In November, when Succession creator Jesse Armstrong got the idea for his caustic new movie, Mountainhead, he knew he wanted to do it fast. He wrote the script, about grandiose, nihilistic tech oligarchs holed up in a mountain mansion in Utah, in January and February, as a very similar set of oligarchs was coalescing behind Donald Trump’s inauguration.

Then he shot the film, his first, over five weeks this spring. It premieres Saturday on HBO – an astonishingly compressed timeline. With events cascading so quickly that last year often feels like another era, Armstrong wanted to create what he called, when I spoke to him last week, “a feeling of nowness”.