How the ‘billionaire lifestyle’ at a Park City, Utah, mansion fueled a new movie by the creator of ‘Succession’
The old saying in real estate — that the three most important things are “location, location, location” — also applies to making movies, as evident in the new film, “Mountainhead,” shot this spring near Park City, Utah.
The dark comedy — which debuts Saturday evening on HBO (at 6 or 9 p.m. Mountain time, depending on your provider) and starts streaming Saturday at 1:01 a.m. Mountain time on Max (soon to be rebranded, again, as HBO Max) — centers on four tech moguls, three multibillionaires and their half-billionaire host, during what’s supposed to be a luxurious guys’ weekend in the Utah mountains.
The fun stops when news comes in of global riots and turmoil, all blamed on misinformation generated by new social media tools just released on a platform owned by the richest of the four men (Cory Michael Smith).
Smith’s character, Venis (pronounced “Venice”), tries to minimize his responsibility, all while trying to talk his friend-rival, Jeff (Ramy Youssef), into selling his new A.I. system, which Jeff says is less prone to spewing lies and fascism.
The group’s elder statesman, Randall (Steve Carell), muses about how they can leverage the impending apocalypse to take over a few countries, while the house’s less-rich owner, Souper (Jason Schwartzman), pitches a meditation app — as if it can help fend off the toxicity boiling out of everyone’s smartphones.
If the story feels close to current events, that’s because writer-director Jesse Armstrong worked on a fast schedule. The “Succession” creator wrote the script for his first feature film in January and February, then filming happened over five weeks, mostly in March. The movie’s release date, Saturday, is the last day of eligibility for this year’s Emmy Awards.
Central to the movie is Souper’s house, named Mountainhead.
The house sits at 3566 W. Crestwood Court, in the gated Deer Crest neighborhood on the northeast side of Deer Valley in Wasatch County. It made news last fall when it was listed at $65 million — then considered a record for a single-family home in Utah.
Macall Polay // HBO
At 21,000 square feet, the house boasts an NBA-regulation basketball court, a two-lane bowling alley and a two-story climbing wall, all of which are deployed in the movie. What’s not in the movie is one of the house’s signature amenities: a private ski gondola.
In interviews last week, Schwartzman and Smith each said “the house is a character” in the movie. They, along with Carell and Youssef, remarked on how it added to Armstrong’s examination of the super-rich — a subject that fueled “Succession” over four Emmy-winning seasons.
The Salt Lake Tribune interviewed the actors over Zoom — Carell and Schwartzman in one session, and Youssef and Smith in another. Their comments have been lightly edited for clarity.
Macall Polay // HBO
What makes Park City a good place to ride out the apocalypse?
Smith: Park City is adorable, and these people are not. It was nice to be in a cute, charming, sweet place.
Carell: I love it there. I’ve been going up there for years. My kids learned to ski up there. It was icing on the cake, in terms of doing this movie, that we got to shoot there. It’s beautiful, it’s serene. It’s the best skiing I’ve ever had in my life. The people are kind and nice. … If I could film everything in Park City, I would.
Youssef: The sheer altitude, right? The whole thing is an allegory. I think about how many of us are in the comfort of our homes and watching suffering happening on our phones. And these guys are in a home that is at a much higher altitude, and the stakes of that suffering are much higher, because they’re actually directly responsible for it. So there was something about that luxe isolationism that was really symbolic.
What was your impression when you first walked into that house?
Schwartzman: The first thing I thought when I walked into the house was, “Which is the first floor?” Because there’s not just one front door. There’s many different doors. So I was always disoriented. Most houses have the main part. There were so many main parts.
Youssef: It was just, “Whoa. This is crazy.” A few questionable design choices.
Smith: There’s nowhere for art to be hung — well, that’s not true, but there aren’t many. It’s like everything is textured in material, which is just really a fascinating way to design. … I think 60% of the house is built for recreational areas. You don’t need to leave. If you want to play basketball, you can play basketball on your full court downstairs. Or if you want to go rock climbing, you can go rock climbing on your wall. Or bowling, pingpong, shuffleboard.
Youssef: It is so nestled in nature, despite being this incredibly man-made structure. It’s the most man-made house I’ve ever been in, in terms of just the sheer opulence. But then it’s nestled right in the heart of nature. So that juxtaposition was cool.
Schwartzman: It’s so funny, that in the beginning we walked in and were like, “Whoa, mama mia!” Steve even said, “No one’s going to think this is a real place that we’re shooting in, because this house and that view are so perfect, people are going to think it’s fake.” … We left the house for a few days and shot at Snowbird. It’s funny, we came back and I was, like, “Ah, home.”
Carell: We acclimated very quickly. We could very easily embrace the billionaire lifestyle.
Macall Polay // HBO
Did the house help you get into character?
Carell: My character is very passé about all of it. Seen bigger, seen better. None of the trappings mean anything, really, to any of these guys, except maybe [Schwartzman’s] character. Material things just have no meaning, the nice cars or whatever. They’re so far beyond that, their lives aren’t even about that. That’s just incidental.
Smith: Jesse [Armstrong] said this early on: “When you walk in, there’s nothing impressive about this.” As the wealthiest man in the world, you’re just constantly in impressive environments, so you’re numb to being wowed by a $65 million overpriced piece of real estate, because it’s on a mountain with its own private ski lift. Like it’s cool, convenient, fun. But it’s not an amazing house. [When Armstrong said] that to me early on, when I was walking in, I was, like, “Oh, that’s just really helpful.” Just for a person to have lost all sense of awe over really extraordinary things.
Carell: It [has this] vastness, and there’s a solitary nature to that house, too. You feel like you’re away from everything in that house. It is your own world, right there. As the story progresses, and they become more and more isolated from the rest of the world, you really feel like this is their bunker, in a way.
Schwartzman: It has a feeling like it’s the only home there, at the top of the mountain. It has an unobstructed view, which I always found haunting in the movie. You just see the emptiness, and when we cut outside and you see the camera coming in, there’s like this creeping feeling. When we read the script, the whole thing was in this house. And when they showed us the photos of the house, I was, like, “There it is. That’s done.” If it wasn’t that house, it wouldn’t have been this movie.
Carell: It benefited the story and the shooting, because there were so many different places to film in the house. Different vibes, different rooms, for different types of scenes.
Schwartzman: That spiral staircase that goes from floor 1 to 7 in a straight shot — it just became a weird physical metaphor of the movie for me. Kind of a downward spiral. That shape is the movie to me.
This story was produced by The Salt Lake Tribune and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.