Succession creator skewers Silicon Valley with dark tech satire

The Age

6 days ago

We are not long in the company of billionaires Hugo (Jason Schwartzman), Randy (Steve Carell), Jeff (Ramy Youssef) and Ven (Cory Michael Smith) before we realise their poker weekend – a 'tech bro' getaway at Hugo's multimillion-dollar winter estate – is a metaphorical game of chance on which the fate of the world might pivot.
It could be a nod to the scene in Ingmar Bergman's 1957 masterpiece, The Seventh Seal, in which a knight returns from the Crusades and challenges Death to a game of chess. Or it could simply be ripped from recent headlines, and the wrecking ball of global geopolitics and its goal-kickers Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel. Take your pick.
What is certain is that we are on the set of Mountainhead, the feature film directorial debut of Succession writer/director Jesse Armstrong, and that much in the same way Succession picked the bones of the world's media dynasties, Mountainhead cuts deep into both the intersection of power, politics and Silicon Valley, and the globe-shaking personalities who populate it.
Unlike Succession, where the fictional world of the Roy family played out at what felt like an excruciatingly glacial place, Mountainhead aspires to plug into a fast-moving story, not just in terms of how quickly AI is changing the world around us, but also in terms of how unexpectedly and brutally big tech is intersecting with politics.
When Armstrong sat down to write Mountainhead, billionaire Tesla owner Elon Musk was only just taking his first steps leading the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). As the film launches, barely half-a-year later, Musk's foray into political budget-keeping has put Telsa to the torch, and the 53-year-old billionaire has returned to the company, wounded, to refocus on his shareholders.
'To some degree these tech people will be rich forever, but the way in which Musk was kicked off the board of PayPal early in his career by Thiel, the way [OpenAI CEO] Sam Altman was kicked off his board and then over a weekend was then reinstated, the way the Tesla share price rocketed and dropped with [Musk's] involvement with DOGE... the roller coaster is moving very rapidly,' Armstrong says.
'That is true both in terms of share price, and also in terms of [the manner in which] personal reputations get made and destroyed so quickly,' adds the 54-year-old UK-born screenwriter-turned-director. 'There's a real incredibly fast metabolism to the reputations that are being made and destroyed in the tech world right now.'
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There is also something uncomfortably predictive about the story of Mountainhead. This is, plainly, a satire. Much more so than Succession. And yet, it lives in the shadow of real-world headlines about big tech nudging into government, and oligarchy superseding democracy. Like Succession, it's funny, but only until it's in deadly earnest.
Without giving away too much of the story, Hugo (Schwartzman) plays host to three of his tech bros – Randy (Carell), who is a deal-maker but is grappling with some personal news; Ven (Smith), who owns a ubiquitous social media platform; and Jeff (Youssef), who owns a potentially transformative AI – on a weekend, as the enmeshing of their business dealings and global geopolitics takes an unexpected turn.
'I don't have a crystal ball, but I think if you read a bunch of stuff in an area, and there's inferred or stated 100 things that happen in this movie, and you're throwing darts, you're going to end up hitting it a bunch of times,' Armstrong explains, during our visit to the show's set in Utah's ski country.
'You do have that weird slightly, oh, f---, yeah, that was in the show. It does have this weird resonance. But I think it's just because if you're doing good research, and you suppose 100 things, 10 of them might happen in the next 12 months.'
Armstrong's magnum opus, Succession, always had a prevailing sense that it was the Murdoch family rendered in hand-carved soap, but in truth it was just as much about Rupert, Lachlan and Elisabeth as it was about the personalities and pivots of other media dynasties, such as the Redstones, the Sulzbergers and even the Hearsts.
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Mountainhead, too, can play hide and seek in the shadows to a point, but it's also not difficult to sense echoes of real-life big tech players in Randy, Hugo, Ven and Jeff. Exactly who, and how much, is the penumbra in which Armstrong clearly likes to play.
'The thing that appealed to me was an attitude and a tone of voice, which is shared by many tech people,' says Armstrong. 'Then the specifics are shared out among them ... a bit of history, a tone of voice [but ultimately] a group of people who are fictional.
'It can be fun to play those games, and I did a ton of research. So there are fragments in there where you're like, oh, yeah, that's that [or] did he get that story from that?
'In Succession as well, I would openly steal good story shapes,' Armstrong says. 'But the fun thing about stealing is then you can change them as you want. You don't have to respect the reality of what specifically happened. It's a fun game, but in the end, it won't lead you to anything any deeper if you want to play that game with this, I don't think.'
For Armstrong, both as a writer and director, everything pivots on a tone of voice. 'If I don't have that, I can't do it,' he says. 'All the research in the world wouldn't let me write somebody if I didn't know how they would order in a restaurant or talk privately to a romantic partner.
'Once you've got their voice and that voice plays out in private, public, business, romantic, intellectual, therapy, once you've got the voice, I can go anywhere.
'My knowledge still about this world is not going to be comparable with somebody who works in tech or even a really good tech journalist,' he adds. 'But once you're confident in the tone of voice or the facts, the stories that you want to tell become graspable.'
'The form of this is very similar to Succession, but also completely different.'
Jesse Armstrong
One of the challenges in Armstrong's writing is just how close to the flame he likes to make the satire fly. Succession turned into a compelling example of a kind of uncertainty principle: that it was, in theory, satirical, and certainly made its audience laugh at times, but that it was equally dark and dramatic, at times devastatingly so.
Mountainhead dances that dance, too, though it delivers its funny moments with a more conventionally humorous punch.
'I don't think too much about in some ways how the audience will receive it,' he explains. 'Although obviously, in general, that's constantly what you're thinking about when you're writing and directing. [In terms of] how they'll navigate the space between the real and the fictional, once I've done my work setting up the world, that's [for] them to think about.'
Armstrong did consider setting Mountainhead in the Succession universe by including a scene in which ATN, the fictional news network owed by the Roy family, would be seen in the background on a screen.
'And then, as it developed, I thought that it was really subtly tonally different,' Armstrong says. 'And maybe that is the answer to the question in terms of the relationship ... one's relationship to the real world is interesting. And this obviously relates to the real world and so did Succession. It's just finding a comfortable distance.'
What is critical, perhaps, is to remember that Armstrong's creative DNA is naturally comedic. He was a writer on some of Britain's most significant political comedies, such as the television series, The Thick of It, and its spin-off film, In the Loop.
'It's often my way into something to find the bit which feels mad and ridiculous,' Armstrong says. 'In a certain way, I think the subject matter chooses the form, and then you write the form. And the form of this is very similar to Succession, but also completely different.
'You can try and formulate the rules for that, but essentially, they just come out as you write that these people speak like this and their logic can take them to this place. So, [certain] things are allowed, and they're not allowed in another piece. And it's both very technical but also beyond your control once you've set up the maths of the situation.'
Important too, perhaps, is that despite the gravity of the piece overall – or, at least, the gravity of its implications – Armstrong is, essentially, still an optimist. In one scene, Jeff offers this depressing prediction for us: 'Earth is like an all-you-can-eat buffet; no one's going to stop until we clear all the hot plates.' It does not have to be so, says Armstrong.
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'I do feel I am personally optimistic,' he says. 'And that line that Ramy has, I do feel a bit like that. I feel certain pity for us in that we can't really help ourselves, that the stuff that's there, we take and we use, and our ability to take and use stuff, maybe our only hope is that we can keep mitigating that at a fast enough rate that our destructive tendencies can be tempered. And I also worry that we won't be able to do that, but I can only hope we do. I'm a bit like the guys in the film, I'm a techno-optimist.'