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‘It’s a Bit of a Suicide Mission’: How ‘Succession’ Creator Jesse Armstrong Wrote and Directed His Tech-Bro Satire ‘Mountainhead’ in Just Six Months
'Succession' creator Jesse Armstrong's directorial debut 'Mountainhead' premieres on HBO on May 31 — here's how he and his team made it in six months.
But after reviewing a book about crypto con artist Sam Bankman-Fried for the Times Literary Supplement in late 2023, Armstrong found himself falling down a rabbit hole of research into the peculiar universe of tech bro billionaires. To exorcise those voices from his head, Armstrong built an outline for “ Mountainhead,” about four billionaire buddies who gather for a no-staff, just-guys poker weekend just as the world is falling into disinformational anarchy caused by a new AI release from one of the quartet’s companies. It’s quite circular in that I learned a lot from Armando Iannucci who did “The Thick of It” and “In the Loop” and “Veep,” and from Adam McKay, who shot the pilot of “Succession” and was a huge follower of Michael Winterbottom and his films, many of which were DP’d by Marcel.
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