Latest news with #FilmmakerToolkit
New York Post
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Post
‘Naked Gun' director Akiva Schaffer ‘threatened to quit' to save this ‘polarizing' scene
Warning: spoilers below for 'The Naked Gun.' Leslie Nielsen would be proud. Director Akiva Schaffer, 47, has revealed that he 'threatened to quit' the 'Naked Gun' reboot to save a scene that the movie's other writers wanted to cut. 8 Akiva Schaffer speaks onstage during the 'Chip 'N Dale: Rescue Rangers' premiere at El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood, California, on May 18, 2022. Getty Images for Disney 8 Pamela Anderson and Liam Neeson in the newly released 'The Naked Gun' reboot. ©Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection 'It was polarizing in script reads,' Schaffer said on Monday's episode of IndieWire's 'Filmmaker Toolkit' podcast. 'People I really respect, like Andy Sandberg, when he read it for me, he was like, 'Snowman's the best. Do not let them cut it,' knowing it would be cuttable.' 'It makes sense once you see the movie, but at one point I did have to threaten to quit,' he added. The 'polarizing' montage in question comes when Frank Drebin Jr. (Liam Neeson) and Beth (Pamela Anderson) share a short romantic getaway in a snowy cabin. 8 Liam Neeson as Frank Drebin Jr. and Pamela Anderson as Beth in 'The Naked Gun' (2025). ©Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection After using a magical spell book to bring a snowman to life, the pair engage in a threesome with the snowman until he suddenly turns violent. Schaffer, who co-wrote the reboot with Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, admitted that he did cut down part of the montage just in case it was completely removed from the film. The Lonely Island alum was ultimately proven right when the sequence became 'the No. 1 scene' in the entire movie. 8 Paul Walter Hauser, Akiva Schaffer and Liam Neeson on the set of 'The Naked Gun' (2025). AP 'After the first test screen, it was the No. 1 scene in the movie,' Schaffer said. 'The people who really fought me on it after ate a lot of crow without me asking. I tried to let them off the hook easy, and go, 'That's fine,' but they were like, 'No, dude, we were wrong.'' Elsewhere during the podcast, Schaffer revealed that they only included the snowman montage as a throwback to the original 1988 'Naked Gun' starring Leslie Nielsen as Frank Drebin and Priscilla Presley as Jane Spencer. In the original, Nielsen and Presley's characters appear in an absurd scene that shows them running hand-in-hand on the beach and laughing during a showing of the dark war drama 'Platoon' while Herman's Hermits play in the background. 8 Liam Neeson as Frank Drebin Jr. in the new 'The Naked Gun' reboot. AP 8 Pamela Anderson as Beth in the new 'The Naked Gun' reboot. AP 'We got to the point in our script, we were like, 'Wow, this love story deserves a montage,'' Schaffer explained. 'The original 'Naked Gun' has a very famous, very good montage set to 'I'm Into Something Good.'' 'We knew it had to be different than that,' he continued. 'And then also, there's been 30 years of making fun of montages, whether it's 'Team America' doing a montage or whatever, there's not a lot of room left in the montage. We were debating not doing a montage and had a few other ideas.' It wasn't until the 'Hot Rod' director got up to use the bathroom late one night that the snowman idea popped into his head. 8 A poster for 'The Naked Gun' featuring Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson. Copious Management/Paramount 'When I got back in bed, it had been percolating that day in the writers' room, and I just saw the entire thing and wrote it into bullet point notes, and then texted it to Dan and Doug,' he shared. 'The next morning, I came into the writers' room and they were like, 'Yeah, done.'' But Schaffer was not the only one to 'love' the 'polarizing' montage, because Pamela Anderson has also spoken about how much she enjoyed shooting that particular scene with her rumored new beau, Liam Neeson. 'I remember Liam and other people saying, 'What is this?'' the 'Baywatch' alum, 58, told Entertainment Weekly. 'But I was like, 'It makes perfect sense to me.' It feels like Akiva's signature.' 8 Akiva Schaffer, Erica Huggins and Seth MacFarlane attend a 'The Naked Gun' special screening at Paramount Pictures Studios on July 14, 2025, in Los Angeles, California. Getty Images for Paramount Pictures 'I know he fought really hard to keep that in because as things grow and then there's budgets and they figure out what they want to use, he was insistent that had to stay in,' she added. 'He's throwing himself on the sword for that one, so he knows something we don't.' Anderson joked that it was even more fun filming the snowman montage than watching it. 'She was in bed with us, so the threesome with the snowman was quite interesting,' Anderson said of the snowman's puppeteer. 'There are very specific rules dealing with people in costumes — you're not supposed to directly talk to the puppeteer. And this was a full-on, Hansen-level costume.' 'Inside, there's a person with these night vision goggles, or whatever you want to call them, in there telling which way to turn,' she added. 'It's very, very complex. It's very robotic.'
