Jesse Armstrong on Satirizing Tech Bros in ‘The Mountainhead’

Sometimes, art imitates life. And sometimes, life threatens to upstage art. 

When Succession creator Jesse Armstrong began writing his first movie script, The Mountainhead, about four tech moguls having a weekend get-together while one of their products is inadvertently causing violence and destruction on a global scale, he knew the power and recklessness of the real versions, like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. But by the time he began directing the film — starring Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Ramy Youssef, and Cory Michael Smith as the four malignant bros — in March, Musk was already hard at work using his DOGE minions to dismantle every government program he didn’t like, with the approval of our new/old POTUS. Musk was unleashing chaos at least equivalent to, if not worse than, what we hear is happening in the world of The Mountainhead. 

This raises a lot of questions about satirizing acutely current events, and what to do when those events are on the verge of overtaking the satire. Ahead of the May 31 premiere of The Mountainhead on HBO and Max, Armstrong spoke about all of this by Zoom with Rolling Stone.

When you started writing this movie, could you foresee the extent to which one of the real tech billionaires would be involved in taking over and dismantling the American government?
No, I didn’t. DOGE kind of emerged and maybe popped again within — this was a fast movie, but that was even a faster governmental project. That was quite weird. We don’t have anything like that in the movie, but it definitely feels like it could be some pages that we cut, doesn’t it?

Were there any points where you worried that real-life events might have in some way overtaken what you were doing?
“Overtaken” I would get prickly as a writer about [using]. You’re allowed to be in these fictional spaces, which are like a bubble you create and can do your own thing within. And then anything that happens in the real world that has a relationship to it, I think it doesn’t burst that bubble. Those things only bother if they click in an unhelpful way, on the level of a word or a particular event. But they shouldn’t burst the bubble of the reality I’m trying to create in the film. 

Was there anything you changed or thought about changing as a result of events unfolding while production got underway?
There’s some geopolitical stuff that went on in the world. There’s reference to conflict in the world, and I had India and Pakistan in a script, and we filmed it, and then changed it in postproduction. God willing, it looks like that conflict in Kashmir has receded from flaring into something more serious. I’m happy to say some quite tough things and present some tough visions of the world within the movie. Had that conflict progressed in a way it could have done, it would have felt like crossing a threshold of taste for us to be referencing it within this world. There are a couple of instances where something like that occurred to me, but mostly I’ve been happy with the relationship between reality and the fictional world.

Succession wasn’t explicitly based on real people, but it came out during the first Trump administration, at a time when Fox News and Newsmax and others were leaning hard into presenting “alternate facts” and acting as organs of state media. What did you learn about what the audience was and wasn’t ready to see that reflected the real world during that time?
It’s interesting about acceptance. It’s kind of up to [HBO president] Casey [Bloys] and HBO to decide. For a long time, people had that feeling about the pandemic: “I don’t want to see a pandemic thing; I just lived through it.” I take the position of a creator: “This is what I’ve got to offer. Do you want some of it?” If you’re up all night worrying about A.I., I understand if you don’t want to watch this movie. But you might find some consolation from seeing a dark comedy in this space and seeing the people who are involved in that technology. So, yeah, I can see it as a potential problem, but I can’t really worry about it too much because this is the story I’m selling right now. So if you’re not buying, I get it. Yeah, it’s all I’ve got.

Ernst Lubitsch made To Be or Not to Be, a comedy set in Nazi-occupied Poland, in 1942. Kubrick made Dr. Strangelove two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, while nuclear paranoia was still huge. Is there a key to making satire of extremely dark times while those dark times are still happening?
I think that’s a great point. This project was made really quick. And one of the reasons was out of a desire, when I pitched it to Casey — in my dream world, this emerges in the same kind of headspace where I’m writing it. That means probably under six months. It feels like the world changes so quickly at the moment. That was very much my sense: “I think I’ve got something to say about this stuff.” Hopefully, maybe someone will be able to enjoy this movie in six or 10 years, but I’d like to offer it to the audience about now. I think sometimes that creative impulse is connected to wanting to talk to people about what we’re going through right at the very moment.

