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Jesse Armstrong trades media moguls for tech titans in Mountainhead. The Succession creator tells DQ about this timely, dystopian feature-length drama, reuniting with some familiar faces and directing his first major project.
Award-winning film and television writer Jesse Armstrong is best known as the man behind HBO’s hugely acclaimed darkly satirical drama Succession, while he also wrote The Entire History of You, one of the standout episodes of dystopian anthology series Black Mirror.
Now, with Mountainhead, the influence of both projects can be found in this story of four tech billionaires postulating about taking over the world while civil unrest spreads across the globe thanks to the rampant rise of AI-generated videos. Written by Armstrong, the HBO film also marks his first major directing credit.
It opens as Randall (Steve Carrell), Venis (Cory Michael Smith) and Jeff (Ramy Youssef) gather at a mountain retreat belonging to Hugo, aka Souper (Jason Schwartzman). But as the ‘Brewsters’ reunite for a boys weekend, they can’t take their eyes off their phones. That’s because they’re sharing constant updates from social media while countries around the world become engulfed by political turmoil, panic buying, stock market crashes and outbreaks of violence – events attributed to new “content tools” released by Venis’s own platform, Traam, that have been used to spread misinformation through generative AI and deepfake videos.
As it happens, Jeff has developed software that can identify AI-generated content – but will he sell his “filter for nightmares” to Venis?
A blend of satirical comedy and drama, and littered with Armstrong’s trademark quick-witted dialogue and imaginative insults, Mountainhead explores the fallout from an outlandish yet frighteningly believable scenario. That, in part, is precisely why Armstrong raced the film through production earlier this year towards its premiere on HBO in the US tomorrow and Sky Atlantic in the UK on Sunday.
“I hope the film will still be watchable in a few years, but the main thing I wanted was that culturally, you live in a certain little bubble where a year, 18 months, feels a long time ago, so I wanted it to come out in the same little pocket [of time] that I was in when I was writing it,” he tells DQ. “And we just about still are, so it needed to be fast from that point of view.”
In fact, Armstrong only pitched the idea for the feature to HBO chairman and CEO Casey Bloys in December, and the exec immediately backed it. The picture and sound were then locked just a fortnight ago.
“It’s been a whirlwind. It’s kind of how I wanted it, but it’s been fast,” Armstrong says. “He [Bloys] would have allowed me to do it slower, but when I mentioned that I wanted it to be a bit lower budget, so I didn’t feel so oppressed by making a first film, and also fast, because of the subject matter, he was very into that and very supportive.”
Since the end of Succession – Mountainhead will debut almost exactly two years after the series finale – the British writer has been developing new projects and “enjoying being at a bit of a slower pace” at home in the UK. It was while writing a review for a book about crypto exchange fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried that he began to read more about a world Succession touched on through the introduction of Alexander Skarsgård’s streaming media giant Lukas Matsson.
“I started reading more and more, and also listening to a bunch of podcasts about tech, the tech world and Silicon Valley,” he says, noting how a writer can pick up a certain tones of voice and vocabularies when listening to people speaking.
“You can hear it first-hand with these [tech] people because they’re on podcasts the whole time, talking about their work and promoting their business interests, so I couldn’t get their tone of voice out of my head. And then the story came out of finding a good receptacle for them talking about the kind of concerns they have.”
But Armstrong didn’t want to impose his own ideas on Venis, Jeff, Randall and Souper. “In a bit of a way, I wanted to say whatever they wanted to say,” he says. “The ideal version is you create the characters and then let them have at it. At some point you do you do feel like you’ve stuck up your aerial and you’re receiving radio waves from the culture, so I let them say whatever they wanted to say. I guess that’s the dream. Obviously you are there holding the pen, but when it’s going well, it does feel like you’re just transcribing.”
He was conscious, however, of ensuring each of the characters could be easily identifiable from one another, and that they didn’t just fall under the collective bracket of ‘tech bros.’ As a result, Randall is the more experienced ‘Papa Bear’ figure, while Venis is at the very top of his game – and the Brewster with the highest net worth. The challenger and potential usurper is Jeff, while the “peripheral guy clinging on for dear life” is Souper – aka Soup Kitchen, because he has the lowest net worth of the group.
“When I was first thinking of it, it was like there is this one voice of tremendous confidence and clarity of philosophical approach,” Armstrong explains. “But then as I thought about the four different points of view and models of tech people who are around, they started to differentiate. They started to define themselves in a constellation against each other.”
As a writer, the challenge of penning the script might have been maintaining the drive of a dialogue-heavy story set largely in a single location with four main protagonists. But Armstrong used those factors to his advantage, as a way to build up the tension as events unfold and relationships unravel.
Similarly, The Entire History of You, from the first season of Black Mirror, features just a handful of main characters, in a story that imagines a future where people can rewatch their own memories.
“It’s for the audience to say whether it’s successful, but those feel like benefits to me,” he says of Mountainhead’s constrained timeline and the location. “I was aware directorially it could become a bit airless if it felt like what it kind of is, which is a TV play that turned into a movie, so I was conscious of that. But a compressed timeline is often a thing you end up doing in a writers room if you’re trying to crank up the level of tension. What could have been restrictions were baked in from the beginning.”
Speaking of directing, Armstrong’s previous experience amounted to a pair of short films, and though he might have been able to take charge of an episode of Succession should he have wished, he was often rewriting scripts until late in the process.