Yahoo
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
To Make ‘Jurassic Park: Rebirth,' Gareth Edwards Had to Set a Production Speed Record
David Koepp handed Universal his 'Jurassic World: Rebirth' script in December 2023. In March 2024, director Gareth Edwards met with producers Frank Marshall and Steven Spielberg. Production began three months later, on June 13, 2024, and wrapped last October. For a VFX-heavy blockbuster slated for Fourth of July weekend 2025, it is a virtually unheard-of turnaround. When Edwards was a guest on this week's episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, he discussed how the hardest aspect of the shortened production schedule was being hired just three months before shooting. More from IndieWire Brad Pitt Says Bradley Cooper's 'Maestro' Is 'One of the Best Movies of This Decade' 'She Rides Shotgun' Trailer: Taron Egerton Is an Ex Con Protecting His Daughter from Corrupt Cops in Thriller 'It was the same amount of prep I had on 'Monsters,' which I shot with three of us in a van,' said Edwards, referencing his 2010 festival breakout that catapulted him to becoming a studio director. 'Usually you get at least two-and-a-half years from the day they call you, to the day you finish the movie.' That was the schedule Edwards had on 'Godzilla,' 'Rogue One,' and 'The Creator.' When Universal wanted to cut it in half for one of Hollywood's biggest spectacle franchises, Edwards tried to push back. 'I remember day one, we went to Universal and there was Donna Langley and Peter Kramer, the heads of Universal,' said Edwards. 'And I put my hand up, 'Yeah, Gareth, at the back.' I'm like, 'Can we push the release date?'' The movie that hits theaters today, only 16 months after that meeting, shows no signs of being short-changed. The action set pieces and visual effects are among the very best since Spielberg's original. Edwards came up as a self-taught VFX artist and has the reputation for being not only one of the most innovative directors of VFX but also someone whose creative process combines conception with execution, leading to far greater efficiencies. 'I think I've always feel that the process is as important as the thing you're making the product,' said Edwards. 'The way you make a film is to me so fundamental, and obviously doing this movie, [we had to do that].' Edwards brought aboard Jim Spencer, his producing partner on what he called his 'two most guerilla' projects, 'Monsters' and 'The Creator,' but not in an effort to convert the 'Jurassic Park' team to their ways. 'Early on, [Spencer and I said], 'We can't change the machine,' said Edwards. 'If you try to fight the machine that is this massive blockbuster, the way these [are made], if you try to reinvent the process, 'Oh, we're not going to shoot it like this, we're going to shoot it more like this,' and really go against it, it's going to run over you,' said Edwards, indicating he was speaking from experience. 'I think you can change the machine, and do things differently, but there's a limit when you've got a really limited timeframe with three months pre-production, getting everyone on the same page to reinvent the process massively is not possible,' he said. 'It was more like, choose your battles, and my main goal was, 'Let's go to real locations.'' Edwards' philosophy: Even if those real backdrops will be significantly altered and augmented, even to the point of even no longer being recognizable, being in a real place is why his VFX-driven films feel so grounded. That 'Jurassic World: Rebirth' was able to quickly land on a main location was serendipitous. In their first meeting, Spielberg told Edwards the franchise was looking to move on from Hawaii, which represented original 'Jurassic Park' locale Isla Nublar. For the nearby Ile Saint-Hubert — an equatorial island off the coast of South America, which we learn once housed a secret lab creating hybrid dinosaurs — they were scouting Costa Rica and Thailand. 'I couldn't be better placed for this conversation because I did 'Monsters' in Costa Rica, and we looked high and low in that country for crazy primordial jungle scapes and beaches, and we'd just done that with 'The Creator' in Thailand,' said Edwards. In that first meeting, he made it clear that Thailand, specifically Phang Nga Bay, was exactly what Spielberg wanted. 