It all started with a phone call.
In the latest episode of Succession, things significantly ramp up in intensity over the hour of television. Starting with Tom’s phone call to Roman informing him of Logan’s last moments, the scene set on Connor and Willa’s wedding boat goes on for an excruciatingly long time as the Roy children helplessly tune in to their father’s death.
While it may not be noticeable as the situation unfolds, it turns out the entire scene was achieved in one 27-minute long take, using some very smart camera techniques and some incredibly acting.
— Succession (@succession) April 10, 2023
In an Inside The Episode video, the cast and crew of Succession explain just how complex the scene was to film and how it all contributes to one of the most pivotal moments of the show’s four season run.
“In the planning of the shots, it felt to me like the camera had to be almost sadistically voyeuristic,” executive producer and director Mark Mylod recalled.
“It had to stay really close without kind of 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 could we keep the action as fluid as possible so that it’s unflinching.”
One of the stars of the scene, Kieran Culkin, said it was all shot over “like five or six days.”
“As it turns out, it’s like a 27-minute long scene,” Culkin said. “It was us doing like a one-act play on a boat in several rooms with background actors, with lighting everywhere, with three cameras and it was unlike anything I’d ever done before and it was extremely exciting.”
How was the scene actually shot?
Because the series is shot on film, it means that the cameras can not just continuously roll without interruption. So the crew came up with an ingenious idea to work around it for the incredible scene.
“The camera operators worked on this idea of basically hiding rolls of film around the set,” Mylod explained. “And hiding a third camera body during super fast reloads so that one camera would always be running so they wouldn’t have to reload at the same time.
“I think a massive percentage of that ended up being in the final cut.”
Check out the full Inside the Episode below.
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