It was late November, just after the election, and Jesse Armstrong was trying to resist telling another story about unfathomably rich tycoons. It’d been less than two years since “Succession” — his Emmy-winning, culture-defining series about the corrosive family behind a massive media empire — had aired its note-perfect finale on HBO, and it seemed foolhardy to return to the world of extreme wealth again. But after reviewing a book about crypto con artist Sam Bankman-Fried for the Times Literary Supplement in late 2023, Armstrong found himself falling down a rabbit hole of research into the peculiar universe of tech bro billionaires.
“People are impossible to write until I can hear their voice,” he says. “There’s an ease of entry to this world because the tech people are often going on each other’s podcasts, so you can directly hear how CEOs of these corporations talk. It was a tone of voice that I couldn’t get out of my head.”
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To exorcise those voices from his head, Armstrong built an outline for “Mountainhead,” about four billionaire buddies who gather for a no-staff, just-guys poker weekend just as the world is falling into disinformational anarchy caused by a new AI release from one of the quartet’s companies. The following month, he pitched it as a TV movie to HBO chief Casey Bloys. In January, Steve Carell signed on to star, followed by Jason Schwartzman (“Asteroid City”), Ramy Youssef (“Poor Things”) and Cory Michael Smith (“Saturday Night”). By March, filming was underway in Park City, Utah. And now the movie — which is also Armstrong’s feature directing debut — will premiere on HBO and on Max on Saturday, May 31. From conception to completion, the whole endeavor took just over six months.
That is a breakneck pace for the tech world, let alone the plodding rhythms of Hollywood. But for Armstrong, stepping inside the lives of the country’s richest and most powerful men also meant somehow capturing what those men are doing to the country right now.
“Hopefully, people can watch this in a couple of years and it’ll still be an enjoyable piece,” he says. “But what I particularly wanted was to be writing it and have people watching it in roughly the same news consciousness. The bubble of nowness floats pretty fast.”
Capturing the absurd spirit of present day society is familiar territory for Armstrong, who wrote on the British political satire “The Thick of It” and its American cousin, “Veep,” before mining the lives of media barons for “Succession.” But the bracing immediacy of Silicon Valley’s influence led Armstrong to feel his film needed as up-to-the-minute a production schedule as possible.
“This is about a group of increasingly powerful guys — and they are all guys — who have an enormous impact on America and the world at a very chaotic and traumatic moment,” says executive producer Frank Rich (“Veep,” “Succession”). “So it seems incredibly newsworthy and up Jesse’s alley in terms of the kind of writing he’s done in the past.”
Armstrong is less resolute, however, when asked how much President Trump’s election to a second term affected his sense of urgency.
“Had he not won, maybe it wouldn’t have felt as vital,” he says. “But I think I would have done it anyway, because the advance of AI, the effects getting so much of our information through social media — they would have still been happening.”
“We never talked about it that way,” Rich says about the Trump factor. “There’s a certain kind of sharp writer who sometimes feels in his or her bones things that are happening in society and politics and media before they’re actually happening. Here the news, like it or not, kept confirming what Jesse saw in this world and these characters, but we weren’t chasing those headlines. In many cases, it seemed the headlines were chasing us as we were shooting.”
But even as Armstrong agreed with HBO to write, cast, shoot and edit “Mountainhead” within six months, he just “didn’t know if that was possible,” he says. The filmmaker, his cast and his production team — largely (but not entirely) made up of “Succession” veterans — spoke with Variety about how they did, in fact, pull it all off.
Jesse Armstrong (writer, director): I was looking to direct, but it wasn’t like, “How can I direct something? This would work.” It was more like, “I’d love to do this thing. Oh shit, I think it might be good if I directed it.”
Jill Footlick (executive producer): I remember getting the call first from HBO saying, “I’m going to tell you about a job, and if you want to hang up on me at any point, please do so.” Jesse said something fairly similar when we first talked. We sort of laughed about it and said, “This is… doable. Sure.” Even though it seemed insane, and frankly still does seem a little insane.
