Making TV is notoriously fast and furious, without the generous cushion of a large film production. But what if you were producing and editing a TV movie that would be the last project released in the 2024-25 Emmy season, and you had less than one month to deliver a working print? For “Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong’s highly-anticipated HBO film “Mountainhead,” this was not a “What if?” but a “Must happen.”
“Our title for the show on everything across call sheets was ‘Espresso,’” Emmy- winning editor and co-producer Bill Henry said with a laugh. “That sort of indicated what we were on from the outset.” A look inside the overnight get-together of tech-billionaire pals Randall (Steve Carell), Souper (Jason Schwartzman), Venis (Cory Michael Smith) and Jeffrey (Ramy Youssef), “Mountainhead” has all the hallmarks of Armstrong’s inimitable patois.
Amidst an AI-fueled civil war tears apart countries around the world, these Masters of the Universe make obnoxious bro jokes, one-up each other and doomscroll for updates on the crisis, all from the comfort of a mansion atop a snowy peak. From the get-go, the movie’s May 31 air date (the final day of Emmy eligibility) was nonnegotiable.
“We knew [the creators] wanted that goal for the Emmys, so it was very much
a hard deadline,” editor Mark Davies, who worked with Armstrong on the
British comedy “Peep Show,” said. (Henry is a “Succession” vet.) So they simply edited in real time as the movie shot in Utah. “It was not unusual to have a situation where they wrap (some scenes) and then a few days later, the director would call us into the cutting room and we’d have a first assembly of everything to go. It was difficult, because they did shoot quite a lot.”
Principal photography wrapped the second week of April; work-in-progress
screeners were available to a limited few less than four weeks later. But the breakneck speed did not daunt Henry and Davies. “The real difference was that during the course of the shoot, I was in Utah and Mark was in London,” Henry said. “And on Saturdays, because they were not shooting, we would gather in the morning (via Zoom) and review everything that we had cut the week before. And it was unusual in that we typically don’t have to present (cuts to Armstrong) until the whole show has been shot. But because of the time constraints, it made much more sense for us to present as we were going, which was really helpful, because
then Jesse would give us feedback on those cuts and we could implement them.”
The actors helped keep the production on schedule by arriving on set word-perfect, despite long, complicated monologues that allowed for very few
extra takes. Here, too, past experience served the editors well. “Jesse has always been one to avoid landing jokes [too obviously] and [prefers to] have
things feel more thrown away and organic,” Henry said. “We just honed what we were given and did it in a style that I’m just familiar with from having worked on ‘Succession.’”
All the while, they were conscious of delivering the vast, cinematic look that Armstrong wanted without sacrificing the film’s taut, claustrophobic
feel. “Jesse actually calls it a play,” Davies said. “When we got that first assembly [of footage], it was about two-and-three-quarter hours, quite long. [‘Mountainhead’] could actually have been three episodes, like a miniseries of television, and it would have worked great.” But everyone involved was dedicated to making a movie under two hours, which meant losing some key bits that might have changed the pace (including a funny hot-tub scene between Smith and Youssef).
As of our interview, the picture was locked-in and 16 days away from premiering on HBO. Still, the editing team said they were expecting notes from the network before the cut could be considered final. But when you have a tip-top team in place, anything is possible. “We were so lucky that we had the sound department, VFX and the music department on board really early, much earlier than you would normally get,” Davies said. “So that was a fantastic luxury to have.” Then, considering his words, he and Henry chuckled. “Well,” Davies said, “luxury is probably not the right word.”
This story first ran in the Limited Series & TV Movies issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
