Alison Herman: Now that you guys have done some scripted work as well, Will, I specifically wanted to ask about Succession since there are a lot of players in common between Succession and The Menu, obviously. Adam McKay’s a producer, Mark Mylod is the producing director on Succession and directed the feature. I noticed Lawrence is a presence. And obviously there are overlapping themes between the two. But I was curious how your work on one both practically and temperamentally bled into your work on the next project.
Will Tracy: It was a really smooth transition because the particular episode that I wrote in season two that Mark directed called Turn Haven, it’s kind of all, it’s centered around a bunch of people in a room having dinner. So there was quite a bit of overlap there and quite a bit of attention paid on that episode to making that room where they’re eating dinner feel lively, which oftentimes you don’t get that in a dinner scene or a restaurant scene set in a film or television show, because there’s a feeling that there’s one central conversation that’s happening and then everything else around the room, all the other people are just sort of miming and pretending to eat and it feels very cold and you actually don’t want to be distracted by anything in the background because you want to be focused on the conversation.
And I think Mark and I were quite keen on making that entire room feel alive so that the camera could be swinging from this side of the table to that side of the table and giving all the actors at the table quite a bit to work with. So even if it’s not their coverage, they have something to be talking about. So it feels like you’re really eating dinner with a lot of people and there are multiple conversations happening. And that same kind of principle was what Seth and I wanted to do.
And then Mark, once he came on board, wanted to do it with The Menu even more so because it’s separate tables and it’s really much more of an ensemble in terms of every kind of table relates and is eventually drawn into that central A story. And so yeah, it’s the same stuff. I mean we were, Seth and I were there every day on set and we were moving on to the set between takes to give actors kind of improv, usually for the tops and tails of their scene so that when the camera would swing to a new table, we weren’t feeling that they were just two actors sitting there waiting for their scene to start. They already had something, a conversation that they would be in while we were joining them. And there’s lines, funny lines, interesting ideas that made it into the movie based on that kind of either alt lines or improv suggestions that we were giving to the actors. So I don’t think that would’ve been possible had Mark and I not already had that shorthand together from working on the show.
Seth Reiss: Yeah, I mean it’s like utter lunacy that Will and I were allowed to be on set for the entire filming of the movie. And not only that, sitting right behind Mark in Video Village in times when he would need it, would turn to us, ask what we thought and we would give notes. We were always there for rehearsal at the top of the day just to see what was going on. And Mark would come to us and ask us, and Mark obviously knows exactly what he wants, but he’s an amazing collaborator. And watching him on a set and how he handles everyone, I learned a few things about how, if I’m ever in that position, how I’d be.
Will Tracy: Yeah, he’s very, he’s extremely clear.
Seth Reiss: Yeah, he is.
Will Tracy: I think there are some directors who are maybe sometimes less sure of what they want and less sure what their vision is. And so they’ll talk and talk and talk around giving a clear answer because they do want to sound authoritative and they want to sound smart and engage with the material and they want to give an actor or a craftsman on set the feeling that, oh, this person is smart and knows what they want, but it’s really dancing around the clarity. And Mark is very, very, very clear. And so actors I think really respond to him and really love him because of that clarity, which I wouldn’t be able do. I’d be tap dancing all around the place trying to get out of, give you an answer to something that I really want one more day to think about.
Seth Reiss: The answer that Will would be tap dancing around is, “No, I don’t want to say the word no. What are all the ways I can get out of saying, I don’t want to do that?”
Will Tracy: Seth pinpointed to me, I wasn’t aware I was doing this for years, but he pinpointed me that when I say, when I want to say no to something, but I don’t want to actually say the word no, I’ll say like, “Yeah, we can talk about that. Yeah, we can talk about.” As if there’s going to be a later day in which we will talk about it and I will say yes. But no, it actually just means, no.
Alison Herman: It’s very corporate management speak, so maybe you’re internalizing it from your time.
Will Tracy: [inaudible 00:28:34] like who I am at all. But for some reason I did like, yes, that’s part of my [inaudible 00:28:40]. And now I’m aware of it and try not to do it.
Seth Reiss: It’s funny because if I ever wanted to press, “Okay, when? When were we going to talk about it?”
Will Tracy: Exactly.
Seth Reiss: Okay, great. Let me know when, I’ll just put it on my calendar.
Will Tracy: And I would say, “Later,” is what I would-
Seth Reiss: Yeah, [inaudible 00:28:58] “Let me think about it.”
Alison Herman: Even just practically, I was also wondering just how it came that you brought Mark onto this or that Adam came on board. Is it like you had an idea and were like, “Hey, would you want to hear about this?”
