Over 4 seasons of following the globe-trotting Roy household, “Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong and manufacturing designer Stephen Carter had mastered the artwork of discovering places that showcased the characters’ excessive wealth, but in addition how uncomfortable and chilly these areas might be for his or her characters. When Armstrong was on this week’s episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit Podcast, to debate his new HBO film “Mountainhead,” about 4 tech moguls’ weekend getaway, he talked about how impersonal these places might be.
“They’re gilded cages, or actually extra beige jail cells,” mentioned Armstrong. “That wealth has this sort of worldwide resort really feel to it. I’ve scouted lots of these places and there’s a similarity. I assume it’s usually individuals who spend time lots of completely different locations across the globe and perhaps they need that uniformity, it doesn’t have a lot aesthetic zing to it.”
In his directorial debut “Mountainhead,” the significance of discovering the appropriate location was proper within the title. As Armstrong talked about on the podcast, the accelerated manufacturing course of, going from pitch to air in lower than six months, was motivated by his want to faucet into the viewers’s in-the-moment anxiousness of the risks of rising AI and real-life tech moguls like Elon Musk gaining unprecedented political, cultural, and financial energy. He would due to this fact want a single location to function the right lair from which his fictional tech bros would plot the way forward for humanity because the world burned down round them.
“There have been quite a few scary moments on this manufacturing the place, given the compressed agenda that we had been making an attempt to realize, it might have fallen aside over casting, over me flunking and never developing with a script on time, however not discovering the home was one of many main ones,” mentioned Armstrong. “It was scary once we hadn’t discovered it. And in reality, I used to be so behind on writing the script, I needed to, at a sure level, simply go away the group to do it.”
Govt producer Jill Footlick, cinematographer Marcel Zyskind, and Carter would proceed the search with out Armstrong, who acknowledged his record of necessities was vital, together with the home needing to be doubtlessly harmful — to say extra can be a spoiler. Past the acute wealth and impersonal coolness, the situation concurrently wanted to be visually assorted and dynamic.
“I knew that it was virtually all going [take place] on this home, and as a director, I used to be keen that we couldn’t, as they are saying, ‘shoot it out,’ and get tired of the situation too rapidly,” mentioned Armstrong.
The search took the “Mountainhead” group to British Columbia, Wyoming, and Colorado, earlier than discovering its 21,000-square foot, seven-bedroom property, in Park Metropolis, Utah.
“I believe I knew that we had the appropriate place when Marcel, who’s Danish, referred to as me up and mentioned he’d come away from this home with simply this extremely robust feeling of melancholy,” mentioned Armstrong. “It form of had shocked him to his core, the sort of the dimensions of it— it’s drilled down into this mountainside over seven flooring with a basketball courtroom on the backside, however has these great vistas out over Utah. It’s actually a personality within the film, I assume.”
After spending the final decade visiting and scouting the worldwide hotel-like blandness of the globe-trotting uber-wealthy, we requested Armstrong if he ever thought-about what he’d purchase if he grew to become mogul-rich. Not surprisingly, he went in the wrong way of the trendy “Mountainhead” home.
“After we had been in Tuscany [for Season 3 of ‘Succession’], I imply, it’s fairly arduous to perhaps to screw up a Renaissance villa,” mentioned Armstrong.
“Mountainhead” is now streaming on HBO Max.
To listen to Jesse Armstrong‘s full interview, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favourite podcast platform.