Why I’m writing about rich people again

Jesse Armstrong, one of the UK’s most successful screenwriters, is not one to rest on his laurels.

Hot off the back of his hit show Succession, which followed the twists and turns in the lives of media mogul Logan Roy, played by Brian Cox, and his four children, Armstrong is back with his first feature-length film, Mountainhead.

It’s a satire film about a group of four tech billionaire friends who go away to a mountain resort for the weekend but find themselves and their social media companies under scrutiny as social unrest spreads across the globe.

Speaking at the Hay Festival, Armstrong says: “People start by saying, ‘Why are you doing these rich people again? And it’s a fair question. They’re tech billionaires. Succession was about a big media family. And I think it’s because I’m interested in power, I don’t think it’s about just wealth.

“Succession was very clearly about why is the world like it is, who has power?”

HBO’s Mountainhead, starring Steve Carrell and Ramy Youssef, was made very quickly.

“We did it at great speed. I pitched it in December and wrote it in January… carried on re-writing it through pre-production and then shot it in 22 days, then edited it.

“We only finished (editing) about a week ago and it’s on TV this weekend!”

Armstrong, 54, wanted to do a quick turnaround on the film to try to capture the feeling and pace of technological developments and society’s fear about keeping up.

“The anxieties that we have about technology, especially AI, feel very present and move quite fast. And I wanted to try and write it in the same mood as you might be when you’re watching it, so I was keen to do it quickly,” he says.

“Another attraction for me was that I’ve never directed anything before and it made me feel less anxious to run at it and do it really, really quickly.”

Armstrong, who cut his teeth in children’s TV before writing for shows such as The Thick of It and going on to co-create series like Peep Show and Fresh Meat, said the inspiration for Mountainhead came from listening to podcasts.

“I wrote a book review about Sam-Bankman-Fried, the crypto fraudster, and then I read more and more about tech, and I started listening to podcasts of senior tech figures, from Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman, but also the mid-level people and even lower level – it’s an ecosphere.

“I couldn’t stop thinking about the voice of these people. I do love getting the vocabulary right. For me, that opens the door, once I can hear them talking. And since it seems like the AI companies are scraping so much of our hard work to train their models, I thought I would scrape them back [using their podcasts]!”

Armstrong told the Hay audience that while he knew his job was to engage viewers, writing the film “was a way of expressing a load of feelings about that world and about those men – they’re almost all men in that world – and it’s cathartic”.

His shows are known for their dark humour and Armstrong says if he had to write his job description in his passport application, he would put down “comedy writer”, adding that he doesn’t think of himself as a storyteller.

“I’m trying to make a story engaging that will probably involve people laughing. And the bit that I find most challenging is finding a story because people remember jokes, but you just won’t make it through that half hour or hour unless that story is is compelling enough to make an audience follow along.”

Many writers and showrunners end up directing episodes of the series that they have created but Armstrong says he couldn’t do that on Succession, which won multiple awards including 14 primetime Emmys.

“I always felt like the people who did it were so good at it that it was rather rude of me to suggest I could just come in and do it just as well.”

Armstrong doesn’t appear to be your stereotypical confident showrunner, coming across as quite shy and humble, despite his success.

“Sometimes very creative people have a real ‘screw you’ attitude to authority, and I don’t have that. Maybe I’m a bit more fearful, a bit more amenable. I like everyone to be happy. I want to to give people what they want in quite a decent and humane way.

“I don’t have a confrontational attitude to people I work with, unless someone’s a jerk – I hope I can stand up for myself and the work.”

Mountainhead is released on HBO and Max on 31 May