The Creator of <em>Succession </em>Is Back With a Movie. There’s a Reason He Rushed to Make It Right Away.
Outside an opulent retreat in the mountains of Utah, the world is going to hell. Thanks to disinformation-spreading tools on the world’s largest social media platform, people are being executed by bloodthirsty mobs and machine-gunned by their neighbors, politicians assassinated and governments crumbling. But inside Mountainhead, the billionaire tech moguls responsible for the chaos are smoking cigars and shooting the breeze, debating whether the eruption of global chaos is a crisis to be managed or a surge of “creative destruction” that will help usher humanity into a brighter future.
If the fictional setting of Mountainhead, the debut feature by Jesse Armstrong, seems a little too close to reality, that’s because it’s meant to be. The movie, which stars Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Ramy Youssef, and Cory Michael Smith, was conceived, written, cast, shot, edited, and released in about six months, an astonishingly short timeline for any director, let alone a first-timer. But then Armstrong, who is also the creator of Succession, isn’t exactly new to the process, or to stories that put a light spin on the already-absurd excesses of 21st-century capitalism. If Succession was about an old-media dynasty losing its footing in a rapidly technologizing world, Mountainhead is about the world that replaced them, one where it’s possible to be plugged in and utterly disconnected at the same time. As the movie begins, Smith’s character, who’s roughly a 70–30 amalgam of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, has just enabled a suite of generative A.I. tools on his social media platform that allow its 4 billion users to create and disseminate undetectable deepfakes, leading to an immediate outbreak of sectarian violence across the world. Youssef’s rival mogul has developed an A.I. that could immediately separate the truth from the lies, but he’s reluctant to bail a competitor out of the hole he’s dug for himself, or at least not while the mayhem keeps sending his stock climbing. So he and the others, including Carell’s Hegel-spouting venture capitalist and Schwartzman’s lifestyle-app developer—the gathering’s poor relation, with a net worth of a mere $500 million—just stay glued to their phones, watching the world self-immolate while they debate which demolished country would be easiest for them to purchase after the killing stops. (Haiti, maybe?)
As Succession viewers might expect, the result is both sobering and riotously comic. The tech bros engage in petty one-upmanship and douse each other in gibberish about interplanetary colonization and going transhuman, while somewhere on the other side of the world people are dying en masse. And the scenes in which Smith’s character attempts to brush off an urgent phone call from “the prez”—“he’s just an arrangement of carbon, you know?”—hit even harder now than they did when I talked to Armstrong during a stop in New York last week. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Sam Adams: You made Mountainhead incredibly quickly—you got the idea in November, shot in March, and now you’re premiering at the end of May. There are a few ways that I could phrase this question, but the most honest is: Why would you do that to yourself?
Jesse Armstrong: What’s the honest answer? I pitched it to Casey from HBO, Casey Bloys, in December. I hadn’t written it, obviously. I wanted it, ideally, to come out in the same mental, geopolitical tech space as I was writing it, which meant, I guess, under six months. Casey and HBO had their schedule, their shape of the year and when stuff comes out. So it made sense for him too, and he was eager to make it work on this contracted timeline.
“I quite like the feeling of being pushed out of the plane door rather than having a lot of time to linger and check my parachute.”
Also, there was a little bit of fear. It was my first time directing, and I was anxious about that, and I knew that if I had tons of time, I would spend it trying to watch every YouTube tutorial about how to make a film and read every book with directors talking about their first filmmaking mistakes.
I felt, in a way, since I knew the appropriate way to shoot this was something pretty similar to Succession—two cameras, loose style—I felt like: Listen, maybe I should just run at it and not have enough time. I won’t even have time to watch one YouTube tutorial on how to make a film, because I’ll be going at such a pace to write and cast this thing to hit the deadline. I quite like the feeling of being pushed out of the plane door rather than having a lot of time to linger and check my parachute.
Given the subject matter and the timeline of Mountainhead, is it fair to say that Elon Musk’s involvement in the 2024 election was a starting place for you?
I’m thinking back now. I don’t think it was clear in November. Certainly DOGE was not … We didn’t know, did we?
Not exactly.
It wasn’t, really—and I’m not being coy. Certainly, seeing all the tech CEOs at the inauguration was very salutary, and the DOGE project, which has almost come and gone within the time span of the production of the movie, definitely infects the world.
But that wasn’t the specific impulse. The germ of the idea was from reading Michael Lewis’ Going Infinite, about Sam Bankman-Fried. I wrote a review of it somewhere, and that kicked me back to a bunch of research that we’d started doing when we did the Matsson character, [Alexander] Skarsgård’s character, on Succession. I started reading a bunch of tech stuff, and I started particularly listening to podcasts and hearing those voices. The Redstones, Murdochs, Maxwells, it wasn’t part of their thing, really, to create a narrative in the mainstream culture. For Zuck and for Elon, for all those tech guys, they all have a story to tell, and it’s part of their modus operandi to be storytellers in public about their own companies. The voices were just available, and for lots of writers, novelists as well, finding the voice of the piece is the thing. It’s a long way ’round of saying the voices were the thing which I couldn’t stop thinking about. The plot is a receptacle to put those voices into.
People are going to watch Mountainhead and think you’re exaggerating the way these people talk, but a sentence like “He’s a decel with crazy P(doom) and zero risk tolerance” is at least based in fact, even if I had to go back to Slate’s tech coverage to figure out some of those words. Is that a problem for a satirist? What do you do when reality is already so far beyond most people’s imagining?
