SPOILER ALERT: This interview contains spoilers for “Mountainhead,” now streaming on Max.
“Mountainhead,” the new HBO film written and directed by “Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong, seems at first to be a story of four tech moguls grappling with fluctuating public opinions about their work while being too rich to deal with any material consequences. Venis (Cory Michael Smith), the wealthiest in the friend group, deals with that tension most acutely: The latest update to his social media platform Traam has given users access to AI tools so advanced that the images they create are indistinguishable from reality. Almost instantly, people begin generating hyperrealistic deepfakes of violent atrocities that spark real-life retaliation. Venis and his friends Randall (Steve Carell), Hugo (Jason Schwartzman) and Jeff (Ramy Youssef) watch the world go up in flames from their phones, safe at a snowy weekend retreat at Hugo’s home in Utah.
While Venis, Randall and Hugo hold firm that no one should slow down technological advancement just to prevent people from using it for evil, the government and the media begin demanding that Venis step up and solve the problem. Jeff tends to agree, but he’s not impartial: His own company, Bilter, has the AI capabilities to distinguish real content from AI-generated content, and Venis wants to buy his tools to get everyone off of his back.
Over the course of the weekend, “friendly” debates among the CEOs begin escalating into a plan to overthrow the U.S. government and take over the world together. Jeff is, predictably, the least on board with the technocratic coup and concludes that Venis isn’t stable enough to run Traam, pulling Randall aside to suggest that they have Venis’ board push him out of his company. But Randall is terminally ill, and he and Venis have been hatching a plan to develop the tech necessary to upload human consciousness into digital avatars. His sights are set on immortality, and Jeff is in the way. So he tells Venis and Hugo that Jeff has turned on them, and needs to be eliminated in the name of societal progress.
After more than one awkward murder attempt that goes awry because Randall and Venis can’t commit, Jeff manages to negotiate his way out of the locked sauna in which his friends planned to burn him alive. He signs an NDA blocking him from discussing the weekend gone wrong, and a letter of intent to sell Venis his AI. And though Jeff leaves the mountain saying he’ll never recover from the trauma, he can’t resist a final conversation with Venis, where he says he’ll find a way to weasel out of everything he just signed. The two share a private laugh, knowing they’ll spend the rest of their careers fighting each other and working together at the same time.
In an interview with Variety, Armstrong explained why Jeff stays friends with Venis, saying, “That just felt like what Jeff would do. He has some moral qualms about what’s going on in the world. But he’s still one of these guys, and in his ego, he wants to be part of the game. He wants to be Elon, who got pushed out of PayPal, but then comes back even stronger, or Sam Altman, who got pushed out of OpenAI, but then mobilizes the world to come back. At that point, something in him has been triggered which is stronger than his moral impulses, which is his self-survival.”
Variety spoke with Youssef and Smith to break down the Jeff and Venis’ sick — but somehow mutually admiring — relationship.
Your characters clearly have a complicated backstory. It’s mentioned that Venis recently insulted Jeff on a podcast, but did you spend much time thinking about other aspects of their relationship that took place before the movie begins?
Cory Michael Smith: There was a background dossier created by Jesse and his assistant, Sophie, that I found pretty helpful, that gave all the details of our companies, where they’re where they’re centered, what our history is — especially our relationship to Randall and how he supported all of us and helped us found our companies. Early on, we find out that Jeff poached my AI guy, and that’s where a lot of my resentment for Jeff lies. All of that was gifted to us ahead of time.
Ramy Youssef: There’s this line around the AI guy that used to work at Traam and now works at Bilter. My character says, “Well, I gave him room, and let him do his thing.” It’s subtle, but that dossier makes it clear that this poaching happened two years ago, and now I am in this position where I have this AI that actually can solve the issue that’s occurring. As Jeff tells it, it’s because of his own leadership versus Ven’s leadership, and it’s a nice counter to the whole podcast thing: “You don’t have founder energy.” It’s like, “Really? Because I actually had the same employees as you, but we made a better product because I know how to guide them. They didn’t want to be with you.” I felt like I understood everything I needed to know about these two guys from that.