Stephen Carter (production designer): I think it was before Christmas that Jesse first reached out. I said to myself, “Probably in other circumstances this would be undoable. But it’s Jesse, and I feel like there will be enough of a shorthand coming from ‘Succession’ into this project that the advantage tips just enough to make it possible.” We didn’t even know what country it was going to be filming in at that point, but it sounded like a fun ride. So I said, “Yes. Good, let’s go.”
Susan Lyall (costume designer): I think the pitch was sent on a Tuesday, met Jesse on a Wednesday, hired on a Thursday, working Monday. I was not afraid of the length of time because so often in costumes, the last four or five weeks is when everything really gets done anyway. It’s not that many people. The story is 36 hours. I wasn’t sure if it was Park City or Vancouver, and in either case, I’m a big skier.
Bill Henry (editor): I let out a very big yell when I got the email because I was so thrilled. I think I got tapped sometime in February. So the biggest thing I had to do was control my anxieties, knowing that it was going to be such an incredibly contracted post schedule. But when I spoke with Jesse early on, we both comforted ourselves by saying, “It’s just a maxi ‘Succession’ episode.” I mean, we’ve climbed much bigger mountains. He always has notoriously written long. When I saw the 124-page count, I thought, “Well, this is within the realm of what I’m used to. We’ll get it there.”
Marcel Zyskind (cinematographer): I was a new member of this party, but Jesse asked whether I was up for the challenge. I’ll go to the end of the world with people I feel comfortable with. These people seemed so lovely from the get go, so I had no quarrels going in.
Footlick: Every time I would call anyone about this project to get them on board, all I had to say was “Jesse Armstrong,” and everyone said, “Where do I sign up?” It was so easy to get people to do it because he’s so beloved. Rightly. And we didn’t have a script. I don’t know if I’m allowed to say that. We had a very detailed outline, but not a script.
Armstrong: The core writing time was like 10 days. I pitched it, went away for Christmas holiday, came back, did a room with executive producer writers from “Succession” — Lucy Prebble, Jon Brown, Tony Roche, Will Tracy — told them everything about the idea and enriched it and the characters and so on. And then I desperately tried not to, but Jill encouraged me look at locations, during which I was writing in the van as we drove around.
Footlick: Yes, I have lots of pictures of Jesse writing in the van on his laptop.
Armstrong: Then I did the hard writing over 10 days when I got back to London. And then from there on, it was redrafting for, I don’t know, three or four weeks. It’s like a TV play in some ways. To give the actors fair chance to learn, I think we locked it about two weeks before we started shooting. I think it might be in the end more like 10 days.
Working with casting director Francine Maisler, another “Succession” alum, Armstrong scrambled to find the right foursome of actors.
Armstrong: It was all a big mess. Well, what’s a better word for a mess? Process.
Footlick: It was not a mess. It was complicated.
Armstrong: So it was either a mess or complicated. I think most of the actors came on board before there was a finished script. Certainly Steve Carell did. I remember pitching the movie to him when we were on the scout in Vancouver, probably mid-January. He was very generous in signing up when we had no location, no script — not much really, apart from Jill on her mobile and me claiming we were going to make it. His generosity and trust in signing up gave us a great boost of momentum in terms of like, “Oh, well, this looks like it really might happen.”
Carell signed on to play Randall, the elder statesman of the group who the other three see as a kind of father figure.
Steve Carell: The way he pitched it was, “I have no script. I have an idea. I’ve never directed. Would you like to do it?” Instantly: “Yes, of course, I’m in.” I don’t even care. Because it was him, and I knew it was going to be great. Then mid-February, I got a script, and we started shooting in March. It was very, very fast.
Schwartzman plays Hugo, the foursome’s host and owner of the eponymous mansion resting atop a snowy peak in the Rockies — and the only one of the group who hasn’t quite reached billionaire status.