I think that’s just a challenge for if you’re in the so-called satire world space. But as you say, it doesn’t matter; that sentence, the cadence of it, I find pleasing. Maybe it would be cool to invent that. Personally, I prefer not to invent. Sometimes you coin things which feel real, but I’ve always much preferred for it to be the real language, so that if your colleague or somebody in tech is watching this, it feels like we’ve done our research, which I hope we have. I like that bit.
I don’t buy the idea that the world’s so hyper or so extreme that you can’t satirize it. Maybe it’s too aggressive to say it’s an excuse, but you’ve just got to find your angle of attack. The world changes, the old angles don’t work anymore, you’ve got to find a new approach. I think that goes with the territory. You can’t still be making the British satirical series That Was the Week That Was, from the ’60s. Saturday Night Live, they have to find a new way in every week, and so do pieces in the sort of space that I occupy as well.
You mentioned the GoJo storyline on Succession, which obviously covers the same territory as Mountainhead. But were there places you could go with this story that you couldn’t when you had a responsibility to preestablished characters and a four-season narrative?
I had a discussion with myself early on about whether it would be cool for this to be a Succession-related story, or would that make the audience more interested if it was? It tonally is, I think, a distinct space, and I loved it being a stand-alone. I would always tell the writers room for Succession, “Burn the fuel, don’t hold anything back. The time to do it is now.” But there is a bit of your brain which knows there are things that people can say to each other or do to each other from which it is almost impossible to come back. Not having any of those considerations, yeah, I did find liberating.
Mountainhead reminded me a little bit of the jump from the British TV series The Thick of It to the movie In the Loop—both of which you wrote on with Armando Iannucci—in the sense that one is about the relatively small stakes of British politics, and in the other the environment is basically the same, but the stakes change dramatically by virtue of shifting the action to the U.S. It’s the same incompetence and petty squabbling, but now it’s starting wars and people are dying. Succession sometimes hints at the broader repercussions of the Roys’ manipulations, but here we see that the things these characters have created are causing massacres and destabilizing entire countries.
“How clear thinking can end up in morally extreme places, that appeals to me.”
I hadn’t thought about it that way, but I think you’re dead right. With In the Loop, it was important that it was a distinct world, because I think Armando knew that if you had just taken those [Thick of It] characters, there would’ve been an uncomfortable disjuncture between the tones. Even late in the edit of Mountainhead, we were like, “Would it be fun to have an ATN slug on one of these news reports?” It’s like, No, this is not that world. In my opinion, and I’m always happy for everyone else to have their own opinion, this film is more comic, probably, line by line, than Succession, but it is rather darker in geopolitical terms.
The characters in Mountainhead have some pretty nutso ideas about relocating to Mars and “going transhuman” and so forth—which, again, are all drawn, without much modification, from real life. As you dug into that world during your research, were there any particularly surprising beliefs you encountered?
I guess it started off a little bit with Sam Bankman-Fried, the philosophical approach of lots of them—and I think Musk said it’s a close fit for his approach—this “effective altruism,” which I have a lot of time for, because it’s people trying to do the right thing, which is appealing to me. What is funny is, because of the philosophical approach—first principles, no barriers on what we’re thinking—some of the thinkers end up going in eccentric directions and thinking mainly about the application to future generations. Suddenly, there’s this compound-interest, multiplying effect, where the moment you live in now becomes almost irrelevant compared to the amount of people who will be affected in the future, and maybe theoretically, if you count all those lives as the same as the ones who are alive now, the present moment becomes insignificant. You get these weird distortions from very clear philosophical approaches. I guess you can see what happens when that gets applied to one individual in this film, and you can end up in a morally inverted world. How clear thinking can end up in morally extreme places, that appeals to me. I like following arguments to their logical conclusions. Or illogical conclusions.
This isn’t a movie that ends with a website you can visit to make things all better, but if you could stand on a hill and ring the alarm bell for one particular aspect of the tech takeover of society, what seems like the most dangerous thing going on here?
That’s not my territory. If we were in the pub, as we’d say in the U.K., I think I could give you my pitch, but in a way, my pitch wouldn’t be any better than yours. It’d probably be worse, given your background and publication. I am not in that territory in the film. No bell ringing.
Let me ask you specifically about generative A.I., then, which plays a key role in setting the world on fire in Mountainhead. Are you someone who believes there’s a good use case for the technology, or is this just a big light blinking red on humanity?
I would signpost this part of the interview going into “Bloke down the pub chatting” rather than what’s inherent in the movie. In the movie, I guess I would say that the expression of the dangers of generative A.I. and social media, it’s a bunch of shit that could happen that I don’t want the film to focus on too precisely, because that world is so fast-moving and so particular that I haven’t got the expertise to say exactly what’s going to happen. But there’s a bunch of anxieties which are hopefully expressed within the film as a shape of stuff going wrong.
In terms of my specifics, if we were in the pub talking about A.I., I feel like there’s going to be no limit on it. Any limit you set on what it is going to be able to do—“This is the game it’ll never do” or “This is the part of creativity it will never exceed”—will be exceeded. That’s what everyone who works in the field seems to think. Maybe they’ll be wrong, but I’d take them at their word, because it seems to have been right so far.
What I do think is that I’m only interested in other human beings. Not only. I’m interested in reading one story written by an A.I. to see what it’s like, and maybe I’ll be interested once every five years to check in. But I want to know what you think about this film. I don’t want to know what a response of a collection of all the other thoughts that have been ever thought in the world applied to it is. That’s intriguing to look at once.
I guess our only hope as creative people, and also human beings in general, is that we carry on really being interested in other people and what they think of our stuff and what we express as human beings, because you’re going to be able to create a similar crumb of what a person thinks, a really good one and in lots of different tones. But that’s pub talk rather than Mountainhead talk.
Slate
