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Jesse Armstrong’s Power Move
The Succession creator’s next act? A farcical TV movie about four tech-bro billionaires he wrote, produced, and directed in less than a year.
It’s late March, and actors Steve Carell, Cory Michael Smith ( Saturday Night), Ramy Youssef, and Jason Schwartzman are shooting an outrageous scene for Mountainhead,Succession creator Jesse Armstrong’s directorial debut about four arrogant tech moguls who get together for a boys’ weekend that goes fantastically awry. Although Armstrong hasn’t had an official big-league directing credit until now, the 54-year-old has spent so many hours writing, producing, or supervising the editing of various TV programs (including Armando Iannucci’s political satire The Thick of It, on which he was a writer-producer, and the sitcoms Fresh Meat and Peep Show, in collaboration with his friend Sam Bain) that this leap would seem a mere formality. “I guess what I did not expect is that he’s quite, quite goofy and quite silly, really.” I experienced this during a break between scenes when I told Armstrong that the setup of Mountainhead reminded me of the 1962 Luis Buñuel satire, The Exterminating Angel, wherein a rich couple’s servants abandon them on the day of a dinner party, and the guests, who don’t actually know how to do anything, are paralyzed with indecision and functionally trapped there.
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