In director Mark Mylod’s next feature film, The Menu, a group of people travel to a remote island for an intimate and uniquely lavish dining experience with the acclaimed Chef Slowik (Ralph Fiennes). Accompanying Chef Slowik superfan Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) to the experience is Anya Taylor-Joy’s Margot who seems to be the only one wary of the tension building throughout the night’s events. As the courses progress, so too does Chef Slowik’s recipe for revenge.

During his interview with Collider’s Perri Nemiroff, Mylod discusses “accentuating the positive” to avoid becoming a Chef Slowik in his own craft and how he views past choices as stepping stones to where he is in his career now. The director also exposes his self-proclaimed “basic palette,” and how he was able to work side-by-side with some of the world’s greatest chefs, including chef Dominique Crenn, owner of the three-Michelin-starred restaurant, Atelier Crenn. You can read the full interview below.

PERRI NEMIROFF: A nice and complicated question to start here because I've grown a little obsessed with this Joe Wright quote that someone shared with me recently about how a director should only take on scripts that they feel they know a secret about. You get a great script, but what is a The Menu secret that makes this film uniquely your own?

MARK MYLOD: Fantastic question. I love that quote. I think my first secret was how little I knew. I had to go in to talk about and pitch for this script with the producers and with Searchlight while really not giving [away] just how incredibly ignorant at that stage I was of this world. And secondly, just really how incredibly basic my particular palette is. So there was that to it. And in that way, I suppose Margot was my entrée into the script. That was my entrance into this world, as for, I hope, many of our audience.

What other secret? So I suppose my secret would be probably the same as Ralph's if you were to ask him that question. I don't want to speak for him too much, but it was a big bonding thing for us when we first spoke about the character of Chef Slowik when I sent him the script. When we spoke about the chef, neither of us wanted a movie baddie. We'd speak about Anthony Hopkins and his manifestation of Hannibal Lecter, for instance, and how fantastic that was. We didn't want to approach it that way. I'm sure that Anthony didn't approach Hannibal as a baddie, but what we did see was an artist in pain and specifically consumed with self-loathing for the bad choices he'd made, and that was the key secret for me. I suppose that my connection to Chef Slowik was my recognition of all the bad choices I've made in my attempt to be an artist, and my attempts to try to put that right. In the case of Chef Slowik, of course, he feels he has nowhere to go. I did feel I had somewhere to go. I felt that I could make something of The Menu that I was truly, truly proud of.

Ralph Fiennes as Chef Julian Slowik smiling softly in The Menu
Image via Searchlight Pictures

I have so many follow-up questions. First, is there anything in any of your past films or shows that, at the time, you didn't like, and since, you've had the opportunity to hone that specific technique or skill?

MYLOD: Yeah, it's difficult to actually damn any particular project or choice, and if I damned all my poor choices this interview would go on for several weeks. But it is true, and I think in any career that one thing leads to another. There's a stepping stone or a misstep and a building block to the next one. My television career has been quite long I hope it goes on a bit longer still, but specifically when I first got together with David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss] on Game of Thrones, really not long after I kind of made this pact with myself to take on, hopefully, more bold, more complex, more scary choices in my work. With David and Dan, I just presumed that they gave me a gig on Game of Thrones because they liked The Affair pilot that I'd just done before that. It turned out, they hadn't even seen that. What they loved was the pilot I'd done of the British version of Shameless back in 2005 or something, which was a tiny budget project I was very proud of. But these connections and these stepping stones and how you get from one place to another, and that eventually led from Game of Thrones onto Succession. If I spend my time looking back on all the bad choices I made, I'd just be swallowed up in self-loathing too much and I'd become Chef Slowik and then trap all my cast and do terrible things to them on set. So I'm left with no choice but to try and accentuate the positive a little bit.

I think anyone with a deep passion, especially with an artistic drive, probably has that exact same problem. You just said that you have a very basic palette. What's your favorite food that someone who considers themselves a foodie might roll their eyes at?

MYLOD: Yeah, probably it's a pasty. I'm not sure you'd know what a pasty is in America. It's the equivalent of an empanada, I suppose. I grew up in South Devon in this really rural area of southwest England and a pasty is the local thing that the farmers would eat there. I love it. I live in America now, I live in Brooklyn, but I still crave it. And fish and chips, which is the ultimate English cliché! It's embarrassing, but I love it. I absolutely love it.

And on Game of Thrones as I mentioned, we'd go to posh restaurants, David and Dan and I, because there are beautiful restaurants in Spain where we shot a lot, and I was always the peasant in the room. I would enjoy the experience, and they're great company, but I'd always be left slightly cold by the whole thing. As I said, that's why Margot was such an entrée into the piece for me.

You're speaking my language. I'm a very basic eater. I'll go to a fancy restaurant with friends and somehow I'll pare the most elaborate dish down to just a piece of chicken.

MYLOD: [Laughs] Yeah, exactly!

I'm the worst.

MYLOD: On the side. Just, I'm not going to eat it, actually.

the menu ralph fiennes anya taylor joy
Image via Searchlight Pictures

I wanted to reference a quote I caught in the press notes. You had said, "I was absolutely paranoid about authenticity.” Whether it was a big broad point or a really small detail, what would you say you were the most paranoid about, and then what wound up putting your mind at ease that you would nail it?

