Jesse Armstrong reveals what new movie Mountainhead has in common with Succession

Off the menu for the Silicon Valley titans – Randall (Steve Carell), Venis (Cory Michael Smith) and Jeff (Ramy Youssef) – is work chat, or anything else that might distract from the fun and games. Or as these back-slapping besties put it: “No deals, no meals, no high heels.”

But as it turns out, what’s very much on the menu is panic in the markets, ethnic violence, societal collapse and talk of global coups – all of which are the calamitous, rapid-fire results of Venis launching a not-fully-thought-through upgrade to his social media platform, Traam.

Welcome to Mountainhead, the blackly humorous and incredibly alarming film from Succession creator Jesse Armstrong. The 54-year-old British writer’s first feature-length drama – and his directorial debut – is a scathing satire on what happens when the American “broligarchy” is allowed to run riot: things quickly get murky, not to mention Musk-y.

From the outset, there are obvious parallels with how Donald Trump and his chainsaw-wielding former DOGE wingman Elon Musk, aided by a compliant, fact-checker-removing Mark Zuckerberg, have weaponised social media for their own ends.

“You could extrapolate easily from Trump and Musk, no doubt,” agrees south London-based Armstrong. But, he adds, “it’s not a direct comment on that. The [digital] tools that I posit in the film don’t exist. It’s a fictional manifestation of a feeling we have that social media – and the content that gets onto it – is uncontrollable, minute by minute. This is a nightmare extension of where we are, of the hostilities and divisiveness you get from those really reflexive platforms that snowball emotion and reaction so viscerally and quickly.”

Indeed. These tech-capitalist overlords make Succession’s Logan Roy (who bore an uncanny resemblance to media mogul Rupert Murdoch) look like a pussycat. As Venis’s Traam platform rolls out new features offering the ability to create, among other things, “unfalsifiable deep fakes” and made-up news footage that stoke violence and financial meltdown, the four come together to fiddle while the planet burns. What’s a nation-state takeover between friends? As Venis, spouting the deliciously pumped-up dialogue familiar from Succession, puts it: “What I wonder is… do we just get upstream, leverage our hardware, software, data, scale this up, and coup out the US?”

This is a room full of white men – the lack of diversity representative, Armstrong points out, of the reality of who runs these companies – high on power, ego and money. How dangerous are they? “I guess if you were being positive, as they normally are, they’d say there are incredible opportunities!” replies Armstrong, laughing, as he video-calls from an edit suite in central London, where he’s racing to meet his crushing, self-imposed deadline to complete his film. “But those incredible opportunities mean that the possibility seems to have grown exponentially of the world being manipulated into different new shapes by quite a small number of people.”

Mirroring the speed with which events spiral in Mountainhead is the momentum baked into the film’s DNA. Armstrong had the idea little more than six months ago, in the heat of the American presidential campaign. With Succession having ended its award-winning, four-series run two years ago, he’d been “cooking on” a couple of ideas for new shows.

But while writing a review for The Times Literary Supplement of Going Infinite, the biography of jailed crypto entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried by financial journalist Michael Lewis, “I just started reading more tech stuff and listening to more podcasts. The voices of what we still call Silicon Valley, the tech world, got lodged. This shape of a story occurred to me.” He admits he “wanted it to go away so I could concentrate on other projects, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it.”

Eventually he contacted Casey Bloys, the CEO of HBO for whom he produced Succession: “I think there could be a one-off in this. What do you think?” Bloys gave the thumbs-up. Armstrong then huddled with his “close collaborators” from Succession, including fellow Brit screenwriters Tony Roche and Lucy Prebble, and asked: “Do you think this could be a thing that I could do really quickly?” His friends were equally enthused. Or, as he frames it: “They gave me enough rope to hang myself by saying yes.”

So, having pitched it in December, Armstrong wrote a draft in ten days in January; spent February in rewrites and pre-production; shot for 22 days in March in the mountains outside Park City, Utah; and edited across April and early May, so that the film came out on 1 June.

That superfast turnaround was both practical and conceptual. First, it was the result of being “a little bit scared of directing. But also, quite liking the feeling of: ‘Oh well, I’ve just got to run into it and see what happens.’ But also, it’s got this queasy, looking-through-the-wrong-end-of-the telescope relationship to reality because none of the stuff in the film has happened. The president isn’t Trump; these people aren’t Musk or Zuckerberg or [AI pioneer] Sam Altman or Sam Bankman-Fried – but I think you’ll feel when you watch it that they’re all in the mix. Hopefully, you’ll be able to watch it next year and it’ll still be funny and interesting. But it feels like a now story.”

It’s also a story bristling with finely tooled tech-speak and bro jargon. This is a rapacious world where to call someone a “decel” – a growth-blocking “decelerationist” – is a bigger slur than incel. But Armstrong is keen that viewers won’t be blinded by the science.

“I hope it’s like Succession, where not everyone understood the weightings of shares and different holding companies. You should be able to follow this movie on the emotional level of the relationships between the four guys. And that you might give a pass to the ‘hyper-scale data centres’ and all that stuff that they get into! You should enjoy it on that level. That’s my task as a writer, and director this time: that you follow the story, even if you don’t know the finer details of AI development.”

Not to overload Armstrong’s personal hyper-scale data centre, but, what’s next? With the news that his old Peep Show pals David Mitchell and Robert Webb are making another sketch show for Channel 4, is there a chance he’ll return to lighter fare? For, if nothing else, a breather?

“Maybe,” he replies with a smile. “The only thing I would say is, there’s nothing harder as a writer than half-hour sitcoms. It’s the most condensed form of writing for TV that you can do. It might be nice not to think about the end of the world via right-wing politics, but day-to-day going to your desk, writing 30 Rock is probably harder than being Samuel Beckett – in my estimation. So, I’m not running back to sitcom. But, yeah, occasionally I’d like to write a silly sketch.”

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