Lorene Scafaria is the director of such films as Hustlers and The Meddler, but she’s also a devoted television fan, and as it happens, her favorite show, maybe of all time, is HBO’s Succession.
Despite their animus, Kendall’s siblings Shiv company, which is besieged by would-be sharks and under investigation by the Feds for covering up a string of deaths on their cruise ships.
How did you come to be involved with Succession?I believe I had put it out there that I was interested in directing an episode right after the Hustlers promotional tour was over.
After that, it was about diving into this bottle episode that takes place in Manhattan.
What was the biggest challenge? Taking a show and all these characters you’re very familiar with and then basically putting them in Burning Man, except in Manhattan — creating a space you’re going to build up and then tear down when it’s all over.
How would you describe the visual language of this show? And what’s the relationship to your own style? My perception of your movies is that they don’t feel as volatile and loose as Succession.
How often have you worked like that in the past?On Hustlers, there were some larger ensemble scenes, particularly the locker-room scene, that were a lot like what the entire shoot of Succession is probably like.
I would have a vision for it, but it would need to be a shared vision, obviously, because it’s someone else’s creation.
Is it awkward coming into a situation where the style of the thing is already fixed? That’s the strange but beautiful thing about directing an episode of television: You’re sort of a special guest.
Have you shot on film before?I have, but none of my features were shot on film, so this was a bit different, although the pressure was off because I had a crew that was very experienced working this way.
I think there’s a quality to it, a texture you could certainly manipulate to get a kind of filmlike quality on digital.
With something like this, where you’ve maybe got a really juicy five-minute stretch of dialogue, you want to make extra sure the cameras are where they need to be.
You can certainly just let the actors go and have the cameras dance and pick it off as you go, but it’s such a perfect little theater space in Logan’s office.
I was always writing and always interested in movies, but I grew up in New Jersey, and then I lived in New York, and I started out writing plays and trying to put them up myself and direct them.
Everyone in the scene has a different intention, a different reason for being there, a different loss, and you have to communicate with all of the actors differently.
I wanted to communicate a lot with the actors about what they needed and what I could I provide for them, especially with certain sensitive scenes and more vulnerable themes.
What kinds of different approaches do actors have?For some actors, the process isn’t anywhere close to the Method for them, and they’re just trying to reason it out logically in their heads.
You’ve got me thinking about the connections between the show and theater, like the fact that many of the signature episodes are rooted in a particular location, whether it’s Kendall’s birthday party or the yacht where Logan decides who to sacrifice or the palatial homes in various countries where other episodes take place.It really is like a little traveling theater troupe.
What are your impressions and memories of that part of the location?That was a really challenging set because we were kind of under the gun by the time we got to the tree house, and it was such an important setting for the story.
The tree house is also the highest point you could get to in this party, and that’s something we spoke a lot about when planning the storytelling: utilizing all these different levels and showing the characters taking escalators up to the next floor and the next floor after that.
When we enter this space, we’re inside the ridiculous mind of Kendall Roy, to the point where the party scenes verge on becoming those bits in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind where people are chasing each other through Jim Carrey’s subconscious.That seems like a movie Kendall might have seen and wanted to bring to life at this event.
Now I’m hearing “Funky Town” playing through the confrontation at the entrance to the tree house.All bangers, all the time! That’s the soundtrack Kendall’s curated for everyone.
And how is he curating his element? How is he trying to realize his best self and also create something he can show off to them? Those are some of the questions we had to keep in mind.
He wants to get across the idea that there is at least one thing that is entirely his and that they can’t have.Something like that, yeah.
I love how the siblings all play off each other and react to each other, and I love seeing how their father thinks of each of them.
It’s my journalistic duty to ask you about Kendall’s mom’s vagina tunnel.When we saw the drawings the first time, I couldn’t believe we were actually going to get to do this.
I wasn’t sure if it was going to be some kind of old theater trick with cellophane fire.
How about shooting the scene in the bathroom with Roman and Madsen, where Madsen pisses on Roman’s phone?That was the hardest I’ve laughed on set, ever.
Kieran is so hilarious and such a great improviser and thinks on his feet and acts with his whole body, and in this scene, you get so much physical comedy out of him.
How many takes did you do of Culkin throwing the phone into the urinal? Was it a real phone? Did Skarsgård provide the stream? That was a real phone.
I guess I should ask you about the scene where Kendall goes searching for the present from his children.
The presents scene was one we talked about a lot, but we stopped after a certain point because we didn’t want to talk it into the ground.
Every detail down to the placement of the gifts was something we hoped would give Jeremy the right container to be completely free in — to really feel the scene and find it.
We tried to fill as many boxes as we could, so if Jeremy really got into it and started ripping things open, if he started breaking things, if he started stepping on things, he wouldn’t be feeling some fake empty boxes and be taken out of the moment.
How did it feel while you were finally shooting the scene?I cried on set.