MYLOD: Brilliant. I love that question. What made me paranoid was two things. Number one was, I think personally, satire, for that element within this beautiful mashup of tones that is part of our storytelling, I think satire works best from a position of authenticity. And perhaps more emotionally important for me was I never wanted, even though I'm poking at the excesses of that particular art form in that world, I never wanted to be disrespectful to the people that actually work and work so damned hard because man do people work hard in that industry. And I never wanted anybody going there and go, "Well, that guy, what the heck's he doing with that weird blender thing? You'd never be doing that." So I just wanted to serve them well by actually reflecting their world as accurately as I possibly could.

To do that was to just bring in all the people that knew all the stuff that I didn't on a level beyond which I could ever know, even with my deep-dive research. Specifically, first case, Ethan Tobman, our production designer ... [was] already deeply immersed in that whole high-end restaurant culture and a brilliant designer in himself. Then beyond that, I sent the script to Dominique Crenn, one of the world's greatest chefs, the first woman, and I think still the only woman in America to have three Michelin stars.

Dominique loved the script and came aboard as our collaborator, and with her team, and with a local brilliant chef in Savannah, Georgia where we shot, John Benhase, and Kendall, our food stylist, all these people who knew that world so much better than me, they just ensured and worked with me to create this boot camp for all our on-screen cooks. Dominique spent time evolving the look of the menu with me and my team so it was absolutely right for that kind of high-end cuisine. She spent time with Ralph which was just so helpful to him in terms of really understanding the whole philosophy of her as an artist. Bringing in the real-deal people just imbued me with a security and a sense of authenticity to the piece.

I want to highlight every single person in this ensemble, but in an effort to touch on at least two, which two cast members have the most polar opposite ways of working, where when you're working on a scene that's focused on their characters, you know that you're going to have two wildly different experiences as an actor's director?

MYLOD: If we were doing, perhaps, a TV series, an ongoing series, I could probably answer that question very clearly. It's funny, you have a certain number of days on the set, and therefore, in that situation, it was clear to me that from the outset I needed to set up my creed and ask the actors to come to that, which they did incredibly, with great spirit. I'm obsessed with Robert Altman, and the way I wanted to get that sense of immersion into this world, specifically into the dining room, and also within our kitchen, I wanted to work this Altman-esque way where everybody was on set the whole time, everybody was mic'd all the time, and everybody could improv up a storm. In the foreground, we obviously have our lovely script, but beyond that, I wouldn't say cut, and the camera would just, in a Darwinian sense, just go wherever something interesting might be happening, if somebody would find something interesting. So everybody kind of folded into that idea. I expect that in a different project, many of the actors would have a slightly different way. We didn't have a specifically method actor, we didn't have a specifically theater-based actor, but what we did have was a great ensemble, and we all found this way to come together and take the journey together.

I know that sounds like a horrible cliché, but it's quite literal in this case in that we had one week's rehearsal and my version of rehearsal is to sit around in the room and chat with the actors. And what's happening as we talk through the script and issues that we find interesting in the script is by osmosis, we're all kind of invisibly tuning into the same frequency so that by the time, even if we don't agree, we're all tuning in there. And so by the time we get up in front of the camera, we're all making the same movie, as I think Sydney Pollack said.

Beyond that, just that ensemble actually being on set with any kind of improvisational extension to a scene, the rules of improvisation, of positive affirmation, you feed off your fellow actor positively. You give and you accept whatever they offer, and you build that. So it's a very positive manifestation of the scene and extension of the scene. And that in itself, just on a basic psychological level, imbues a camaraderie of our company. So we built this very tight little clan, and we're all in a bubble of COVID at the time anyway. So I suppose it's a very long-winded way of saying that I said, "Hey, can you all come and play like this?" And everybody said, "Yes."

the menu anya taylor joy social featured
Image via Searchlight Pictures

Given that way of filming this movie, what scene would you say changed the most from how you originally envisioned it playing out and what your actors wound up doing with it in the end?

MYLOD: The end. The end morphed and evolved a lot during production. But I don't want to say anything more than that about it. The ride of the film is so much about the unexpected. What I will say, I wanted a more operatic end to the movie. I wanted Chef Slowik to end the film in a way that felt a little more spectacular, if you like. So we evolved that really through production. So I was doing a bit kind of nighthawk story boarding. So we'd shoot all day and then I'd go and think about it -- and there was a specific image that I wanted to base the ending on, which was, if you've ever seen the titles, the opening credits to Chef's Table, there's a beautiful tabletop image which is based on Grant Achatz's Alinea Restaurant. It's a deconstructed dessert with meringues and chocolate and all beautiful things being smashed up on a tabletop. I wanted to do a kind of, not just a tabletop version, but a restaurant-wide version of that. And getting the whole perspective and balance and design of that right was really, really fun. It involved literally every department working on the film. So in between the shooting and the normal prep of the movie, we were trying to create this big set piece in the evenings as we went along. That was really joyful. But it did, it quite radically changed.

The Menu is served in theaters on November 18.