Seth Reiss: With Adam and Betsy, Adam McCay and Betsy Koch at Hyperobject, when the script went out, it had some interest and so we had calls with various producers, and after our call with Betsy, I mean that was it. Will and I went with her and Adam McKay. Because they got it, they loved it. They were passionate about it. We could tell. And that, I will say in my experience now, a little bit of experiencing a little bit more of this world, that producer passion is so important in getting something to the finish line.
Because at various moments we actually had a fairly stable path to production. We had some hiccups, but because Will and I are new to this world and we are so aware, I think of the stories about the industry, I think there’s a bit of, “Well, once this thing goes wrong, it’s all going to go wrong.” And that domino hits that, that Adam and Betsy along with having great tastes and great notes were always, were going to make the movie. “Don’t worry, we’re going to make the movie. We love the movie, we’re going to make the movie.” And that was really worth its weight in psychological gold as the process continued.
Will Tracy: Yeah, it’s true, I think. And we continued to be very big cynics throughout, like Seth said, like, “Oh, ” like, “Hey, I read Easy Riders Raging Bulls. I know about Hollywood, I know how projects disappear. I’m an old salty pro.” And I think that occasionally our cynicism prevented us from enjoying the experience a bit more.
Seth Reiss: Absolutely. Tonight, as we talk to you, Tonight is the premiere of The Menu. And I’m still certain Searchlight’s going to shelve it.
Alison Herman: You’re going to get a text while we’re on the line, just don’t bother showing up.
Will Tracy: We did not allow ourselves to be excited at any point. And in terms of Mark, we had talked to a few other directors before Mark, and I think for a writer, what you kind of always really want to hear from a director is that, “I love this, I understand it and I know how to do it.” And sometimes even with really brilliant directors who you’ll talk to, there’s a little feeling of like, “Yeah, what is this movie? I wonder what it is.” And we’re kind of sitting there thinking, “Well, we know what it is. It’s not a puzzle to us.” And so when we met with Mark, it was immediately, it felt very comfortable. And obviously it helped that I knew him already, but I remember having a drink with him in our neighborhood in Brooklyn, and he had read the script and I think he had very clear thoughts about what do you want to do? And he just immediately wanted to be clear, “I love it and I know what this is and I think I know how to do this.”
Seth Reiss: And from that point, it makes doing a pass for a director so much easier because you and the director are then aligned in going down the same chute together. And you’re not trying to make an argument with your pass to the director as to why they should now understand it. And if you’re trying to make that argument, that’s a tough position to be in. And I actually, I tend to think that once somebody says how they feel about something creatively, they’re probably going to feel that way.
Will Tracy: You’re not going to chase their mind.
Seth Reiss: No matter what. I think they, it’s just that gut artistic instinct. And that’s okay. I mean, it’s absolutely okay if their gut artistic instinct is uncertainty. And I think that uncertainty will probably continue on unfortunately for a while. But if the gut artistic instinct is certainty, and also what I’d like to see, that’s a different type of working relationship.
Will Tracy: And sometimes what it really comes down to is the director is thinking, and I think this is totally justifiable for, if you’re a director, really thinking about your career and really thinking about wanting to have a signature career or a voice. A lot of times what they’re thinking is, how can I make this movie more like me? Which is, again-
Seth Reiss: Makes sense, right?
Will Tracy: Makes sense. Totally the [inaudible 00:33:24] thing. But for the writer, of course, all we were thinking is, please just think about how do we make this a great movie? So that’s, sometimes can be the push and pull with writers and directors. But we never really had that with Mark. I think he knew that he was a good fit for us, so he wasn’t having to think about how can I make this more me? I think he already felt like, this feels like something I can do and this will feel like a Mark Mylod movie. And it does.
Seth Reiss: Yeah. And I think he had, based on what we had, felt like he artistically had a way into the movie, be it through the character of Margot, be it through chef’s ego, be it through… I think he felt in as opposed to… And, which I totally understand when a director is trying to find his or her way into a movie but then can’t. That’s totally fine, that makes sense. But when you can’t, just say goodbye and let’s try to find someone who can.
Alison Herman: Once Mark came on board, I mean this may have been something you guys thought about even beforehand, were there any visual touchstones that you guys were talking about as references? I think Chef’s Table is the obvious one, but there’s a whole canon of food on film that I was wondering what your guys’ touchpoint was.
Will Tracy: Yeah. In terms of movies about food, we oddly did not talk that much about, other than Bunuel’s two films about eating and either not being able to start eating or not being able to finish eating. I don’t think we talked that much specifically about food movies. We did talk a lot about, and Mark has talked a lot about Gosford Park, which similarly was a reference point for the Succession episode we worked on, that feeling of being part of a lot of different conversations happening at once in the overlapping dialogue, and the sort of contextual clues on the wall. And that’s how you kind of build a story and move around the room, almost like the camera’s a servant or a waiter moving around the room. That was an important touch point. And I’m trying to think of other examples, Seth, but…
Seth Reiss: Well, Starving Angel obviously was [inaudible 00:35:31] Mark wanted the cast to watch that movie, and there’s elements of our movie and that take [inaudible 00:35:39] ripped off. No. In a certainly loving way.
