How The Menu is connected to Succession and Game of Thrones

Superficially considered Mark Mylod’s thriller The menu looks like a chilled high-end horror movie. The trailer frames it as the story of a successful chef who sets a trap for his rich, spoiled patrons and draws them into an unpredictable game of life and death in which he and his loyal followers define all the rules. Bloody chaos follows. But Mylod sees the film differently – and his interpretation ties directly into what drew him not only to this film but also to his other high-profile work as a regular director of the hit TV series successor and game of Thrones.

For Mylod, the connection between these three stories is the way they deal with family – literally onward game of Thrones and successorand more symbolic in The menuwhere the antagonist – the mysterious, aristocratic chef Slowik (Ralph Fiennes) – has built his kitchen staff into a slavishly devoted team led by his fanatical apprentice Elsa (Guardian Star Hong Chau) explicitly describes as family.

“If I have one consistent line in my work – going back to my British work, when I started directing in the late 1500s – it’s family,” Mylod joked in a subsequent interview with Polygon The menuPremiered at Fantastic Fest 2022 in Austin, Texas. “I realized that power and family are symbiotic, especially in the formative years. I’m really fascinated by it. You are trapped in the space you live in and you can’t really escape until you can leave your home. And so there is endless potential for dramatic conflict.”

Margo (Anya Taylor-Joy), a woman with a strapless dress and thick red hair, stares at the camera in close-up in The Menu

in the game of Thrones, Bloodlines are practically destiny – anyone involved in the title quest for power and dominance is both empowered and constrained by the family into which they were born. in the successor, the whole story revolves around the connections and competition within a wealthy family. in the The menuHowever, there’s more of a feeling 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 The menu was this idea that you put all the characters in this one box with this quasi family and you keep them trapped in this space and there is endless potential for dramatic confrontations and dramatic conflicts,” says Mylod. “And that creates this beautiful relationship of suspense and comedy that the writers exploit so well.”

Literal family emerges The menuwith chef Slowik’s mother as one of the guests at his meal to the death, although their relationship and intentions towards one another is one of the film’s greatest mysteries.

“We were hoping you’d fill in some of the blanks,” says Mylod. “[The question is] always How far do you go with the exhibition? How far do you go into Chef’s backstory? We walked a tightrope with that. The choice we made was to tap into the intelligence of the audience. You can fill these things in yourself. Audiences are so demanding these days that we didn’t feel like we had to delve too deeply into them. You could feel the emotional connection.”

Another connection between game of Thrones, successorand The menu is that all three stories deal heavily with wealthy people who arm their power and are punished for their hubris, but all three stories also humanize these characters.

“The chess game was always the focus,” says Mylod. “With bong [Joon-ho] in parasite, he never intended the poor to be good and the rich to be bad. It’s corny and undermines 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 with these characters. We could see them doing stupid things, but I definitely didn’t want them to be just cardboard cutouts, two-dimensional stereotypes. We wanted them to have an emotional life and we wanted the audience to feel their danger.”

A frantic man swings a chair against one of the glass walls at a fancy restaurant to break it and escape while the rest of the terrified diners watch a scene from The Menu

For Mylod, the connections are between successor and The menu are stronger, both thematically and in terms of how he worked behind the scenes to encourage improvisation and full participation from the cast.

“Something I contributed to The menu very specifically successor was my lifelong admiration for Robert Altman and the way he worked,” says Mylod. “I was fortunate to work very early in my directing career with two actors, Charles Dance and Michael Gambon, who had previously worked on the film [Altman’s masterpiece] Gosford Park, and I kept bombarding her with questions about how he worked. He really was pretty much the first director in the West to get two mixers and all [on a set] miked.”

Altman was famous for his naturalistic, criss-crossing dialogue, captured on set by people who were encouraged to remain in character at all times. Mylod used this technique successor

and The menu to give his sets what he calls “a Darwinian feel” where everyone is acting all the time, rather than just in short setups where the camera is on them and they have specific dialogue in the script.

“Everyone was tuned in and everyone was improvising, so everyone’s alive and present all the time,” he says. “I used that successorand I kept using it The menu. It takes a very specific, brave, intelligent, intuitive actor to take that on. To achieve this, we were very targeted in our recruitment. [With The Menu], which ended up being the happiest seven weeks to have on set because at that time we were all locked together in our bubble with COVID. All the extras came to the set in the morning, everyone was miked, and when they happened to be off camera they were still backing up, they were still improvising, keeping the atmosphere of the restaurant alive.

“These brilliant kitchen staff were there every day after going through this boot camp, explaining exactly what to do at each moment. They perform their choreographed dance with the 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.”

Director Mark Mylod sits at a table on set with several characters from The Menu and gestures remotely as he directs, with camera equipment and operators in the background

As far as topics that connect successor and The menuMylod says that the “eat the rich” idea of punishing powerful people is “part of the fun” but he’s more interested in how both stories deal with distorted creativity and the crumbling of the characters’ ideals.

“The perversion of art through power, through exclusivity, through money is certainly something that interests me personally. That definitely attracted me successor,” he says. “I worked with [Succession creator] Jesse [Armstrong] on this one. With The menu, I think the theme of pure beauty, creating good food for another human being, the pure elemental act of sharing and maintaining and nourishing another — it’s so beautiful. It doesn’t get any more fundamental than that, except maybe at birth. And that this was perverted by industry and money – that seems to me to be a tragic element [for Chef Slowik]. I find this perversion of an ideal really interesting.”

In the end, that sense of tragedy in one character is part of what makes Mylod’s favorite characters in all three of these stories. While he’s reluctant to choose his fandom for one character over another in these three ensemble projects – “It’s like asking me about my favorite child,” he says – he admits his attraction to villainous characters, who see themselves as heroes.

To the game of Thrones, which meant being drawn to Cersei Lannister. “[Actor] lena [Headey] was so antithetical to that character,” says Mylod. “She’s so easygoing and lovely and funny, and then she just totally morphs into this other person in front of the camera. It’s just extraordinary to see the transition. It seems so effortless.

“And [Cersei is a favorite] because I remember talking to Lena about her take on the character – she just made a comment one day about, “I’m just trying to protect my kids here”. Just as Cersei wasn’t an evil person, she was just a woman trying to protect her children. From that perspective alone, it was a revelation to me. I was kind of entranced by how exquisitely evil she is, and at the same time she’s just trying to protect her kids. That was nice for me.”

To the successor, Mylod is attracted to Tom Wambsgans (played by Matthew Macfadyen), the Roy family follower, partly because of the distance between actor and character. “Actually the same argument,” says Mylod. “There is no best character, but in terms of who transforms the most of himself into the character, it would be Matthew because he’s such a loveable, soft-spoken, gentle character, and then he transforms into Tom, that monster.

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

The same goes for Mylod’s favorite character in The menu: inevitably his tormented villain, Chef Slowik, who doesn’t see his capture and torturing his patrons as evil either. Instead, he sees that they captured and tortured him, which led to everything that happens in the film. “That’s why I love him,” says Mylod. “He’s the essential, silent tragedy behind what I hope is a really funny film. Slowik is in pain. He’s just trying to stop the pain.”

The menu is now in cinemas.