The teaser poster that originally appeared in the Guardian.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Armando Iannucci, the director whose new film In the Loop premiers in Boston tonight at 9:30 pm at the Somerville Theatre as part of the BIFF.
This hilarious political satire is based in part upon Iannucci's BBC series The Thick of It, the political comedy exploring the ins and outs of life at 10 Downing Street. The popular show starred Peter Capaldi and Chris Addison, who reprise their characters in In the Loop. Whereas the series took place in London, In the Loop is also set in New York and Washington, where escalating political manipulation and media hype find some of the main characters (including Tom Hollander as a hapless goivernment minister, Gina McKee as an aloof press secretary, James Gandolfini as a decorated army general, and The Upright Citizen Brigade's Zach Woods as a brown-nosing aide) scrambling to save face, their careers, and the world from a potential declaration of war.
Peg Aloi: I understand some of the characters are based in part on composites of actual people, but I’m more interested in the characters that aren’t inspired by anyone specific. Do you try to craft certain characters based on any particular archetypes? It strikes me that characters like Chad, or Liza, or Judy, for example, are based upon types or types of behavior observed in these environments?
Armando Iannucci: Exactly! It’s a lot like office politics, but here, decisions people make have enormous consequences. I also wanted it to feel free, and it can’t feel that way if the characters are all meant to be somebody else. So in the writing, someone like Malcolm Tucker, who is in part based on actual people one finds at 10 Downing Street, it feels more original to not have them conform exactly to the original. I knew from my research in Washington, there are all these well-off people in the State Department who are extremely young, in their early 30s, and who have enormous responsibilities. Also, in terms of creating specific types of characters, I cast the film very early on when I was still writing it, so we knew very early on what the actors were like, what they looked like, their mannerisms. For example, Linton Barwick (played by actor David Rasche)was based a bit on how Paul Wolfowitz was said to act with his staff, the assumption that he was always right and there was no doubt about it, and no point in listening to any other point of view. Before we started shooting we had three weeks of rehearsals, and we’d ask the actors to rehearse and then improvise, so that we could genuinely see these characters come alive, and then we could rewrite the script according to the new things we’ve learned about the character from that process.
PA: I tend to think of this type of comedy, the idea of the pseudo-documentary, which we’ve seen of course in The Office but also in films like This is Spinal Tap, Waiting for Guffman, etc. It’s become its own genre in a way, and its success, to me, really thrives on authentic but also very tightly-controlled performances, so the actor becomes very important. I have students who try to imitate this genre and they don’t quite understand that it’s not typical comedy and the actors can’t play it as if it’s funny. And again and again when I see this form done well, as it is in In the Loop, I am reminded of Bruce Robinson’s 1987 film Withnail and I, in which the comedy depends upon the outrageous characters saying and doing outrageous things, who take themselves and their situations completely seriously.
Armando Iannucci: It’s like having a choir where it only takes one person singing the wrong note to have the whole thing come crashing down. So casting is so important, people need to be happy to move beyond the script and not feel that it brings down the level of their performance. It’s about keeping everything very real. There is something very funny about people who take themselves so seriously in politics, and something funny in having the actors play it very straight so the humor comes from what they are saying, not necessarily how they’re saying it, so it’s not a typical comic performance.
PA: It also strikes me that when characters say things in an attempt to be funny, they come off as being terribly cruel and misanthropic, or just plain out of control.
Armando Iannucci: That’s exactly it, they do get out of control. When I’m editing, I often take out funny lines simply because no one would believe that this character would come up with a line like that in that situation, so sometimes I would rather have them be speechless, or just run away.
PA: The speechlessness works well. I love that scene in the bar where (Olivia Poulet) is dumping her boyfriend Toby (Chris Addison) in front of both their bosses, and Judy (Gina McKee) is sitting there listening with a potato chip raised to her mouth, perfectly still and just waiting eagerly to hear what will be said next. May I also say, the casting of this film is brilliant, it’s so great to see Gina McKee doing comedy.
Armando Iannucci: That scene really evolved during work-shopping. When Toby admits he had an affair to stop the war, it just seemed to work so much better to have them burst out laughing. In earlier drafts the scene was fu of funny lines but we took them out, it was funnier just to have them sitting around the pub laughing. You go in with a script, but once there you let these wonderful changes come.
PA: One things that comes through strongly in this film is the notion that was also explored and exposed in The West Wing, that the really important decisions and the major players are not what you’d expect; they’re not decisions made by the President or the Prime Minister or the Secretary of Defense, but departmental assistants and advisors and directors of communication. Why do think this has appeal for audiences?
Armando Iannucci: I think it seems different from what people expect. In many films and television shows, I see a portrayal of Washington politics as either sinister and evil, or noble and heroic. Therefore I wanted to react against that in having my portrayal of Washington done in such a way that you couldn’t predict what people were going to do. Usually when a character is introduced the audience knows what to think about that person right away. I wanted to show how these terrible situations arise, and how ordinary people find themselves in extraordinary circumstances. This forces the audience to consider it from a different, more personal angle, perhaps. Sort of like, “I’m a good person, how would I come through this? What would I do? Would I do the right thing or would I just run away?”
PA: I think many of us would love a chance to be able to make these decisions ourselves.
Armando Iannucci: I’m really looking forward to seeing how this all comes down in America.
PA: I really appreciate that you didn’t try to Americanize the British idioms or slang or humor; there really are two distinct worlds, two cultures of humor, and they blend together very well.
Armando Iannucci: Thank you! I didn’t want to dumb it down. I was big fan of The West Wing and while I didn’t always understand everything they were saying, I was always sure what they were doing. All I had to do was understand that, all right, he’s angry and she’s frustrated. So that same idea applied to my film. I was also interested in staying true to exactly how things would be said by who was saying them, without worrying about whether the audience would be lost, because again, it came down to the characters, just doing what they were doing.
Comments