“Time was always a factor, so I just could not have been [directing],” he says. “I’d often go and watch a few takes and talk with the director about what we were doing and then go away and be rewriting the next episode. So I just couldn’t have directed on that show.”
With Mark Mylod, Becky Martin and Andrij Parekh among the “respected” directors on Succession, “it felt a little rude to think, ‘Oh, I could do this. Give me a great episode and I’ll go off and direct that.’ So I was mindful of being respectful to their contribution to the show and not wanting to feel like I was undermining it by saying, ‘I could do your job as well, easily.’”
That meant he was pleased to finally have the chance to direct his own script with Mountainhead – even more so because the tone of the piece is both “very similar and completely different” to Succession. “I knew what that tone was, and with only a limited amount of pre-production and production, the fact that I could just talk about it [as the writer] directly to every head of department and the actors allowed us to move quicker than we could have done if I’d had that extra, often really good, layer of collaboration where the director has a different idea of the scene, character or story, which can be really profitable. But in this case, the stuff we shot on day one needed to be in the movie.”
The rapid pace of production meant Armstrong didn’t have time to “become a visual stylist” or invent a tone wildly different from Succession, meaning the film has a noticeably similar filming style to the long-running series, “which is not that significantly different maybe from [political satire] The Thick of It, [Danish feature] Festen or another documentary-derived, majority-handheld film,” he says.
In fact, there was a strong Succession vibe not just on screen but behind the scenes, as Armstrong asked many of Succession’s creatives – from camera operators and the script supervisor to the first AD and the sound department – to reunite for Mountainhead.
“Basically, it’s a Succession crew, and so that element in a way was like, ‘We’re gonna shoot it two cameras. It’s gonna be loose. We’re not gonna spend a long time if Marcel [Zyskind], this very talented DOP, is happy with the image that we’re getting. Let’s do it as quick as we can.’ So that part of it was really borrowed. Anyone who’s watching it would feel like this is probably a similar visual texture to Succession.”
The Succession vibes go beyond the shooting crew, with Armstrong keen to keep longtime production and writing partners including Frank Rich, Lucy Prebble, Tony Roche, Jon Brown and Will Tracy close at hand in executive producer roles. “I trusted them to give me bad news,” he says. “Early on, I was like, ‘I think there could be a film here, I think I could do it really fast. Please don’t bullshit me if you think it’s gonna be a disaster.’”
Filming the feature was “tight,” with shooting taking place across 22 days. But with two cameras in operation, Armstrong still had room to play with the actors on set with some improvised moments that made the final cut.
“Mostly, you get this freedom, a looseness to the texture that feels more like every day if the blocking isn’t too set,” he says. “I would say some things like, ‘It’s gonna be hard for me to shoot you in silhouette for a whole scene up against Utah out of the window, so maybe you get to be over here, or maybe you’ll get to over there,’ and they’re very experienced. They could adjust to make sure they’re being captured.”
Reflecting on making Mountainhead, Armstrong says he would be keen to direct again, though only for the right project. “I think I could focus well on actors. I know what I like visually, but it’s not natural to me to be a tremendous visual stylist or a natural mover of the camera,” he says. “I like the collaboration, which is between me, the DOP and the camera operators, and they become the dancers and the shot creators. That collaboration, I love. Capturing performances and then the other stuff feels real around that, so that’s the kind of directing I’ll be attracted to.
“So I would do it again. I would also not it again,” he jokes. “It’s a lot of work. I quite like to be the writer who rolls in at nine o’clock and is like, ‘Oh, that’s lovely. Yeah, that lighting setup is great,’ then watches a few takes and wanders away again. That’s a nice role.”
Armstrong is now based back in the UK, where he is developing a pair of solo projects while also hoping to reunite with Peep Show and Fresh Meat partner Sam Bain. “Although we keep in touch with each other’s projects and see each other all the time, we haven’t actually done anything together, so hopefully this film we wrote together, [Broadway-set comedy] Jonty, is going to get made. So to work with him again would be lovely.”
Meanwhile, as Armstrong looks beyond Succession, it’s notable that a number of the creative team who worked on that show now have high-profile projects of their own, not least Tracy (The Regime), Brown (The Franchise), and Mylod and Francesca Gardiner, who have partnered to lead HBO’s new Harry Potter adaptations.
“It’s really nice. They’re all really good people,” he says. “I just wish everyone well, and I’m always around to be checked in on. They’re endlessly fascinating, writers rooms, and running a show is such a weird endeavour that it’s nice to have a little bit of a support group where we can all chat about what it was like and how things go right and wrong in those environments.”
Like that? Watch this! Suggested by AI, selected by DQ
Succession: Jesse Armstrong’s acclaimed HBO series about the power struggles and dysfunction within the super-wealthy Roy family, led by patriarch and media mogul Logan Roy.
Veep: Armando Iannucci’s HBO political satire centres on former senator Selina Meyer as she gets the opportunity to serve as vice-president of the US, but faces an ongoing struggle mishaps and embarrassment while juggling her personal and public life.
Billionaire Island: This Norwegian Netflix series is described as Succession with salmon fishing, as the ruthless owner of a farm plans to buy out a local rival to become the world’s largest salmon farmer.
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tagged in: HBO, Jason Schwartzman, Jesse Armstrong, Mountainhead, Ramy Youssef, Sky, Sky Atlantic, Steve Carrell