Will Tracy: Yeah. I think we, when talking to people in early stages, we would hear a lot about like, “Ooh, it’s tricky melding those tones,” right?
Seth Reiss: Right.
Will Tracy: And it’s just, as writers, it’s not something we really thought about because for us it felt like, yeah, the comedy and the thriller elements were kind of coming from the same mechanism and it seemed clear what the tone was to us and how to do it, and I think to Mark as well. But I think what we didn’t realize was the real concerns come down the road when you’re shooting, and especially in the edit, to make something feel both funny and tense or horrific at the same time without feeling too arch, right? Without feeling like you’ve over egged the custard in either direction where the satire feels too big and obvious or the horror beats are too punishing and jump scary and it just feels like a weird tonal mishmash. And that stuff is in the edit to get that right.
Seth Reiss: Yeah. I think the movie can be summed up in the 10 seconds in which there’s a gunshot and then we cut to Nicholas Holt’s character who flippantly says, “I didn’t see that coming.” I mean, that’s the movie, because for the audience, and when I watch it with audiences, a bunch of times at this point, they’re horrified by that moment. And it cuts to Nick, he says that and they laugh. And so the movie could have gone in this extremely, extremely grim direction, but the way that’s paced and the way it cuts back to Nick, it’s like, no, no, we’re not losing that charm and humor that you’ve become accustomed to throughout the movie up until this point.
And I think the same thing sort of happens when, it’s another sequence with Nick where he cooks, and I think it’s actually quite a sad, humiliating scene. I think it’s kind of my favorite in the movie. And then we’re kind of scared a little bit what’s going to happen, and then we see the title card, Tyler’s Bullshit, and they immediately, the audience immediately laughs. And so it’s really balancing those two things. And that is a credit to pace and tone, and that’s created by Mark and our editor Chris Elson.
Will Tracy: When you get characters like that in a pressurized situation and they’re trapped in a room, people get honest really quickly and some of their cultural pretenses drop. And so that honesty, there’s a lot of potential for comedy there. People can start saying what they’re really thinking.
Alison Herman: Yeah. Well, I just wanted to ask about the pace because I thought the movie is structured in a very interesting way where it feels like there’s this real inflection point almost exactly at the halfway mark, which is exactly what you identify, which is when the gunshot happens. And it’s not just the gunshot, it’s a very rapid sequence of events of you go from gunshot to finger chopped off to, “Oh, and by the way, everyone’s going to die.” And we basically know how this is going to end in the space of four minutes. And I thought that was such an interesting choice on your guys’ part and really pivots the movie from this kind of slow buildup to a more surrealist back half. And I wanted to ask you guys what the thinking was behind that choice.
Will Tracy: I think what we liked was to have something like that happen maybe a little bit deeper into the movie than you would expect. But then also after that happens, although everything changes, at another level, nothing changes. The structure continues of here’s the next course, here’s your wine pairing. The elegance of the service, the consistency of the service and the timing of everything actually remains the same, even though the emotional dynamic has completely changed.
Seth Reiss: Which then, to your point, that does make it a little bit more surreal. And that does then make Margot, we’re seeing through Margot’s eyes, this is fucking insane and these people are, I don’t belong here. And I also maybe don’t belong over there either. And because this is completely antithetical to how I would feel or act in this situation. One could argue structurally that the end of act one in our movie happens on page 55, because you could say that the gunshot is sort of the end of act one. But I love that.
And I also love that we made the choice for the chef to say, “Oh no, everyone’s dying tonight.” And I think a lot of people would say, “Well, why would you give away the game so soon? Isn’t it better to have people realize it?” So it’s like, “No, we’re telling you what’s going to happen.” How it happens is way more interesting than what’s going to happen. I’ve always said if there was a black title card at the beginning of the movie that said, the character of Margot gets out, I would be fine with that. Because of course she does. But how it’s how she does it is what matters, is what’s interesting anyway. I think.
Alison Herman: I think we have time for one more question. I think I’m going to cheat and do one real question and maybe one rapid fire before we leave. But for the final question, we ask a lot when guests are on the show about how the pandemic and the coronavirus affected the project, which I’m sure was the case here. But I think your movie is very unique in that the subject of the movie was something that was very affected by COVID. And also that brought out a lot of the dynamics that we see in the movie of the antagonism between the server and the served. And I was just wondering whether or how that played into your guys’ thought process throughout the writing and production here?