'So it all clicked really quickly and it probably saved us some time. I didn't have to scout all those locations because I knew most of them.' Visual effects supervisor and second unit director David Vickery's team quickly shot footage of the locations, which became virtual 3D renderings that allowed Edwards and his collaborators to work virtually. 'I said to the studio when we started, 'We've got three months, we cannot make a mini version of this film in pre-viz, we haven't got time,' said Edwards. 'But, then we had virtual cameras, it's like there's a little volume space and they set it up in the office and essentially you could see in real time, an Unreal Engine version of your ship and the [dinosaur].' Working virtually, Edwards could go through his creative process of designing the action of a big set piece while allowing department heads to figure out what they needed to prep. 'It's like a jigsaw puzzle where you haven't got the box, you don't know what the picture is, but you start going, 'Well, we need a shot like this,'' said Edwards. 'Going through the motions of shooting those shots [with a virtual camera], it then allowed other people to go, 'I think we're going to need a helicopter.' 'I think we're going to need a drone here.' 'It creates all these ingredients so that the production can start to make all those things happen… It's just like controlled chaos, really.' Universal Pictures will release 'Jurassic World: Rebirth' in theaters on Wednesday, July 2. To hear Gareth Edwards' full interview, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform. Best of IndieWire The Best Lesbian Movies Ever Made, from 'D.E.B.S.' and 'Carol' to 'Bound' and 'Pariah' The Best Thrillers Streaming on Netflix in June, from 'Vertigo' and 'Rear Window' to 'Emily the Criminal' All 12 Wes Anderson Movies, Ranked, from 'Bottle Rocket' to 'The Phoenician Scheme'
Yahoo
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘The Eva Victor Grad Program': Inside the Year-and-a-Half the Director Spent Preparing to Make ‘Sorry, Baby'
Comedian and actor Eva Victor had previously been hired to write screenplays, but sitting down to write 'Sorry, Baby' during COVID lockdown was different. 'It was a little bit rebellious, it was the script that no one was asking me to write,' said Victor while a guest on this week's episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. 'This is the movie I want to write if I die tomorrow. I just kind of needed to get this out [of me], and it was becoming more painful to not write it, than to write it.' It is very personal film, one that Victor (who uses she/they pronouns) long saw themselves also starring in, as the protagonist Agnes. But Victor feared that simultaneously starring in and directing their first feature film would compromise both roles. Conversely, initially entertaining the idea of bringing on another director brought clarity to the dilemma. More from IndieWire SCAD Takes Cannes: IndieWire's Future of Filmmaking 'The Cat in the Hat' Trailer: Bill Hader Gets Animated for Dr. Seuss Adaptation 'I realized that I desperately wanted to direct it. I just felt scared of not knowing [how], I never went to film school. My only time making stuff on my own had been videos with my iPhone,' Victor said. Victor's iPhone comedies built an online following, including director Barry Jenkins, whose Pastel Productions would produce 'Sorry, Baby.' One thing Jenkins saw in those internet videos — although Victor didn't at the time see it themselves — was that they were already demonstrating a strong directorial sensibility. Jenkins and his partners at Pastel, including Adele Romanski and Mark Ceryak, would become advisors to what they called 'The Eva Victor Grad Program,' which started with a question posed to Victor: What do you need to prepare to direct? 'I have an issue,' explained Victor. 'If someone asks me a question, I come back with like pages and pages of an answer.' The result is what universities might call a 'self-guided' course of study, which Victor walked us through while a guest on the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. No course of study will give a director 'a vision' for a film, which is an essential ingredient. 