Jesse Armstrong hadn’t deliberate on making one other venture about billionaires.
The Succession creator was taking a break after ending HBO’s Emmy-winning sequence concerning the ludicrously rich siblings combating for management over their father’s media conglomerate, which led to Could 2023. However whereas writing a evaluation of journalist Michael Lewis’ e-book Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon, about crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, Armstrong received sucked into listening to podcasts that includes tech elites. It impressed him to jot down and direct his first function: Mountainhead, a film about three tech billionaires and their much less wealthy, deeply insecure pal, all of whom have far an excessive amount of energy at their disposal.
“I could not get the … tech voice, tech man voice, a billionaire, out of my head,” Armstrong says, noting that to him, that voice embodies each “supreme confidence of their analytical skills” and “conceitedness.” Armstrong is being good right here. The phrase that repeatedly got here to my thoughts whereas watching the foursome commerce jargon, insults, and delusions of grandeur for the film’s almost two-hour run time was douchebag.
The movie, which is able to begin streaming on HBO Could 31, stars Steve Carell as enterprise capitalist Randall; Jason Schwartzman as Hugo Van Yalk, whose nickname “Souper” is a reference to a soup kitchen—and his decrease internet value; Cory Michael Smith as Venis, a Zuck-Elon determine unleashing hyperrealistic deepfakes on his platform Traam; and Ramy Youssef as Jeff, who plans on profiting huge from releasing AI that may counter the chaos his pal Venis is wreaking on the world.
The chums meet up for a retreat within the mountains, hosted by Souper, whose fixation on impressing the cohort along with his residence decor and meals platters is met with scorn by the others. They’ve a “no offers, no meals, no excessive heels” rule for the weekend. However the enjoyable—of their case, snowmobiling to a peak and writing their internet worths on their chests with lipstick—is finally outdated by plots to take over the world and “coup out the US.”
Mountainhead got here collectively in only a few months, in opposition to the backdrop of President Donald Trump’s second time period in workplace, a lot of which has been dominated by Elon Musk’s DOGE mission. Taking pictures occurred over a number of weeks this spring. Whereas Carell says there have been upsides to the tight turnaround—“everybody’s simply trusting their intestine”—Schwartzman says shortly attaining fluency within the “tech voice” Armstrong was going for was a problem for him.
“At a sure level I mentioned to Jesse, for those who ever need us to say something additional, do you’ve a glossary or a dictionary,” Schwartzman says. “It is like for those who had been doing a film in French after which improvise one thing in Italian.”
Whereas Armstrong acknowledges that some folks would possibly react to his newest venture by asking, “Why ought to I care about these wealthy assholes,” he refrains from outright making a judgment about them.
“I do really feel some sympathy for the actual folks grappling with a few of this tech, as a result of it’s a little bit of a corridor of mirrors,” Armstrong says. “A number of folks go into, particularly AI, with a way of the facility of the know-how, and I feel, so far as I can inform, a real sense of duty.”