Will Tracy: Yeah, I mean we wrote a lot of our early drafts and were kind of already getting everything off the ground long before, but we were getting ready to start shooting and then the pandemic started. We were getting closer to that end of production. And so then it kind of, there was some thought of, oh, does this… Because it affected the restaurant industry so deeply, is this something that we need to acknowledge? Does this make the movie less effective? Does it make it actually more interesting?
And then there was quite a bit of debate. It is directly referenced in the film. There’s one of the kind of investor characters says, “He kept you open through COVID, you prick.” And there was a bit of back and forth about does that date us to this particular time and place and will it not have much resonance in later years? And do we want the movie to feel like a bit more timeless or universal and not like it’s pegged to a specific moment in… But in a way I felt like that line is-
Seth Reiss: I lost this argument.
Will Tracy: Yeah.
Alison Herman: He said you’ll talk about it later.
Seth Reiss: Yeah, we can talk about that.
Will Tracy: I think ultimately McKay was in my corner or at some point, something, “Oh, I love that line.” So it kind of felt like, okay, I had someone in my corner. But was, I think ultimately it says, it’s not so much a line about COVID or that time period in particular. I think it kind of eloquently summed up maybe how imbalanced that relationship between the investor and Chris- [inaudible 00:42:40]
Seth Reiss: Servile. Like chef needs chef. Chef is the servant of him.
Will Tracy: And also brings to mind like, oh, they kept them open through that and how difficult that must have been for the people in that kitchen. And it dredges up a lot of feeling, right?
Seth Reiss: Yeah, and also just COVID being a part of the production. I mean, we were shooting at the height of Delta and we did not shut down once. And I’m sure that is a miracle, but to watch the infrastructure of testing, and I would say it was pretty blown away by the lengths to which we all went to make sure that the set was as COVID free and safe as we possibly could make it. And…
Will Tracy: We killed dozens, but.
Seth Reiss: Oh, dozens. Dozens died, but not of COVID. Not of COVID.
Will Tracy: Not of COVID. Yes, right, we should-
Seth Reiss: Something else. But not of COVID. And it was pretty remarkable to watch. And I do think it does create a sort of boy, we are in this thing together. I really hope none of us get sick. And we’re in Savannah, and please eat outside if you can, because they’re allowing indoor dining. So please if you can. And I think we followed that to a certain extent and we did create a sense of comradery going through it. And I hope we never have to go through it again, because it sucks.
Will Tracy: Yeah. Because it was tough, right? Because it is basically a movie set mainly in one room and we’re all kind of packed in that room and going into that room and on a sound stage because that’s a build, that’s not a real practical location. So.
Seth Reiss: We called it the COVID Den.
Will Tracy: The COVID Den. Right. That’s cool. So yeah, you were very aware of being a little bit boxed in, but there’s also a way in which that may have added a slight good, interesting frisson of tension and claustrophobia to the movie.
Alison Herman: Yeah. Well I think we are out of time, but for the final question, since this is a movie about food, I did want to ask you both if there’s one particular memorable meal or restaurant that you would like to shout out as we end this conversation.
Seth Reiss: Let’s just do Savannah’s Finest.
Will Tracy: Let’s do something in Savannah?
Seth Reiss: Yeah. Call the Savannah’s Finest, we did great in Savannah.
Will Tracy: Yes.
Seth Reiss: Will, you do. We’ll keep going back and forth.
Will Tracy: There’s a restaurant called Common Thread in Savannah, where one of our chef consultants, John Benhase was running that restaurant and that, sort of almost in a way became kind of unofficial cast and crew, canteen of the show where that was a regular stop and we were always treated very, very well.
Seth Reiss: Cotton & Rye in Savannah, amazingly solid. Great burger. Great Burger, Cotton & Rye. Classic Smash Burger. I think those two. Bull Street Tacos in Savannah. Fantastic.
Will Tracy: It’s important to us to kind of save some of these places just because those background actors working in the kitchen are actual local cooks who were actually working in a real working kitchen, were plating and serving, and they did just an incredible job. So.
Alison Herman: That’s amazing. Well, thank you both for taking the time. This was such a great conversation and I hope people see the movie.
Will Tracy: Thank you. Thanks a lot.
Seth Reiss: Thank you. You’re awesome. Thanks.
Speaker 1: On Writing is a production of The Writer’s Guild of America East. This series was created and is produced by Jason Gordon. Our associate producer and designer is Molly Beer. Tech production and original music by Taylor Bradshaw and Stock Boy Creative. You can learn more about the Writer’s Guild of America East online at wgaeast.org. You can follow the Guild on all social media platforms at WGA East. If you like this podcast, please subscribe and rate us. Thank you for listening. And write on.