'It was about slowing down and being like, 'Look, I know how I want this to look and feel. I need to surround myself with like geniuses to help me execute this and to help me understand why an image feels so important to me on a technical level, so that I understand what story we're telling and the vocabulary of the film,' said Victor. It would take time for Victor to learn the tools and process. And while unemployment is stressful, it supplied Victor a year-and-half of immersing themselves in the steps to get to the point they felt confident they could direct 'Sorry, Baby.' 'I would go look up the curriculum of a bunch of film schools,' said Victor. 'I would watch the films and I would read the books, [which] were these technical books.' There are so many facets to filmmaking, and filmmaking books can lead to falling down overly comprehensive rabbit holes. It's here, in retrospect, the self-guided nature of Victor's deep dive wasn't always the most productive use of time, as the scope of the discussion was beyond what they felt they needed to know. What became important from this process was understanding what tangible steps and exercises Victor would need to do next. Explained Victor, 'I read the books that I think make sense to read, and now obviously I need to do something different because this is very heady and it's a not impractical, but non-practical, it's not the action of doing something.' '[Reading filmmaking books] became, 'OK, now I know what a shot list is, how do you make a shot list? How do films that I love shot list?' So I analyzed films,' said Victor. 'I went through all of 'Certain Women' and took a screenshot of every setup, and [said], 'OK, so let me guess at [director] Kelly Reichardt's shot list.'' Victor realized there were limitations to reconstructing Reichardt's actual shot list, as aspects of the coverage were likely left on the editing room floor, but it became important to get inside the thought process behind the choices. 'It's an attempt at understanding the scope and the reasons why the camera is where it is, and how you can edit things together,' said Victor. Victor's transition from scene analysis to storyboarding was seamless, as analyzing films like 'Certain Women' 'quickly becomes, 'OK, that's how she did it,' explained Victor. 'But how am I going to do it?' 'Why does this coverage make sense for her story and what kind of coverage makes sense for my stories?' And that became storyboarding.' Victor spent five months storyboarding. It would prove to be one of her most valuable schooling steps. '[I] finally put to paper the images that had been lasting in my mind, so that I could show people the wide [shot] of the house at the beginning, and even just to show myself,' said Victor. 'It was almost like editing the film once, to see if I liked the edit.' One of the big visual challenges Victor would start working through was that 70 of the 84 scenes in 'Sorry, Baby' take place in a small New England cottage. Practical locations with tight interior spaces are often where low-budget independent films go to die, and Victor would need the cottage to visually express distinct phases of Agnes (Victor) and best friend Lydie's (Naomi Ackie) lives. Victor would have to prove to herself, but also make the case to her savvy producers, that she could pull off what could be a significant, self-imposed limitation. 'The cottage has to do a lot, and it has to go through a transformation on its own,' said Victor. 'I wanted the cottage to be able to exist on the spectrum of a warm cozy nest when Lydie is around, and then sort of this house of horrors when Agnes feels lonely.' 'Sorry, Baby' is a non-linear film, moving between the time Lydie and Agnes are grad student living together in the cottage, and then later when Agnes stays on to teach at their university. While Agnes is isolated and feeling stuck in the cottage, Lydie is off living her life in New York City and growing (discovering she's gay, falling in love, and having a baby). 'It's really about showing someone how time passes in the same places,' said Victor. 'A cottage in the woods is like a horror movie thing, and it's also a rom-com thing, so it's helpful to have our associations with images to then use them to tell Agnes' subjective experience of how this house transforms in different moments.' The five months of storyboarding was beneficial, but it triggered a new fear in Victor: How does set work as a director? 