Jesse Armstrong doesn’t consider in evil—he thinks. “I think everyone behaves like they do for reasons which you could eventually get to the bottom of,” the prolific author and producer says. For 4 deliciously diabolical seasons, Armstrong examined his idea by exploring the machinations and internal psyches of the no less than evil-adjacent Roy household on Succession. His new HBO movie Mountainhead, which premiered May 31, explores it as soon as once more, this time with tech-bro autocrats.
Steve Carell, Ramy Youssef, Cory Michael Smith, and Jason Schwartzman play Randall, Jeff, Venis (pronounced like “Venice,” not “Venus”), and Hugo—all massively profitable tech entrepreneurs, all price greater than a billion {dollars}. (Except mere hundred-thousandaire Hugo, whom the others name “Souper,” brief for “Soup Kitchen.”) While they collect for a boys weekend, the world exterior Hugo’s palatial property is kind of actually falling aside. Governments are collapsing, shares are crashing, and scores and scores of persons are dying—all due to unregulated AI expertise that Venis is straight answerable for unleashing into the world.
Believe it or not, Mountainhead is Armstrong’s main directorial debut. Although he took residence 4 Emmys for writing and creating Succession, Armstrong by no means directed an episode of the sequence—although he did contemplate it. “It’s impossible time-wise to do the writing I needed to do and also direct one,” Armstrong says. He additionally had a slight dose of imposter syndrome. “Mark Mylod had been such a close collaborator and a valued one, and he often did the finales,” he says. To suggest himself as a director “felt kind of presumptuous and rude; I worried I wouldn’t do as good a job as he would.”
For Mountainhead, he put his fears apart. “I know the tone, I know what I want to get. It’s not doing Game of Thrones. You have some helicopters, but not even that many helicopters,” he says. Maybe he’d have had extra if the movie hadn’t been made so shortly. Armstrong pitched the movie to HBO president Casey Bloys in December; he wrote the script in January, and so they shot on location in March, enhancing as they went alongside earlier than wrapping in early April. But Armstrong sees the truncated timeline as a blessing in disguise. “I was anxious about directing for the first time. Not having too much time to reconsider or worry actually felt like kind of an advantage,” he says. “I wasn’t going to read so many interviews with great directors. I wasn’t going to get paralyzed.”
On the floor, Randall, Jeff, Venis, and Souper appear comparable—exorbitantly rich (largely) white, (seemingly) straight males who’ve miraculously made it to the highest of their fields. But Armstrong is aware of that not all tech entrepreneurs are constructed alike—even when they use the identical jargon and put on the identical fleeces. “Everybody’s different,” he says. “On a dumb writing level, you’ve got the dad, the favorite son, the usurper who’s going to take his position, and the guy who’s just clinging on by fingernails. You’ve got these archetypes.”
Of course, it’s extra sophisticated than that. And although every character brings real-world parallels to thoughts, none is an ideal match for anybody infamous tech bro. Carell’s enterprise capitalist, Randall, evokes each Peter Thiel, the billionaire who as soon as expressed curiosity in a follow involving the transfusion of blood from a youthful individual as a method of bettering well being and probably reversing getting older, and Bryan Johnson, the biohacker whose dedication to slowing down the getting older course of has led him to check his nighttime erections with these of his teenage son.
Youseff’s Jeff brings to thoughts Sam Bankman-Fried—the younger gun crypto king serving a 25-year sentence after being convicted on seven counts associated to fraud and cash laundering—and Open AI founder Sam Altman, although he’s additionally positioned as probably the most ethical billionaire. Cory Michael Smith’s Venis, the richest and most amoral of all, is an amalgam of Meta’s geek turned hypebeast Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk. Souper? Well, he’s simply Souper.
“Because I wasn’t making a biographical or documentary representation of this world, I could just take a bit of, like, ‘Oh, that was weird when Sam Bankman-Fried said that,’” Armstrong says. “It was weird when Sam Altman said that, and Marc Andreessen seems to have a real big hang-up about this.” Some tech personalities gave him extra materials than others. “Obviously, Elon is so big in all of our minds at the moment. There’s a lot of him scattered around the different people. And Zuck as well. You could take different parts of their characters and sequestrate them away and create these amalgams that seem to work.”