Welcome to Mountainhead, the palatial snowbound 21,000-square-foot Utah Berghof belonging to software developer Hugo van Yalk (Jason Schwartzman), where he and his tech-bro buddies get together for 36 hours of poker, banter and booze.
But as it turns out, what’s very much on the menu is panic in the markets, ethnic violence, societal collapse and talk of global coups – all of which are the calamitous, rapid-fire results of Venis launching a not-fully-thought-through upgrade to his social media platform, Traam.
From the outset, there are obvious parallels with how Donald Trump and his chainsaw-wielding former DOGE wingman Elon Musk, aided by a compliant, fact-checker-removing Mark Zuckerberg, have weaponised social media for their own ends.
“You could extrapolate easily from Trump and Musk, no doubt,” agrees south London-based Armstrong. But, he adds, “it’s not a direct comment on that. The [digital] tools that I posit in the film don’t exist. It’s a fictional manifestation of a feeling we have that social media – and the content that gets onto it – is uncontrollable, minute by minute. This is a nightmare extension of where we are, of the hostilities and divisiveness you get from those really reflexive platforms that snowball emotion and reaction so viscerally and quickly.”
This is a room full of white men – the lack of diversity representative, Armstrong points out, of the reality of who runs these companies – high on power, ego and money. How dangerous are they? “I guess if you were being positive, as they normally are, they’d say there are incredible opportunities!” replies Armstrong, laughing, as he video-calls from an edit suite in central London, where he’s racing to meet his crushing, self-imposed deadline to complete his film. “But those incredible opportunities mean that the possibility seems to have grown exponentially of the world being manipulated into different new shapes by quite a small number of people.”
But while writing a review for The Times Literary Supplement of Going Infinite, the biography of jailed crypto entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried by financial journalist Michael Lewis, “I just started reading more tech stuff and listening to more podcasts. The voices of what we still call Silicon Valley, the tech world, got lodged. This shape of a story occurred to me.” He admits he “wanted it to go away so I could concentrate on other projects, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it.”
So, having pitched it in December, Armstrong wrote a draft in ten days in January; spent February in rewrites and pre-production; shot for 22 days in March in the mountains outside Park City, Utah; and edited across April and early May, so that the film came out on 1 June.
It’s also a story bristling with finely tooled tech-speak and bro jargon. This is a rapacious world where to call someone a “decel” – a growth-blocking “decelerationist” – is a bigger slur than incel. But Armstrong is keen that viewers won’t be blinded by the science.
“I hope it’s like Succession, where not everyone understood the weightings of shares and different holding companies. You should be able to follow this movie on the emotional level of the relationships between the four guys. And that you might give a pass to the ‘hyper-scale data centres’ and all that stuff that they get into! You should enjoy it on that level. That’s my task as a writer, and director this time: that you follow the story, even if you don’t know the finer details of AI development.”
“Maybe,” he replies with a smile. “The only thing I would say is, there’s nothing harder as a writer than half-hour sitcoms. It’s the most condensed form of writing for TV that you can do. It might be nice not to think about the end of the world via right-wing politics, but day-to-day going to your desk, writing 30 Rock is probably harder than being Samuel Beckett – in my estimation. So, I’m not running back to sitcom. But, yeah, occasionally I’d like to write a silly sketch.”
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Mountainhead is available to watch on Sky and NOW.
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