Note: This story contains spoilers from “Mountainhead.”
If “Mountainhead” made you feel disturbed and horrified, that’s kind of the point.
“It does and should feel a little scary. It’s a prescient film, which is part of the reason why it’s been such a fast process [to make],” Cory Michael Smith, who plays Venis in Jesse Armstrong’s new movie for HBO, told TheWrap.
Filmed in March, “Mountainhead” takes place over a weekend as three tech giants reunite in their friend Hugo Van Yalk’s (Jason Schwartzman) mountainside retreat. Initially, the trip is defined by immature and status-obsessed insults that would feel at home on Armstrong’s previous hit series, “Succession.” But as the weekend continues, a new AI model released by Smith’s Venis leads to a global economic disaster. The rest of the movie follows these four men as they casually scheme to “save” the world, aka fix and profit from the problems they themselves created.
Smith noted that the movie shines a light on these incredibly powerful tech billionaires who are allowed to operate and influence the entire world with next to no political interference. “It’s not that this film is a lesson to people, but it’s worthwhile for all of us who are not those people in real life to really question who these people are, how they exercise that power and why we would afford them so much without any sort of regulation,” Smith said.
Another horrific element of “Mountainhead” has to do with its use of technology itself. As these men plan and panic about what to do, they’re constantly scrolling on their phones. Disturbing images of mass shootings and riots are often paired with scenes of the characters literally drinking champagne.
“We all do some version of scrolling past the catastrophe on our phones and looking at a recipe or a friend’s photos and skipping over war footage,” Ramy Youssef, who plays Jeff, told TheWrap. “For many of us, 15 minutes away from where we live are people who would die for what’s in our fridge. There’s this thing we do where we turn our brain off. These guys do it at a much larger scale, at a higher altitude, and they do have a say in the matter. I think that’s why it’s the thing you watch through your hands. You feel the separation.”
“You can be looking at something, and it’s real or it’s happening. Then you put in your pocket and it’s not,” Jason Schwartzman told TheWrap. “Jesse hit that spot of what’s really happening and how quickly it’s happening in the background, and then the foreground, the background, the foreground. I think that was really scary to read, absolutely right now.”
Schwartzman, Youssef and Smith didn’t base their characters on any specific billionaires. Instead, they pulled from Armstrong’s script as well as the chaos of this current moment in history.
“I was looking at this emotionally immature version of myself who didn’t know when to stop a joke and was incredibly annoying. He was probably when I was 14 or 15,” Youssef said. “I think I’m less annoying now, maybe. But I definitely tapped into that version.”
As for Schwartzman, he’s still trying to wrap his head around his character. At the beginning of the movie, Hugo, aka “Souper,” is the only non-billionaire member of the friend group, and he seems the most harmless. Throughout the movie, he caters to his friends’ whims, fretting over elaborate fish dishes as they panic about a potential global collapse. He even goes as far as giving Venis the main bedroom. But the most upsetting part about Souper is that no matter what outlandish idea his friends propose — buying Panama, installing Souper as a president who will likely be assassinated, murdering Jeff — he almost instantly goes along with them.
“I said to Jesse — I mean, it wasn’t like some revelatory thing — but I was like, ‘Souper is kind of one of the more dangerous of these people.’ He’s under the radar, in a way, whereas the others are more defined in what you think they can and can’t do. Souper can change really quickly and is trying really hard to make the situation right, that he’s always in his version of right,” Schwartzman said. “It’s almost like that little brother thing, in a way.”
By the end of “Mountainhead,” these men have caused a global economic catastrophe. As least one of them — Venis — can be indirectly blamed for the deaths of hundreds of people. They’ve been yelled at by the President of the United States, met with several world leaders and have repeatedly attempted to kill their friend Jeff. You would think they would end this movie sick of each other, Jeff most of all. Yet “Mountainhead” ends with Venis and Jeff striking an agreement. Jeff will give the man who tried to murder him hours earlier access to the AI guardrails that will fix Venis’ platform, and the two will make millions if not billions more in the process. All of this plays out as Steve Carell’s Randall uncomfortably looks on from his car, the new odd man out.
“It ideally should feel like one of the more shameful and anxious moments for Venis because he really does need [Jeff’s model],” Smith said. “There it is a real friendship, definitely, and there’s a brotherly love here. They’re competitors, but there’s a lot of respect because no one else has exercised what they would perceive as genius to achieve this level of success by creating an intellectual property of this value. It’s like ‘I’ll take you down if you’re going to take me down. But in the meantime, you’re the best of the best, and I respect that.’”
“They’re both such capitalists that it’s almost like everything that played out amongst them, well, of course that was going to happen because the thing we care about most is our positioning. In a way, it is almost the deepest type of relationship that maybe either of them are capable of,” Youssef said. “It’s just the cost of doing business. And all of us, on a level, do that kind of business. I think that’s the thing that’s disturbing.”
“Mountainhead” is now streaming on Max.