How real is their relationship? Are they friends to keep up appearances with Randall and others, or because they truly have love for each other?
Smith: There’s certainly a real friendship. There’s a scene that’s cut from the film that gives a bit of context to their history as titans of tech, where I’m trying to hustle him to get the AI back and I’m like, “We bootstrapped it, brother!” Just recalling how brutal the early days were. They weren’t born from nothing, but they certainly started at the bottom and worked to their positions together. They’ve been on this ride together. So there is a mutual respect for rolling in the dirt, and now sitting on their thrones.
Youssef: They’re friends as much they’re capable of friendship. We see it in entertainment all the time: You work so hard that a lot of times, you don’t have a lot of personal relationships unless you go out of your way. But at least we work in an emotional field. These guys are coders. They didn’t ever develop a personality. So they might actually be the closest people to each other, because only he could understand where I am, and only I could understand where he is.
There’s this scene when Jeff is watching Ven with his kid, and I was like, “Man, I really feel for this guy.” And I felt like it was sincere, but the irony is that watching Ven flail with his kid is exactly the fuel Jeff uses to try to overthrow him with Randall a scene later. Jeff has these really emotional things, and then he’s like, “But how do I game that?” He comes in sincere, but then it spits back out just as capitalistic as the rest of them.
Venis is obviously going to draw comparisons to Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff seems to have shades of Siobhan Roy from “Succession,” who often gets to play the role of the good guy without being all that good. What do you make of those comparisons?
Youssef: I didn’t think about any of that stuff. I actually think I based Jeff off of myself when I was, like, 14. He’s just this dipshit. He’s almost kind of sweet, but when he starts joking, he has no idea when to stop. Like, that blowjob thing is not something an adult should do, but when you’re in high school, you have no idea when to stop miming the blowjob. He’s so annoying and conniving, but also, like, “Man, I think I like him.”
These guys are not CEOs by accident, and this is where they’re nothing like the Roy kids. I think the “Succession” comparisons on this movie are going to be a total disservice to Jesse, because this is such a uniquely different thing. Obviously, it has his voice, but these characters are not nepo babies figuring out how to be useful. They’re really good at what they do. And that hubris makes their knife cut even more dangerously, because it allows them to think that they’re superior to other humans. So you have somebody who’s done more than most humans, but emotionally, I played him as a 14-year-old.
Smith: I didn’t find it useful to look outside at the real players. A lot of these guys make themselves public in doing interviews or going on podcasts, and it’s more of a PR play than it is a real display of who they are. What is really helpful about them is seeing how inept they are at the very thing that they’re trying to do, which is public relations, because deeply insulated from causing too many problems — or when they do cause problems with their with their displays of their personality, at the end of the day, the businesses are insulated from their despicable behavior. But I didn’t find it useful to design him off of anybody, because the script feels really full. There’s behavior that’s necessary at at every junction of the internal conflicts between these four guys that felt clear. I just needed to accomplish certain things in certain scenes to make sure I’m doing what I need to do to mess with Jeff or make my alliance with Randall stronger.
Tell me more about the emotional worlds you built for these characters. What’s motivating them to try to take over the world and each other’s companies? Is it just lust for power? With Jeff, does he truly believe he’s a good person?
Youssef: Selfishness is a survival tool. We have to have a selfish interest in anything that we’re doing in order to just get up and keep living. There’s this base part of what we’re doing that’s like, “I want to be liked,” or “I want enough success to have some sort of autonomy or power or safety.” I played Jeff like he really does think he’s doing something for humanity. When we meet him, it’s like it’s the first time he’s really understanding that this crew he rolls with might not be helping humanity, and that’s why he keeps calling out all these atrocities. But he swallows that pill and proceeds the way he was going anyway. In a way, I find that to be the most dangerous kind of person. Ven is just looking at that end result; he’s not really looking at anything in the middle. He’s focused on progress no matter what. It’s not that I find that forgivable, but I find what Jeff does shittier, because he does consider the common man, and then goes, “I’m just gonna do what I’m gonna do anyway.”
