Succession creator Jesse Armstrong came to Banff World Media Festival on Tuesday to praise U.K. actors Peter Capaldi and Brian Cox for their foul mouths.
“Both of them deliver a very good fuck off,” Armstrong said of Capaldi, who starred in one of his series, Thick of It, and Cox who became renowned for flipping the bird in his patrician role in Succession. “There’s some things which British idiom is good on, and ‘fuck off’ sounds better, I think, in British and Scottish dialect than it does in U.S. and Canadian accents,” he added.
During a keynote address in the Canadian Rockies, Armstrong also revealed a habit of sitting with pen-in-hand when watching TV or reading books. “When I’m reading a novel, I read with a pen in my hand, and I guess that’s the way I watch TV and how I grew up watching TV and reading novels,” Armstrong said.
“To do corrections,” Armstrong, the son of an English teacher, revealed. He broke out in his native U.K. by co-creating the British comedy show Peep Show with his longtime writing partner Sam Bain, before they collaborated on Fresh Meat.
“That’s what got me writing, as I read a screenplay with my pen in my hand, making corrections, and he (Bain) didn’t take offense. He liked them and that’s what encouraged us to write together,” Armstrong recalled. The duo also adapted The 70s Show for British TV, which failed with their audience, but became a big learning experience.
The power of the pen also served the multiple Emmy winner well as he made his directorial debut with the Steve Carell-starring HBO movie Mountainhead, a drama about billionaire friends and tech barons during a rolling international financial crisis.
“It’s not fun not having any friends,” Armstrong said of real life tech barons like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. “The quality of their personal relationships feels thin, feels unsustaining. I feel sorry for that, but that’s not unconnected to how they move in the world,” he added.
On Succession, Armstrong said writing about power, as opposed to the world of the super wealthy, was more at work as he penned his scripts. “I think I can write about this area. I think I have some things to say,” he added, without being able to specifically answer why people in power matter in his writing.
“Why are these people like they are? Why is the world like it is? I guess that’s the fundamental itch that I’m trying to scratch, the questions I’m trying to answer for myself,” Armstrong explained. For Succession, he reiterated the popular HBO series was not about the Murdochs.
“It sometimes feels like I’m trying to evade some essential truth when I say that, but it really isn’t,” Armstrong said as his research that preceded writing the Succession scripts included studies of a host of other powerful people in U.S. and U.K. media, including Disney’s Michael Eisner, Conrad Black and the late Robert Maxwell in the U.K.
Armstrong said it wasn’t a coincidence began and ended in many ways around the character of Greg “Cousin Greg” Hirsch as he was new to the Roy family’s world of wealth and privilege, as was the long running drama’s loyal audience.
“I always felt the bubble that you get in a Dallas or The West Wing, it’s often nice to have a character the audience can follow, who knows as little as the audience about the social conventions and the details of that world, because they can be told information that the audience wants to know,” he explains.
Armstrong also cautioned against writing TV series about the rich and powerful to effect change in the world. Documentaries and newspaper op-eds, he explained, are far better vehicles for that.
“It’s not a sword, it’s not even a medical drug that can cure something. It’s like a recreational drug that might alter the way someone thinks, but they’re not going to see on their mushroom trip what you want them to see. They’ll find their own thing,” he argued.
“At the end of the day, that is what’s great about what lots of us in the room, in film and TV, is offering people drugs,” Armstrong added.
