How ‘Succession' creator Jesse Armstrong freshly explores mega wealth through tech bro one-upmanship in ‘Mountainhead'

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6 days ago

Succession creator Jesse Armstrong is continuing to use his distinctive satirical tone to explore how the 1 percent wields power over the world. In his directorial debut Mountainhead, Armstrong hones in on the oversized influence of a group of tech bro billionaires played by Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Ramy Youssef, and Cory Michael Smith.
The HBO film, which will premiere on HBO and Max on May 31, finds the four friends tucked away in a modern mansion in the snowy Utah mountains as one of their social media apps spurs global unrest and violence due to unrestricted generative AI.
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At the Mountainhead premiere held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City on Thursday, Carell spoke to reporters on the red carpet about the "overwhelming" experience of slipping into the identity of a billionaire. Early in the film, his character Randall, who ranks highest in the group in terms of seniority, is embittered when his net worth falls below that of Youssef's Jeff, who's created tech that safeguards against the dangers of AI.
"When somebody is worth 60, 200 billion dollars, the actual amount doesn't even mean anything anymore, I think, to these people. It's a number," Carell said. "But the number itself kind of means something, if that makes any sense. There is a hierarchy within that, even though the actual physical ability to buy things doesn't really change between 60 and 200 billion. But the fact that within this hierarchy of four people, he's second and may end up being third is not a good thing. So that's a huge component of all of this."
Armstrong, who traces his script inspiration back to writing a review of Michael Lewis' book about Sam Bankman-Fried, explained to Gold Derby why he's keen on examining the lives of the ultra wealthy. "I guess it's not especially the 1 percent-y wealth that interests me — I think it's the power that comes with that. So for myself, I wouldn't tend to write things that were necessarily just about rich people. It's the fact that they have that power on the world. And that's what Logan Roy (Brian Cox) and his family had, and it's what these guys have, or at least some of them. And that's the bit that I'm really interested in: Why is the world the way it is, and who's shaping it?"
SEE HBO unveils trailer for Jesse Armstrong's Mountainhead
In the film, the four protagonists are decidedly separate from the rest of the world as they stay put at the titular Mountainhead mansion that belongs to Schwartzman's character (who is nicknamed Souper for having the lowest net worth in the group with nary a billion to his name). Armstrong detailed how the secluded property was found and its significance to the storyline.
"Paul Eskenazi, location manager from Succession, helped us find it. We looked at a lot of places in Canada and Utah, and we wanted to be somewhere sequestrated away from other people. And that's a common thing about wealth, right? Private planes, gated communities. So it needed to feel isolated. It also needed to feel isolated for some of the action that happens in the movie. I wanted them to feel like they were almost like a horror movie removed."
Notably, Mountainhead came together in less than a year's time. Executive producer Will Tracy sees the project as "the perfect thing" to release in our current sociopolitical climate.
"In many ways, that was part of the appeal, is the urgency of it, that we can maybe get it out very soon, before anyone else had a crack at this fairly new world of government that has in some ways been captured by the techno-futurists, by the Musks and so forth of the world," he said. "It's changing so rapidly, what's happening in the government, so hopefully we got it right."
Tracy also spoke to the appeal of telling stories spotlighting the 1 percent.
"I think it starts with the characters and the kind of small, more human stories we want to tell about those people — Succession being kind of a family story, and this being kind of a story about male friendship, in a way. And we tell those stories on a very small level," he said. "But the finance and the money and the power just raises the stakes of what these, I think, very emotionally difficult people, the ripple effects they can have on our world, which, as we're seeing right now, those ripple effects can be quite large ripples — waves even. Tsunamis."
Mountainhead premieres Saturday, May 31 at 8 p.m. ET/PT on HBO and Max.
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