The Menu: 'We wanted an artist in pain who's consumed by self-loathing'
Ralph Fiennes and Anya Taylor-Joy in The Menu.
His knack for spotting a great story has made him one of TV’s most successful directors and producers, with shows like Succession, Game of Thrones and Shameless.
Now Mark Mylod turns to the big screen for The Menu, a deliciously mischievous horror thriller laced with satire and black comedy.
The film is set over one night in an exclusive island restaurant where Ralph Fiennes - giving us his best menacing stare since In Bruges - is preparing a top-notch tasting menu for his monied guests.
What they don’t realise is there are some shocking surprises about to be served up on the menu.
For Mylod, who has aced blending drama with dark humour in the multi-award winning Succession, doing so in the culinary world was again part of the draw.
“Finding that balance - a triangle of comedy, thriller and that satirical element to it. Getting the right balance of those ingredients - it’s almost impossible to talk about this film without doing bad foodie puns at some level,” smiled the British filmmaker and producer.
“I have a slight obsession with trying to nail slightly awkward or difficult or specific tones, I find that a lovely challenge.”
In finding his leading man to do so, Mylod looked no further than top British actor Fiennes. He’s having a blast as Julian Slowik, a chef and molecular gastronomist regarded as a genius in culinary circles, not least by himself. Resentful at making some tough business decisions, he sets out to prepare the ultimate tasting menu.
“It was tremendous fun, just a brilliant experience,” said Mylod of working with Fiennes.
“You’ve seen his body of work. Our first conversation was one of those lovely meeting-of-minds conversations where neither of us wanted a moustache-twirling baddie.
“We wanted an artist in pain who's consumed by self-loathing for the choices he's made - this Faustian pact with his financiers - which gradually elevated and perverted his art form to a place where it's unrecognisable from his ideals, from where he started, which of course is classic tragedy.
“The joy of Ralph is that he could also bring that other incredibly important ingredient of being hilarious with it, which is to unify that comedy with such pathos. There are so few actors in the world who I think could achieve that.”
The filmmaker was not familiar with the world of prestige dining, so decided to explore it in a bid to make a top-class restaurant believable on screen.
That included consulting with the top experts in that industry, including Dominique Crenn, the first woman chef in the US to achieve a prestigious three-star Michelin rating.
“My experience of it was really specific - I used to work on Game of Thrones and David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss], the writers on that, are quite foodies. So I'd always hit them up for some fancy restaurant, whenever we were shooting in Croatia or Spain somewhere.
“They're great company, they're hilarious, but the restaurants themselves I always felt massively intimidated by which I thought was just such an odd contradiction for a place that's supposed to be joyful, and the art of just sharing food, a very basic human need.
“Margot, Anya Taylor Joy’s character, is very much the eyes of the audience and that's me, that was my entrée into the script. Not that I didn't appreciate it, it's just I didn't really understand it.
“The next thing on the shopping list was to do a deep dive into that world. That was really fun. I think the single biggest thing I came out of, apart from probably knowing an awful lot more about molecular gastronomy than I did, was just incredible genuine respect for the artists, for everybody involved in that industry.”
Already a long-established and in-demand director, Succession has marked one of Mylod’s greatest achievements yet.
He’s currently in “the deep immersion and joy” of working with his cast and writers on series four. It was the initial screenplays, he says, which prompted him to get on board.
“It seemed like it had that zeitgeist quality of just being... it felt like America today. I live in New York. And it just felt like it was nailing the cultural zeitgeist.
“I'd never seen anything like it before, where the characters were just so awful and yet with such vulnerability, so it's an underlying humanity to the bite of the satire.
"The kind of yin and yang of it really was so brilliant in the writing. It was just utterly compelling. There was no way you couldn't do it with that visceral writing.”
Of course, Mylod also directed a number of episodes of one of Northern Ireland’s great success stories, Game of Thrones. To what extent did he feel the North was key to the series’ success?
“It was huge, obviously, that specificity of locations and the freshness of that world to a viewing audience.
"It really showcased the incredible landscapes there. I did a series of commercials for Irish tourism a few years ago, which even though my grandparents are both Irish, from Kildare, was my first jump into Ireland.
“I travelled around pretty much the whole country, north and south. That opened up the landscape to me, but Game of Thrones brought it out to the world.
"And we've seen the benefits to the Irish tourism economy that have come from that.”
- The Menu is now in cinemas
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