Jason Schwartzman: When it was presented to me, Steve was a part of it, there was mostly a script written, we were going to shoot it in the next two weeks, and it would be coming out in the end of May. I’ve never heard of something happening so quickly, which, to me, was so fun, because it felt like we’re all in this together and there’s no time to overthink this.
Youssef plays Jeff, CEO of a bleeding-edge AI company, and Smith plays Venis, who runs a Facebook-like social media platform whose separate launch of AI visualization tools sparks violent, destabilizing upheavals across the globe. Their prickly relationship drives much of the story.
Ramy Youssef: I heard, “Tech bros on a mountain,” and I got very excited. I knew that there would be something to say, something incisive, because it was Jesse.
Cory Michael Smith: Jesse had sent a draft of part of the first act. And as a huge fan of “Succession,” who looked at all of those actors as if they were the luckiest boys and girls in the world, I was like, “Yeah, let’s go!”
Schwartzman: He didn’t make it easy on himself, Jesse. “Yes, I’ll direct, and it’s going to come out in six weeks!”
Smith: I don’t understand how they truncate this process in this way, with everyone sort of working simultaneously. A lot of these people are collaborators, and so there’s sort of a shorthand and an awareness of what they’re going for and how to collaborate and communicate.
Youssef: I didn’t know at first how quickly it was coming out. I wasn’t aware of the crunch they were under. I mean, we’re just acting in it. So I was just like, good luck to the editors. Good luck to production. We had the easy end of it.
Armstrong and HBO settled on a May 31 release date — and it isn’t a coincidence that that’s the final day of eligibility for Emmy consideration.
Armstrong: It was in Casey’s mind. It wasn’t, I hope, the overriding consideration, but it’s definitely a consideration. But Jill and Casey and I all had our hands on an alarm cord. We were always like, “If we ever think this is going to be bad because of how fast we’re doing it, let’s quit and we can do it later.” It gets scarier and scarier to pull that alarm cord, but if we hadn’t found the house, for example, or if Steve hadn’t signed up, I think that one of us would pulled the alarm cord and be like, “Look, this just isn’t going to work. We can’t make this happen.” And that would have been okay. We could have done it later.
Footlick: There were benchmarks that we had to hit. I created a calendar of, like, “If we don’t get this by this date, if we don’t have this by this date…” I tried to not tell Jesse about those benchmarks.
Armstrong: I imagine we missed them all wildly. Well, not wildly.
Footlick: There was a lot of shifting for sure. The house was the biggest one.
Hugo’s home is effectively the fifth character in the film — it is, literally, the titular role — but there was no time to design and build one on a soundstage. So the production scoured listings of potential real-world candidates in rarefied mountain communities in Jackson Hole, Wyoming and various locales in Colorado, before looking at possibilities in Whistler, British Columbia.
Carter: Whistler was certainly attractive because there were great crews available there. A lot of the folks that had just finished filming “The Last of Us” were available, and it seemed like with so many unknowns in terms of script and casting, it would be great to have a great team sort of lined up and waiting for us. We saw a bunch of locations, but some of them were frankly disappointing because there was a lot of new construction right next to them and stuff that wasn’t revealed in the photos we’d reviewed.
The production then shifted to the palatial ski villas dotting the peaks around Park City, Utah, but Armstrong and Carter had to leave town before they’d found any viable options.
Carter: At the last minute, another location became available to take a look at. Jesse and I missed seeing it, but based on the photos and the vibe that everyone reported, we thought this house that we had nicknamed “Rockstar” might be the one. The morning I arrived back in Park City, that house had fallen off the possibilities list, so we were back with nothing. But by the end of the day, we had found the house.
Armstrong: I really wanted to be there to see the house, but in the end, I just had to rely on Jill, Stephen and Marcel.
Carter: It’s not a house I would ever really want to live in myself. But in terms of grounding these characters for a compressed weekend, it had lots of material to work with. Normally when I get a script, I break it all down, and then if it doesn’t check all the boxes, there are tricks we’ll pull out the bag to fix those things. In this case, I was really saying, “Does it have enough variety to keep us excited for an hour and a half to two hours worth of material?” There were houses that closely fit the demographics, but they didn’t have that range. This was the first house that I walked into and I thought, “Yeah, there’s enough going on here.”