'I took five months to make storyboards, I don't have five months to make [the film], so I asked my friend Jane Schoenbrun to go to their set and shadow,' said Victor. The most valuable part of shadowing Schoenbrun, was watching them prep 'I Saw the TV Glow.' Victor acknowledged they are a very different filmmakers, but in a way that was for the best — seeing how Schoenbrun's distinct and clear vision was translated to the 'TV Glow' department heads was helpful. Prior to that, Victor did not understand what happened during pre-production, and was comforted that there were so many meetings where every aspect of the film was discussed in detail. By the end of the 'I Saw the TV Glow' shoot, Victor called the Pastel team with news: they were ready to direct 'Sorry, Baby.' An A24 release, 'Sorry, Baby' is now in limited theaters, with a nationwide release to follow on Friday, July 18. To hear Eva Victor's full interview, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform Best of IndieWire The Best Lesbian Movies Ever Made, from 'D.E.B.S.' and 'Carol' to 'Bound' and 'Pariah' The Best Thrillers Streaming on Netflix in June, from 'Vertigo' and 'Rear Window' to 'Emily the Criminal' All 12 Wes Anderson Movies, Ranked, from 'Bottle Rocket' to 'The Phoenician Scheme'
Yahoo
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Tony Gilroy on Giving ‘Andor' a ‘Hopeful' End, Bringing Back K-2SO, and Episode 10's Revealing Backstory
On Tuesday, Disney+ dropped the last three episodes of 'Andor,' wrapping up the series and directly setting up 'Rogue One.' It's not typical that a television show needs to pass its baton to a film made almost a decade earlier, and 'Andor' creator Tony Gilroy did not want to approach the show's final episode in a typical way, either. While on this week's episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, Gilroy talked about fighting against the need to incorporate one final big decision or turning point in wrapping up the series heading into 'Rogue One.' More from IndieWire 'Murderbot' Review: Alexander Skarsgård's Goofy-Great Apple Series Wants Us to Watch TV, Together How 'Love, Death and Robots' Season 4 Made the Ultimate Cute Little Guy 'Episode 12 is really its own thing where we didn't put a lot of pressure to jack anything up,' said Gilroy on the podcast. 'This is kind of a 'deliver the pizza' episode, and the pizza is emotional, and everybody settled into it, and we took the pressure off ourselves.' Gilroy specifically wanted to go out on a hopeful note. 'Andor' Season 2 was about the personal sacrifices and impossible choices characters faced in taking on the cause of the nascent rebellion, and the series creator felt as if 'Andor' had earned the right to end with a measured note of optimism. 'We're really putting the audience through some amazingly difficult journeys [of] what time does to people that hopefully you care about, and [what] time, under these really extreme circumstances and these extreme adventures that they're on, does to them,' said Gilroy. 'So there's a lot of attrition at the end. There's a lot of sadness at the end. But really, in the end, this is the beginning of 'A New Hope.' What's going to come out of this is the phoenix of the Rebellion.' The last three-episode cycle 'Andor' also saw K-2SO (voiced by Alan Tudyk) back into the fold, returning to the prominent supporting role that the modified KX-series security droid plays in 'Rogue One.' It's a move Gilroy purposefully delayed and left to the series end. As Gilroy explained on the podcast, his initial involvement with 'Andor' was as a friend to the franchise, giving notes to Lucasfilm on its initial plans for a 'Rogue One' prequel series. In addition to his advice to take a 'back-to-the-studs' approach to Cassian Andor's (Diego Luna) arc, which would become the basis of his own series, he highly recommended they abandon their ambitious plans for K-2SO. 'I was saying, I don't think you can have K-2 all the way through this show, which they kept wanting to try to do because that was the, 'Let's have a Butch and Sundance' show,' said Gilroy of the initial plans to have Cassian and the droid go on 40-episodes worth of missions together — a proposal that reminded the 'Rogue One' writer of his own story struggles with K-2. 