ScreenWize

It may seem that an Italian-Glaswegian who spent three years working on a failed doctoral thesis about Milton’s Paradise Lost is the least likely person to put in charge of a biting contemporary film about transatlantic politics, but Armando Iannucci has long been observing and parodying the behaviour of those in charge. “At school I was always the one who impersonated the teachers and did the jokes at the Christmas concert,” he says, “and when I did a degree in English literature, I was known to be good at writing quick parodies of any style - from Shakespeare to Joseph Conrad.”

After giving up on Milton, Iannucci pursued a career in comedy, working in both radio and television - mostly for the BBC. He wrote, produced and appeared in the highly successful On The Hour, a Radio 4 programme that parodied current affairs and which brought together the talents of some of Britain’s leading new comedians from the 1990’s, including Chris Morris, Steve Coogan, and Rebecca Front. After writing and performing in a series of shows like Quote…Unquote, I’m Alan Partridge and The Saturday Night Armistice, Iannucci found the move into directing very natural. “A lot of comedians who write end up directing,” he says. “It’s because when you write you have a clear idea of what it’s going to be like in your head, and you find yourself on set saying “could you do it a bit more like this” even if someone else is the director. So you may as well cut out the middle man.”

His first shot at directing for television came with the hugely successful The Thick of It, which has just concluded its third season in the UK. Described as Yes Minister on speed, it follows the inner workings of the fictitious Department of Social Affairs and Citizenship, headed by blundering Minister Hugh Abbott who is constantly being hauled over the coals by the Prime Minister’s spin doctor Malcolm Tucker. Iannucci - who conceived the idea and who is one of the main writers of the series – was inspired by years watching Yes Minister. He’s been a long-term fan of the show, vigourously defending it in a recent documentary about British comedy. “It’s easy to sing its praises and it’s still relevant and raises issues that haven’t gone away,” he argues. Yet Iannucci knew that the political world he would be parodying in The Thick Of It had dramatically changed since the 1980’s when Yes Minister was made. “The central dynamic of the Minister being hounded by his public servants has been replaced by the Minister being hounded by his own obsession with the media,” explains Iannucci. “These days, politicians are desperate not to say the wrong thing, and have to deal with the much more centralised control they get from the Prime Minister’s office. There’s this demand for 24 hour-a-day media coverage coupled with a terrible fear that something you say will come back to haunt you in a week’s time.”

Like the feature film In The Loop, the half hour episodes of The Thick Of It use a highly documentary-realist approach to storytelling, giving the distinct impression that there’s been a vast amount of detailed research about the inner workings of the corridors of power. “You might think that,” says Iannucci with a laugh, “but an awful lot of the stuff is out there these days. Thirty years ago it might have been difficult to get access to this information, but people have no qualms about publishing their biographies and letting on how it works now. I also approached political journalists, advisors, and ex-Ministers and convinced them to give me all the details of very dull everyday facts. I wasn’t interested in destroying careers or making a documentary. I wanted to know who takes a call when it comes through to the Minister’s Office or who carries his papers to meetings, that sort of thing. The idea is to make sure that an outsider watching gets a sense that this must be what it’s like.”

During the second season of The Thick Of It, Iannucci began to conceive the idea of the feature film that has become In The Loop, but deliberately steered away from making it a film version of the television show. Foul-mouthed spin-doctor Malcolm Tucker (played by Scotsman Peter Capaldi) is the only main character to cross over to the big screen, with Capaldi’s performance - delivering some of the funniest lines of dialogue you’ll hear for a long time – critical to success. “I wanted to start again,” says Iannucci, “and we wrote it in a way that you don’t need to know anything about the show. I knew that I needed Malcolm and I wanted to use some of the actors, but in different roles. It’s very much a stand-alone piece.”

After its debut at Sundance, In The Loop (which screened at last year’s Canberra International Film Festival) has been slowly released throughout Europe and North America to rave reviews. Iannucci maintains that its popularity – even in places like Spain – comes from sticking to the core idea. “The response is very heartening,” says Iannucci, “I just wanted to make the film I wanted to make, and we deliberately didn’t try and make something that would specifically appeal to Americans or Europeans. I always said that if we kept the film absolutely rock solid committed to its own world, then enough people would buy into it for what it really was.”

The success of the film has allowed Iannucci to finally leave the BBC. He’s thinking about a slapstick project and is also in discussions with HBO about a comedy series looking at the power of blogging and tweeting. But before he finished up with his long-term employer, Iannucci did have time to complete a much more serious documentary project – about Milton’s Paradise Lost. Called Milton’s Heaven and Hell, it took Iannucci back to his aborted PhD studies at Oxford. “One of the great benefits of doing the documentary was that I got a very nice note from my old tutor,” says Iannucci. “He said I had managed to achieve closure.”

Filed Under: Interviews by Simon