Carell: I can’t imagine it being another house. It broadened the scope of the movie. Scene choices changed because of this house. You have a basketball court, a bowling alley, a climbing wall, a bar, outdoor swimming pool — and it’s perched on top of a cliff, 8,000 feet up. When we walked in, we all were consumed by the vibe of it.
Armstrong: One other thing that attracted us to this house was Marcel seemed to have an almost physical depressive reaction to it. He was like, “It’s perfect. I want to kill myself.”
Footlick: I remember seeing his face. When we walked in there, Marcel almost threw up.
Zyskind: That house itself made me feel quite obnoxious. It just did something physically to me. It’s like a violation on the mountain, that house.
Armstrong: That was the gut feeling we were looking for.
Schwartzman: That house is my character’s thing, so when I first walked in there, that was the completion of my character, in a way. This is the first time this house has been used in the story of the movie, so my character is also equally in awe of it — and taking notes on things that maybe weren’t how he had planned them.
Youssef: I would never live there, but I missed that house. Like, I have Stockholm Syndrome with it.
Carter: Decoration wise, we brought in a fair amount. But we did very little architecturally. We covered up some white walls just to make things a little more photographically interesting. I think the hardest challenges were probably for Marcel in dealing with lighting because there was a lot of glass. We loved the views, we loved how isolated it was, but in terms of being able to control the light, it was tricky to say the very least.
“Mountainhead” adopted the filming process famously employed on “Succession,” with the actors performing through full scenes while camera operators capture it on the fly.
Zyskind: I’m a huge fan of “Succession.” So I had no problem whatsoever in being within the DNA of that. I was not going to come in and change all that. We shot 10-hour days, and had a running lunch. We didn’t stop for an hour to eat, which meant that we wouldn’t come back and suddenly the sun’s in a completely different position. And they were big scenes. Some of them were like six, eight, 10 pages. We shot them in great time — record time, to be honest.
Armstrong: Marcel is typically humble, but I was already a fan of his work. It’s quite circular in that I learned a lot from Armando Iannucci who did “The Thick of It” and “In the Loop” and “Veep,” and from Adam McKay, who shot the pilot of “Succession” and was a huge follower of Michael Winterbottom and his films, many of which were DP’d by Marcel. It already was, like, pre-influenced. As a scared first-time director, he was very gentle in guiding me towards what could work and what couldn’t. There were huge technical challenges in shooting this quickly in a house with so much moving light conditions.
Zyskind: The way of shooting the scenes from start to finish in one go obviously helps. Thankfully, there are tools that help you plan. A snowstorm might change all of it, and it did several times. But the writing and the directing and the actors are so good that you often don’t see that it’s suddenly snowing outside in certain shots, or the guys have disguised it well in the editing. The actors were just hitting home runs every time. They would know those scenes by heart. I’m looking at the script and I’m like, “Oh my God, to remember all this?” It was amazing to watch.
Fans of “Succession” are familiar with Armstrong’s facility with the comically impenetrable vocabulary employed by C-suite executives, which is only amplified in “Mountainhead.”
Youssef: Filming is always rushed. You always have your back against the wall to make a day. So I didn’t think it was particularly crazy, other than the fact that it is a dense script.
Smith: I love working with dialects, and this is almost like having a dialect. It’s really nice to experience the mind warp of trying to listen to these guys and understand what they’re talking about, because these guys have power over our lives. They’re creating technology that directly affects us. They’re doing things that our government doesn’t understand and can’t seem to figure out how to regulate. So it’s like, jump on board and understand the vortex that they’re creating in real time.