'He's the worst piece of luggage in the world. He's not a spy, you can't take him undercover, he's seven feet tall. KX units are so inhibiting. If you watch 'Rogue' with that in mind, how many times is he is not allowed to get out of the ship, or 'I have to wait here and do something.'' In a series which, at its core, is about supplying an emotional understanding of what brings characters of all stripes to fight a fascist Empire, Episode 10 is arguably the holy grail of 'Why We Fight' Rebellion backstories: Luthen (Stellan Skarsgård) and Kleya (Elizabeth Dulau). Gilroy said very early on he knew he would explore Luthen's backstory, and was saving it for a key storyline of the stealthy underground leader for near the end of 'Andor.' 'I had a variety of backstories that Stellan and I spoke about early in the first season,' said Gilory. 'The one thing he didn't want was he didn't want revenge. He said, 'I don't want it to be a revenge story. I see that in some of the other characters, and I think that's the one I don't want.' The ultimate Episode 210 storyline, and the incorporation of Kleya, as an almost adopted daughter, into Luthen's backstory, was motivated and inspired by the talents of Dulau. Gilroy and Skarsgård had both been impressed by the previously unknown actress's talents, and wanted to give her and the character the opportunity to spread their wings before saying goodbye. 'Elizabeth Dulau, who plays Kleya, was such an incredible surprise. It's her first job. She came right out of RADA, and we had a couple of actresses who were signed up for that part, who got offered other things along the way, and we let them go. And suddenly we have this young actress [who we don't really know,' said Gilroy. '[Her] audition's very good, and her scenes are very good, but how good is she? And oh my God, you start to realize what someone can do. She's a Meryl Streep. I mean, she's just astonishing.' To hear Tony Gilroy's full interview, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform. You can also watch the full interview at the top of the page or on IndieWire's YouTube page. Best of IndieWire The 19 Best Thrillers Streaming on Netflix in May, from 'Fair Play' to 'Emily the Criminal' Martin Scorsese's Favorite Movies: 86 Films the Director Wants You to See Christopher Nolan's Favorite Movies: 44 Films the Director Wants You to See
Yahoo
04-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Mountainhead': Jesse Armstrong Discusses the DOGE-Inspired Dark Second Act Turn and Surprising Final Scene
[Editor's note: The following interview contains spoilers for the HBO movie 'Mountainhead.'] In 'Succession,' the cutthroat Roy family proved capable of covering up even manslaughter to protect their business, but Logan Roy (Brian Cox) himself might blush at the extremes of his tech-mogul counterparts in creator Jesse Armstrong's HBO follow-up 'Mountainhead.' More from IndieWire 'Outlander' Creators Talk Season 7 Highlights and Reveal Why They Had to Make a Big Change to Jamie & Claire's Reunion Love Scene 'Abbott Elementary' Season 4 Took Pains Not to 'Phone It in': 'We Want Every Episode to Be a Surprise' While Armstrong was on the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, he talked about not wanting to do another story of the uber-rich and powerful following 'Succession,' but after reviewing Michael Lewis' book about crypto-crook Sam Bankman-Fried, and then listening to tech moguls on the 'All In' and Lex Fridman podcasts, he couldn't get the Silicon Valley voices shaping our world out of his head. But it was more than the way tech moguls talked, it was the way they saw the world and justified their increasingly powerful place in it that led Armstrong to the 'Mountainhead' story of four tech bros' weekend getaway and its surprising (murderous) plot twist. 'What I like about it is taking things to their logical conclusion — you know, zero-basing Elon [Musk's] philosophy with DOGE, 'Let's cut everything else away and rebuild,'' said Armstrong of his latest project's dark second act turn. 