘How can we keep the action as fluid as possible so it’s unflinching?'”
So, how was that achieved? Well, Culkin claims Mylod tries to credit him with the idea of doing a one-take of the whole sequence that plays out in the episode. “We shot like five or six days of the sequence bits, and then we ran the whole thing,” Culkin stated. “Turns out it’s like a 27-minute long scene.”
Shooting on film threw up challenges, too. “We can only shoot for ten minutes and then the camera needs to be physically reloaded with a new roll of film,” Mylod added. “So the camera operators worked on this idea of basically hiding rolls of film around the set, and hiding a third camera body, doing super fast reloads, and one camera would always be running so they wouldn’t have to reload at the same time.”
“It was like doing a one-act play on a boat, in several rooms, with background actors, with lighting everywhere, with three cameras. It was unlike anything I’d ever done before,” Culkin mused. But, the end result was all worth it in the end, clearly.
Here’s how to watch Succession season 4 if you need to catch up. Also check out our feature on who will win Succession, and here’s how to run a media empire, according to Logan Roy. Alternatively, check out our lists of the new movies coming this year, or the best movies of all time.