Schwartzman: I had index cards on a ring with all the words that I’ve written down that I didn’t know. I learned quite a lot — now I’ve kind of forgot, but beyond the vernacular, sometimes I was reading stuff in the script and I didn’t know if it was a grammatical error or, like, he had misspelled a word. For instance, it’s silly, maybe you already knew this, but if you say, “That’s four times bigger,” in this world, they’d say, “That’s 4x.” I was like, who talks like this? Then I started doing this deep dive, and there is a whole other language. I can’t wait to see what people who speak this vernacular as their main language think of it.
Shooting in a single location did afford the production some perks.
Lyall: The costume department and the hair and makeup department were located just up the hill in a beautiful house — much smaller and, honestly, much nicer. The actors all had their own rooms, many of them with sweeping views of the valley. It was by far and away the most beautiful holding work area I have ever had. It’s so much better than being in a 50-foot trailer in the parking lot.
Armstrong: There are a bunch of advantages as well of all being on top of each other. I’m running down to see Susan looking at the costumes and running back up to see Stephen. You get a good creative energy from the mess of this aggressive timetable as well as the sleepless nights that some people suffered. I’d be interested who had the worst time from this schedule. I think it was probably Bill.
Henry: The great advantage of having the [editing] crew in the U.K. was that they would process overnight after it came out of Utah, and then the assistants would be on it while I was sleeping. When I hit it in the morning, they would easily have some of these scenes together for me. Jesse and the other editor, Mark Davies, who was in London, we would get together on Saturdays and screen what we had done the week before. So we were able to give Jesse a view of what he was getting and how it was going.
Armstrong: Although this has all been so incredibly quick, I don’t think any of it has felt out of control to me, and it hasn’t felt creatively like we’ve made any concessions. But I had a couple of panic points. One was when Steve signed up and we got the house and we were definitely making it, but the script still wasn’t finished. That was a tough moment: “Have I bitten off more than I can chew?” And at the beginning of the edit, when we were just in London and we had a two-and-three-quarter hour cut, there was just a looking at the calendar and being like, “This might not happen. Can we cut that time out and make all the right decisions and keep our heads?”
They did, indeed, keep their heads, cutting the film down to 109 minutes (including credits). Remarkably, everyone who spoke to Variety about making “Mountainhead” said they would work this ridiculously fast again — though some are more enthusiastic about that than others.
Lyall: It was really one of my favorite film experiences of all time. One advantage to the short schedule was you never reached that point where you’re like, “I’ve got to go home.” I wasn’t tired of it at all. In fact, I was kind of sorry it was over. I didn’t feel like I was finished.
Footlick: It was lightning in a bottle, honestly. Would we like more time? Sure. But I would do it again in a heartbeat, absolutely.
Carell: I think the joy for me was that there was no second guessing, across the board. No one had any chance to reconsider much and just had to go with their gut. You can feel it when you’re doing it. I think the final product as well reflects that it’s all instinctual choices.
Carter: Somewhere along the way, I was saying to some of the folks on my team that Jesse has set us up on a suicide mission. If we screw it up and it’s terrible, obviously we fucked it and we failed. But if we succeed, they’re going to try to make us do it over and over again in this new model. But as everyone else, I would do it again in a heartbeat. I’m glad that it wasn’t, like, 55 locations.
Henry: I told Jesse when we wrapped the mix, “Maybe we could have had another month, and that would’ve been nice.” But saying that, I do love that the process is so quick. I started out in features, and I found that I got really bored and irritated with all the niggly nubbins of going back and forth and second guessing things and trying it a million different ways. I just start to lose my objectivity.
Armstrong: I don’t know what people will make of the film. They may not enjoy it as much as we enjoyed making it, and so there still may be some tough things around the corner. But overall, I feel like I’d only work like this. It works for one’s creative metabolism. You send the email, you get the answer, make the decision, move on. It’s a credit to the people on this film that I never felt hurried to make a decision that I wasn’t ready to, because Jill made a schedule and Marcel managed to shoot it and Stephen had the options and Susan had the costumes and Bill had made 100 great decisions so that we could focus on the 10 that were left. So it is a bit of a suicide mission, because I love working like this.
These interviews have been edited and condensed.
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