Shooting Jesse Armstrong’s Mountainhead came with a number of novel challenges for Jason Schwartzman.
For one, the film’s turnaround time was a matter of mere months: Filming wrapped in April, and the film premiered May 31 on HBO and HBO Max.
“I didn’t know they meant [May 31 of] this year,” Schwartzman told Mashable in an interview. “I mean, it’s very crazy, but it was so fun to do, because everyone was working so hard to try to make this work for Jesse.”
Another new wrinkle for Schwartzman? Phone acting. Mountainhead follows four tech moguls — played by Schwartzman, Steve Carell, Ramy Youssef, and Cory Michael Smith — on a remote mountain getaway during a period of international crisis. The four spend much of the film watching global conflict unfold on their phone screens, leading to a few montages of tense doomscrolling.
“I have never really done too much — I realized until I did this movie — work with a phone,” Schwartzman told Mashable.
However, given Armstrong’s work on Succession, where characters constantly receive phone alerts, Schwartzman couldn’t have picked a better film to start truly acting against a phone. He revealed that all the footage he and his costars watched on phones was put there practically and in real-time, as opposed to being added in post.
That could make things challenging when it came to distinguishing between reality and the world of the film, because Mountainhead‘s news alerts about hyper-realistic AI aren’t too far off from what we’re seeing in the real world. (Look no further than Google’s Veo 3 AI video generator.)
“At a certain point, I would get alerts on my personal phone, and I’m like, ‘Is this my real phone?'” Schwartzman said. “It was sometimes a little crazy.”
To hear more about Schwartzman’s work on Mountainhead — including his thoughts on the massive mansion where it was filmed — watch the full interview above.
Mountainhead is now streaming on HBO Max.
