Following Succession, which ended two years ago, the show’s creator, Jesse Armstrong, said he wasn’t sure he wanted to make his follow-up project — and directorial debut — be another story about the wealthy.
“It kind of wasn’t. I was trying to do other things,” Armstrong told The Hollywood Reporter on the carpet for the Mountainhead premiere in New York City Thursday night about working on the film after the Emmy-winning series. “Especially, I thought, maybe something that wasn’t in the world of rich people.”
But he explains what changed his mind — and it had a lot to do with the tech bro billionaires that the movie is inspired by. “I ended up doing a bunch of research in this area for a piece I wrote, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the way that these guys spoke in public,” he said. “It started to become like an earworm, like a song that you can’t get out of your head and I wanted to write some of it down, so that was the germ of the film.”
The movie, which has the tagline: “Humanity is in their hands” follows a group of billionaire friends who reunite at a mountain home during a worldwide economic crisis. Randall (Steve Carell), Jeff (Ramy Youssef), Souper (Jason Schwartzman) and Venis (Cory Michael Smith) are the core ensemble. Though not confirmed, some of the billionaires their characters are believed to be based on include Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Marc Andreessen.
Carell spoke to reporters about how it was “overwhelming” to get inside the head of playing someone who seemingly has unlimited wealth. “When somebody is worth $60-$200 billion, the actual amount doesn’t even mean anything anymore, I think, to these people. It’s a number, but the number itself kind of means something,” Carell said.
He continued to explain how his character was affected by AI and fell in the rankings of the group. “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,” he said. “So, that’s a huge component of all of these characters, whether they have to admit it or not.”
For Smith, the preparation was “truncated” as it was only a few weeks from when the actors were cast (the script was still unfinished) to when they began filming, he told THR. “The process really was having someone sit with me for an entire week, so for six to eight hours a day I could just go through lines before I got to Utah [where the movie was filmed] so I could try to memorize the whole script.”
When it came to developing his character, Smith said, “There’s like a whole vocabulary and language that these guys have like tech jargon that I do not personally use, so the rehearsal ahead of time was really to make sure that there was a real proficiency with language and the speed.”
Though it was wasn’t all work. The cast made sure to balance enough play, too. “We did some very late-night John Wick movies. We watched one and two, Ramy and I,” he quipped. “We just wanted to see some really violent films.”
Armstrong shared why the timeliness of the film — and turning it around so quickly after wrapping photography last month — was important. “When people see it, they’ll realize it’s about this world that we live in right now and the tech world changes so quickly,” he said. “I was keen to write it and for people to see it in the same sort of bubble of time.”
Mountainhead will premiere on HBO and begin streaming on Max on May 31.