'Following premises to their logical conclusions is funny and interesting to me, and I think very appropriate for this world. Because like how do you end up taking away HIV drugs from children who are going to die? How the fuck do you get there? Will you get there because you convince yourself that you're following some perfectly logical process? That is terrifying. So I knew that I needed it to go into [another space] morally.' In 'Mountainhead,' the tangible, real-world effects of this thinking are the escalating global eruption of violence and chaos resulting from the generative AI video tools Venis (Cory Michael Smith) has added to his social media platform Traam which, with its four billion users, has made him the world's richest man. While there are visible signs of cognitive dissonance as the four friends take in each new horrific news alert coming across their phones, the group convinces themselves this chaos is ultimately a good thing, akin to a forest fire accelerating the new growth process. On the podcast, Armstrong indicated he couldn't know for sure if the tech bros he's lampooning believe what they say, or if it is something they tell themselves so they can sleep at night, but it almost doesn't matter, as his interest was following their logic in justifying the havoc their tech was now wreaked. 'They often say, 'From first principles, what are the first principles? What we are trying to achieve here?' And if you start taking that approach and looking at it from a comic perspective, you can get to some funny and dark places,' said Armstrong. The dark place Armstrong is referring to is Venis, Randall (Steve Carell), and Souper (Jason Schwartzman) trying to murder the fourth member of their crew, Jeff (Ramy Youssef) after he dares to suggest steps be taken to slow the unhinged Venis and the chaos brought by Traam's new GenAI tools. Armstrong said the murder plot twist was one he came to early, as it was the inevitable result of his 'following premises to its logical conclusions' exercise: Killing Jeff, a threat to a AI utopia (and the tech oligarchs' best opportunity to fix the world's problems) would be for the greater good. Armstrong had a blast writing the three men debating the morality of the proposed murder, including incorporating the philosophies of history's great thinkers into their argument. 'I think one of the things that happens in that world is pulling on the mantle,' said Armstrong of the murder-debate scene. 'They like the stoics and Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, but I think a thing people, especially men, do is reach for some of that appealing-looking scent from the highest cultural shelf.' Even girded by their moral justifications for murder, the three men repeatedly fail in slapstick fashion before Jeff convinces them of a less-violent means to achieve their goal, saving himself by agreeing to sell Venis the AI-anecdote he desperately needs. The biggest surprise comes the next morning. Jeff had been the audience's sliver of hope that at least one of these masters of the universe had the guts to try to stop the world from burning. The audience would naturally assume that after surviving a night of his oldest friends trying to murder him, Jeff's eyes were now fully open. And it's here Armstrong delivers his final gut punch — the final scene of Jeff laughing it all off and striking a Machiavellian deal to partner with Venis. 'Tonally, I knew that was where we would be soon after I had a green light to [make 'Mountainhead'],' said Armstrong of Venis and Jeff's final scene in the driveway. Armstrong admits he was nervous his initial ideas for the film's dark turns had the potential to be problematic, which is why before sitting down to write the script, he gathered four of his 'Succession' writers and producers — Jon Brown, Tony Roche, Will Tracy and Lucy Prebble (all of whom received executive producer credits on 'Mountainhead') — for a one-week writers' room to find potential holes and explore alternate narrative paths. 'I did a one week super-accelerated 'Is this gonna work? Am I crazy? What do you think?' [writers' room],' said Armstrong of his mini-'Succession' reunion. 'We did some thought experiments with what could the worst thing [that could] happen when [Jeff is in the sauna]. So I tried to entertain the different possibilities, but I came out of that room with the same idea that I went in with and that was the ending of the movie. That tone of an accommodation being made was what I wanted.' 'Mountainhead' is now streaming on HBO Max. To hear Jesse Armstrong's full interview, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform. Best of IndieWire The Best Thrillers Streaming on Netflix in June, from 'Vertigo' and 'Rear Window' to 'Emily the Criminal' All 12 Wes Anderson Movies, Ranked, from 'Bottle Rocket' to 'The Phoenician Scheme' Nightmare Film Shoots: The 38 Most Grueling Films Ever Made, from 'Deliverance' to 'The Wages of Fear'