One thing that’s been a challenge to satirists in the last 10 years is that reality has become so absurd, with the dumbest possible things happening every day, that there doesn’t always seem to be another level for satire to go to. When the real Elon and the real Zuckerberg already feel like caricatures, how do you make a funnier version of that?
I always feel like, “Oh, come on, my fellow people, this is the challenge!” It is a long time since Tom Lehrer said he gave up satire when Kissinger won the Nobel Prize. This is not a new phenomena of the world feeling so vivid, so extreme, that finding an angle of approach is hard. It should be hard. The easy satire is the one where you see the sketch and you know what the punch line is. Finding a new angle of approach on events which seem difficult to frame in your sense of the world is the challenge, and I guess it should be the bit that quickens your desire, as a creative person, to get in there. I think I’ve found a way to approach these people. I find it a good challenge [rather] than something that puts you off the territory. Not “I want to make a graphic novel about Flaubert” or something — not running in a different direction. 

What did you feel was your way in, so that you had something hard to say about this type of person at this moment in history?
In a way, I’m slightly intellectualizing what is a gut approach. I did a book review of Michael Lewis’ book about Sam Bankman-Fried, and started reading a ton about tech, which we did a bit in Succession with the Lukas Matsson character, but I hadn’t fully looked at it. I couldn’t stop reading the stuff. All of us are in a world where we’re thinking about the boundaries of social media and A.I. I could see this was territory that started to quicken my creative impulses. And then I started to listen to the podcasts. You know, there’s not a lot on the record about Maxwell, Murdoch, Redstone — they’re not as interested in selling a narrative of themselves and their companies as Zuckerberg, Musk, and Altman are, telling their own story on podcasts done by their friends, or TED Talks or whatnot. Their cadences, and the cadence of the wider tech world, hooked me in. I felt like I could hear those voices, like an earworm. So please, Casey, will you let me be released by putting them on paper, and maybe that’ll stop them talking to me at night?

There a few moments in the film where Cory and Steve’s characters talk about whether or not they think other people are real. Do you think the actual versions of these guys wonder this, too?
I have some sympathy for them. I think it’s a challenge for all of us. The movie is tough on these people. But everyone who lives in the Anglo-American rich world, not to get too existential, do we really believe that everyone else in the world is worth as much as us? And if we do, are we behaving in that way? Am I giving enough of my money to Oxfam, or the UN, to alleviate the suffering of other people in the world? No, I’m not. So I guess in some ways it’s an extension of that thought — that these people live in a extraordinary bubble where what they could do could make a big difference — but in a way, it’s just an extrapolation of a dilemma or a thought experiment that all of us face: Do we really believe that everyone else in the world is as is as real as us? It’s quite a hard challenge.

You just said that you have some sympathy for these guys. I’m curious, in the course of doing all your research and then actually making this movie, what has changed in your thinking about these tech Masters of the Universe?
Sam Bankman-Fried, reading that book that Michael Lewis wrote, I do believe he said different things at different times. And there’s a question of whether effective altruism, and that philosophical approach, was just a thing he said that would make people like him, and thus would have let him have more money. I think he did have interest in that philosophical approach, which has some merits. And I think Sam Altman really did start working in A.I. partly because he could see what it could do, and he felt like he would be a decent person to help corral it. So I do have sympathy with people who understand something ahead of the rest of us, try to wrestle with it, but are buffeted by these unbelievably large amounts of money and personal prestige, political ‘who’s up, who’s down’ in your little peer group, who’s thrown off what board, and all those pressures that come to bear. So a bit like the kids in Succession, I never felt they were uniquely bad or evil. It’s just that they were put under a unique set of pressures. Similarly, I’d say the same about these tech people. What used to get in my head about them was, there’s a spectrum of attitude, where at a certain point they have warranted confidence in their own abilities, which has been proven in the world. And at a certain point, it shades into arrogance. And when you start applying things you think you know from your world to another part of the world, without any consideration for what you don’t know, then I think you can be blamed for that you should, because a thinking person should be able to figure out, “Oh, this is different over here.” That’s where I feel there’s some culpability.