Armando Iannucci Interview: Spin as you go

Published on Wednesday 8 April 2009 15:53

BACK WHEN HE WAS A FRESH- faced graduate still a few years shy of launching the successful comedy career he'd been fantasising about since the age of 12, Armando Iannucci did what lots of panicking graduates do when they don't really know how to land their dream career: he took the Civil Service exams.

"I nearly got into the Treasury and I'm tremendously relieved I didn't," says the 45-year-old, softly spoken Glaswegian. "I could have been responsible for implementing the Poll Tax at the age of 22."

Instead, he channelled his energies into writing and producing some of the most innovative and influential British comedy of the last 20 years. The Day Today, Alan Partridge, numerous Radio 4 shows – Iannucci was behind the scenes, pulling the comedy strings. Still, that Civil Service career was a close call. "I kind of got to the final five in interviews," he continues, "but in the end they said 'no' because they thought I wouldn't take it seriously. And fair enough. I take my hat off to them. They nailed me."

You only need look at Iannucci's forthcoming debut film as a director, In the Loop, and the Whitehall-mocking BBC series The Thick of It that preceded it, to see how on the money his almost-employers were. The latter saw Iannucci satirise, in hilariously savage fashion, the behind-the-scenes spin doctoring involved in modern British politics. With Downing Street trying to keep a lid on the fumbling, bumbling nature of Whitehall, the show imagined a system fraught with compromise and populated by ineffectual government ministers, ambitious aides and bullied civil servants scrambling around creating policies on the hoof in a desperate attempt to retain their jobs.

Now, with In the Loop, he has reconfigured that world on a global scale, using a very thin veil of fiction to skewer the backroom politicking involved in the British-American "special relationship" during the run-up to a war in an unnamed Middle Eastern country.

While there are no prizes for guessing which ongoing military situation supplied the bulk of the inspiration, one of the seeds for the film was actually Iannucci's own professional dealings with America. Frozen out of the development process of a proposed US version of The Thick of It (directed by Christopher Guest, it died at the pilot stage), Iannucci thought the experience of being seduced by the glamour of Hollywood, and then being quickly disabused of the notion that anybody cared what he had to say, would be funny if applied to politics.

"I'd been wanting to do something on the whole business of how wars happen, and how people, just by being a little bit rubbish, sort of contribute to things that are a lot bigger than them," says Iannucci of In the Loop's plot, which revolves around on-the-rise British government minister Simon Foster (Tom Hollander) who finds himself being used as a "meat puppet" by Washington after making a couple of flip-flopping public statements about the "unforeseeable" nature of war. "Then when I started speaking to people in Washington about what went on in the build-up to Iraq, one of the things that emerged was that when the British politicians went out there, they felt like they were going out to the political version of Hollywood. They got giddy and a bit excited and slightly lost all sense of what it was they were meant to be doing.

"That was a bit terrifying because you think, 'Wow, it really was not thought through at all; it was all so impulsive.'"

Not that the American side, fronted in the film by James Gandolfini as a war-weary Pentagon official, gets off any lighter. Dispelling The West Wing-perpetuated myth that the corridors of power are filled with policy wonks walking and talking their way through the important issues of the day, In the Loop gets in plenty of digs at the workings of Washington, particularly the Bugsy Malone-style prominence of staffers in their early twenties.

"You do end up with a lot of senators with inexperienced 24-year-old foreign affairs advisers," marvels Iannucci, "and what people kept telling me was that if they get asked stuff they don't know, what they'd do is go, 'Give me 20 minutes,' which would give them just enough time to Wikipedia it. You're left thinking, 'God, it's like the rest of life. It's people pretending they know what they're doing.' What's scary is that this has enormous international consequences."

Mercifully, In the Loop finds the funny in all of this. Like The Thick of It, it delivers its more serious points wrapped up in a farce fuelled by a furious tirade of jokes, one-liners and darkly poetic, wildly imaginative, expletive-filled rants.

The latter come courtesy of Peter Capaldi's Malcolm Tucker, the Premier's gloriously profane, permanently apoplectic communications chief, widely believed to be a riff on Alastair Campbell.

Not that Iannucci entirely agrees. "He did loom large but it was never meant to be an impression of him," he says. Rather, Malcolm is a personification of the whole army of spin-doctors "regularly dispatched to all the ministries to do Number 10's dirty work". (Campbell has since dismissed In the Loop as too boring to offend him, possibly a sign that the film does indeed get under the skin of spin).

Still, it's indicative of how successful a creation Malcolm is that he's the only main character from In the Loop to transfer from The Thick of It. Accordingly, despite Gandolfini being the biggest name in the cast, it's Capaldi who emerges as the true star, vomiting forth ever more inventive streams of invective at any character who crosses Malcolm's path. "They're the work of several people," says Iannucci of his rants. "There are five of us that work on the script and we find it sort of splutters out. Then Peter has to commit it to memory so it sounds like it's tumbling out really fast."

"That's the conjuring trick," explains Capaldi, "When you look at the script, there's a lot of blood, sweat and tears that have gone into creating it."

That Capaldi is so good at delivering these lines was one of the biggest surprises of The Thick of It when it first aired in 2005. He was known primarily for playing gentle souls, akin to his debut in Bill Forsyth's wondrous Local Hero – not ferocious, f-bomb-dropping attack dogs.

"It has been absolutely liberating," Capaldi says of playing Malcolm. "In fact I said this to Armando the other day: I feel like I'd been sleeping for ten years before I did this job."

It's hardly surprising Capaldi is grateful for the chance to play against type. Not only has In the Loop afforded him the chance to go head-to-head with Tony Soprano himself ("I'm a huge fan of James Gandolfini, so that was a great thrill for me"), he's acquired an international fanbase – albeit one with weird affectations.

"When we were in America, one of the film's technical advisors had a friend who's an Iraq veteran and a huge fan of Malcolm Tucker and he asked me if I could phone him up and abuse him," he recalls.

And did he? "Yeah, but he wasn't in, so I had to leave this whole pile of abuse on his answer machine.

"Then later that day he called me back and started doing the whole Malcolm Tucker rant to me. Which was strange, because he was Puerto Rican, doing a Scottish accent, so it came out sounding like Polish or something."

Such culture-crossing appeal bodes well for the film's success at home and abroad. But is Iannucci confident that a movie which pores over the events leading up to the biggest gaffe of the Bush era is still relevant in the age of Obama?

Apparently so. "We've found that a lot of people want to get the last eight years off their chest," Iannucci says. And of course, it won't hurt that the film's depiction of the star-struck nature of the special relationship suddenly seems even more relevant now that Gordon Brown (along with the rest of he world) seems so besotted with the new president.

"Yeah," nods Iannucci. "There's that ever so slight suspicion that if things went tits up again, it's easy to see how these things could take on a life of their own."

&#149 In the Loop is on general release from 17 April.