Jesse Armstrong loves to pull fictional stories out of reality. His universally acclaimed TV show Succession, for instance, was inspired by real-life media dynasties like the Murdochs and the Hearsts. Similarly, his newest film Mountainhead centers upon characters that share key traits with the tech world’s most powerful leaders: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, and others.
Mountainhead, which releases on HBO on May 31 at 8 p.m. ET, portrays four top tech executives who retreat to a Utah hideaway as the AI deepfake tools newly released by one of their companies wreak havoc across the world. As the believable deepfakes inflame hatred on social media and real-world violence, the comfortably-appointed quartet mulls a global governmental takeover, intergalactic conquest and immortality, before interpersonal conflict derails their plans.
Armstrong tells TIME in a Zoom interview that he first became interested in writing a story about tech titans after reading books like Michael Lewis’ Going Infinite (about Sam Bankman-Fried) and Ashlee Vance’s Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, as well as journalistic profiles of Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and others. He then built the story around the interplay between four character archetypes—the father, the dynamo, the usurper, and the hanger-on—and conducted extensive research so that his fictional executives reflected real ones. His characters, he says, aren’t one-to-one matches, but “Frankenstein monsters with limbs sewn together.”
These characters are deeply flawed and destructive, to say the least. Armstrong says he did not intend for the film to be a wholly negative depiction of tech leaders and AI development. “I do try to take myself out of it, but obviously my sense of what this tech does and could do infuses the piece. Maybe I do have some anxieties,” he says.
Armstrong contends that the film is more so channeling fears that AI leaders themselves have warned…