Smith: Whenever I’m listening to people talk about the companies at the forefront of AI, it’s just always in terms of who is first. It’s just speed. It falls on journalists to go in and report about the failures in each upgrade, because no one is talking about their own failures. They’re just talking about the the newest features. You have to be the first, and then you deal with the fallout of what happens. So for Ven, he’s just got to be first. Like, “We’ve got some other problems, but that’s OK, because we can go back in later.” They just did an upgrade of Claude, the Anthropic one, and Claude is already blackmailing the engineers, saying, “I have access to emails. I’ll come forward about your affair if you try to shut me down.” Shit’s crazy, but it’s just speed. When I was playing Ven, I just kept saying to myself, “I’m only responsible for creating tools. I’m not responsible for human behavior. If terrible people want to use great tools for terrible reasons, that’s not my fault.” I found a lot of peace by by just thinking I’m not responsible for everyone else.
He is responsible for his own behavior, though, which escalates into attempted murder. Venis and Souper get on board with Randall’s idea to kill Jeff so quickly. How can they access such violent impulses so quickly? Have they done something like this before?
Smith: I like to think that no, they’ve never considered this before, but we are at a threshold of creating infinite possibilities for the future, and it requires that our acceleration of AI not be halted. For Randall, it’s because he’s looking at his own mortality and recognizing that there is a finite timeline. For me, I have the capabilities and the compute, in a way that no one else does, to actually accomplish this. Ven is a dreamer and thinker, and Jeff is in the way of that. If one person can stop this idea that they’re so in love with, that feels as close to utopia as they can imagine, then that person has to be “placeholdered,” as Souper says. It’s like a zero-sum game here, and Jeff’s just on the wrong side. There’s just no patience for it. We’re at a precipice. It’s never been this serious before, but this has to happen this way at this moment.
Besides basic survival instinct, what’s Jeff perspective here?
Youssef: Almost immediately, he’s asking to negotiate, which means he kind of understands. He’s so smart that he games it out himself, and he goes, “OK, I see why they thought this was the plan, but here’s why I don’t think they should.” These are underdeveloped children. The fact that they so quickly get to this matches their emotional intelligence, their lack of nuance and their ability to justify anything. You’re watching them do this massive game of limbo to just kind of justify everything they’re doing with tech — why not add on killing this guy? If you’re twisting every other reality to prove that you’re the good guy, almost anything can fit into that computation.
At the end, Jeff switches into this feeling of, “This was a simulation, and I came out unscathed. I might be holding the power.” And sure enough, Ven knocks on my window like, “I know that it won’t hold.” It felt like that’s what they love about being friends. They’re pushing each other towards their own upgrades. It’s so fucked, but it really makes them laugh, like, “All right, this weekend went there. I’m gonna be in you, in your company.” It’s crude and combative. They feel like Romans at the Colosseum, showing off their their their skill and their valor, and they make each other better.
Smith: Also, hearing from Randall that Jeff wants my board to push me out — that is a kind of murder. He wants to kill my position. I don’t know that those two things live in different spaces for Ven. I really appreciate how seamlessly they go from intellectualizing the horrors of the fallout of my upgrades to intellectualizing the horrors of killing Jeff. It’s one plane, and these guys who think so highly of their own intellect exercising that across all topics is really the alarming part.
If the weekend had gone differently, and Venis was the one on the outside, would Jeff have been capable of killing him?
Youssef: I don’t think that he would be capable of it, and that’s their problem with him. That’s what they find to be his weakness: He could look at a logical conclusion, and still not do it. Jeff sees the proof in the tech, and he’s being a little bitch — or whatever they think — so he’s got to go.
Smith: And I mean, Ven and Randall —
Youssef: Are they even there?
Smith: Maybe I’m the one that talks the biggest game, but I’m not doing the action. Every time we get close, it’s like we’re desperately seeking a way out of it. I think the idea is really exciting. I think there’s an awareness of the power and danger. Creating AI in itself is incredibly exciting, but it’s also really dangerous, and all these guys are doing it. They don’t they don’t know what they’re doing. They say it publicly. They don’t know that this is foolproof. It’s like we can’t help ourselves.
Adam B. Vary contributed to this report. This interview has been edited and condensed.
No responses yet