Over four seasons of following the globe-trotting Roy family, “Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong and production designer Stephen Carter had mastered the art of finding locations that showcased the characters’ extreme wealth, but also how uncomfortable and cold these spaces can be for their characters. When Armstrong was on this week’s episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit Podcast, to discuss his new HBO movie “Mountainhead,” about four tech moguls’ weekend getaway, he talked about how impersonal these locations can be.
“They’re gilded cages, or really more beige prison cells,” said Armstrong. “That wealth has this kind of international hotel feel to it. I’ve scouted a lot of these locations and there is a similarity. I guess it’s often people who spend time a lot of different places around the globe and maybe they want that uniformity, it doesn’t have much aesthetic zing to it.”
In his directorial debut “Mountainhead,” the importance of finding the right location was right in the title. As Armstrong talked about on the podcast, the accelerated production process, going from pitch to air in less than six months, was motivated by his desire to tap into the audience’s in-the-moment anxiety of the dangers of emerging AI and real-life tech moguls like Elon Musk gaining unprecedented political, cultural, and economic power. He would therefore need a single location to serve as the perfect lair from which his fictional tech bros would plot the future of humanity as the world burned down around them.
“There were a number of scary moments on this production where, given the compressed time table that we were trying to achieve, it could have fallen apart over casting, over me flunking and not coming up with a script on time, but not finding the house was one of the major ones,” said Armstrong. “It was scary when we hadn’t found it. And in fact, I was so behind on writing the script, I had to, at a certain point, just leave the team to do it.”
Executive producer Jill Footlick, cinematographer Marcel Zyskind, and Carter would continue the search without Armstrong, who acknowledged his list of requirements was significant, including the house needing to be potentially dangerous — to say more would be a spoiler. Beyond the extreme wealth and impersonal coolness, the location simultaneously needed to be visually varied and dynamic.
“I knew that it was almost all going [take place] in this house, and as a director, I was eager that we couldn’t, as they say, ‘shoot it out,’ and get bored of the location too quickly,” said Armstrong.
The search took the “Mountainhead” team to British Columbia, Wyoming, and Colorado, before finding its 21,000-square foot, seven-bedroom estate, in Park City, Utah.
“I think I knew that we had the right place when Marcel, who’s Danish, called me up and said he’d come away from this house with just this incredibly strong feeling of depression,” said Armstrong. “It sort of had shocked him to his core, the kind of the scale of it— it’s drilled down into this mountainside over seven floors with a basketball court at the bottom, but has these tremendous vistas out over Utah. It’s really a character in the movie, I guess.”
After spending the last decade visiting and scouting the international hotel-like blandness of the globe-trotting uber-wealthy, we asked Armstrong if he ever considered what he’d buy if he became mogul-rich. Not surprisingly, he went in the opposite direction of the modern “Mountainhead” house.
“When we were in Tuscany [for Season 3 of ‘Succession’], I mean, it’s pretty hard to maybe to screw up a Renaissance villa,” said Armstrong.
“Mountainhead” is now streaming on HBO Max.
To hear Jesse Armstrong‘s full interview, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.
