Armando Iannucci

This interview originally appeared in the MIPCOM 2013 issue of World Screen.

Known in the U.K. for his biting political satire on the BBC’s The Thick of It and its spin-off, the critically acclaimed film In the Loop, Armando Iannucci’s trademark style of comedy lays painfully bare the inefficiencies, insecurities and incompetence of elected officials and their staffs. He has brought his unique blend of humor and sarcasm across the Atlantic and produced Veep for HBO. The comedy stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Vice President Selina Meyer. Using the same insult-and-profanity-rich cinéma vérité style that marks The Thick of It, Iannucci has placed the U.S. political process, the 24-hour news cycle, the drive for power, and human frailties and misjudgments under his unforgiving microscope. Now preparing Veep’s third season, Iannucci continues to poke fun at politics and power.

WS: When you were writing the pilot of Veep, did you have Julia in mind from the beginning?
IANNUCCI: It was a long process of mine thinking what should be the central role—should it be someone in Congress, a senator, a governor, an ambassador, a cabinet member. Then we decided the vice president. And pretty instantly I thought it would be good if it’s a female vice president because we could make it feel a bit new, a bit fresh and people wouldn’t say, Oh is this meant to be Joe Biden. So we wrote the pilot script for Selina and once we wrote it we realized that we’d need a very good strong comic actress to play her. Julia was the first name that sprung to mind and the first person I got in touch with and it was all sorted pretty quickly after that.

WS: What has she brought to the role beyond what you had envisioned?
IANNUCCI: She has a great depth and breadth of experience. What I hadn’t appreciated was that she actually grew up in Washington, D.C. So she already had a slight background feel for the city [and its workings]. She also had a lot of experience doing improvisation in Chicago. But the other thing that she brings to the role is, because of who she is and what she has done [she starred in the hugely successful comedy Seinfeld] she is quite an eminent figure in America. Therefore she is used to going into a room and knowing that everyone is looking at her and knowing that she has to smile and be pleasant. She knows all the tricks that Selina would have to use, but Julia can look spontaneous and natural rather than making it seem like a performance. So there was that element of body language, of being on the public stage but trying to be protective of your own privacy, or not let slip what is actually going on in your head. These were all unexpected bonuses from my point of view. We cast her because she is a brilliant performer, but when we really got down to talking about the role and the script, these other things all started emerging as bits of her experience that could be brought to the role.

WS: Were you intrigued by the limitations of the vice president as always being second banana to the president, who is number one?
IANNUCCI: It’s that but it’s also a second banana role inhabited by someone who up to then had been in a position of authority. So Selina, for example, had been a senator for some time. She had won several elections. She had no doubt been on several committees and had influence on legislation and had the power base in her home state. She was used to making decisions. So to go from that to having to voice the opinion of someone else and having to back the policy of someone else or to have your role shaped by someone else—because the VP’s role is whatever the president makes of it—is a challenge. If you are very close to the president, you have lots of power and influence. If you’re not that close, you have none. So you are entirely at the whim of the president. For a grown-up, hard-hitting politician that’s a very, very, awkward position to be in.

WS: Unless you are Dick Cheney.
IANNUCCI: There’s someone who made the vice presidency one of the most powerful roles in Washington, during George Bush’s first term. But it was gradually taken away from him in the second term when Bush realized that Cheney was a bit more of a liability.

WS: Power is a theme that you really want to explore?
IANNUCCI: Absolutely. In the first season it was all about the frustrations of not being at the center, so we thought in the second season, what happens when you are given your wish, what does that do to you? How do you cope with the responsibility of the decisions that you have made? How is your personal life impacted by power and what you are doing publicly? Also in the first season, I suppose it was very much Selina coming to terms with the limitations of her office. In the second term, having mastered her office, as it were, it was about wanting to do something else and take that ambition elsewhere. And viewers are also getting closer and closer to the president’s office and the president’s staff, seeing the West Wing and just getting nearer to the heart of power.

WS: Selina curses like a man, acts like a man, talks about having a penis—is gender an issue? Do women at this level of power have to behave like men in order to be taken seriously?
IANNUCCI: Even though we made a female vice president, I didn’t want any of the episodes to be about being a woman. However, if you want to be real, then you have to look at how women are portrayed in politics. And it’s true, they will get adverse headlines if they have a very expensive hairstyle or have spent a lot of money on clothes. On the other hand there will be photographs of them wearing the same dress twice and things like that, so they are aware that they are being judged in a different way from men. I think there is also that sense of women high up in power who feel that because they are still the exception, they will be marked down unless they can show that they are as macho as the male politicians. It’s no surprise that Hillary Clinton wore pantsuits and adopted that sort of militaristic tone on Iraq and all those things when she was campaigning, because she felt she had to show that she was as formidable a commander in chief as a Reagan or a Bush.

WS: How do you and your collaborators research topics or characters? I read that when you visit D.C. you have a “metaphorical magnifying glass.” What do you look for?
IANNUCCI: When I go to D.C. I meet up with people who work in these departments and in these buildings and I say to them, look it’s not a documentary, I’m not out to expose great scandal or anything. I just want to get the details right and therefore I want to know the boring stuff: what time to you get in in the morning, what time do you get home at night, what’s the thing that takes up most of your day, if a call comes through from The Washington Post, the editor of this, or the presenter of that, who would take the call? And as you wander around these buildings, you realize they are much more shoddily laid out inside than they look from the outside. You gradually pick up a picture of how D.C. works. Also, when I am speaking to these people I am aware of how they speak and how they act.

WS: I am sure you have noticed that to a large extent, DC runs on interns!
IANNUCCI: Absolutely. I am amazed by the number of under-23-year-olds, and how they can acquire real power if they are sharp enough!

WS: Having first worked in the British system of producing television, how did you transition into the U.S. model where there are more episodes per season and a writers’ room to work with?
IANNUCCI: It’s interesting because I was sort of doing that in the U.K. anyway. On my show The Thick of It, we had eight writers and it was a team-written show, so I had half absorbed the U.S. system there. I was very much the showrunner of The Thick of It, which is not a role that is common in U.K. television. Similarly, working at HBO reminded me a lot of doing stuff for the BBC, because HBO is different from the big networks, they want to protect the creator so they give a lot of autonomy to the showrunner and to the writers. It’s not a huge season order; it’s only ten episodes. In many ways it reminded me of the protectiveness that I got when I was working for the BBC. But there were things to learn, many more resources at your disposal than you have when you do U.K television, which is both a good thing and a bad thing, because what you don’t want is this big monster that you have to control—we try to keep the show as streamlined as possible.

Also, we were working in Baltimore, it’s a small city, it’s away from TV land; it’s not New York, it’s not L.A., so I didn’t get that sense that I was working in the heart of the American television industry. I felt more that I was working with a dedicated crew and a team that got together for the project, but there was a feeling of working in isolation, which is a good thing.

WS: I’ve spoken to showrunners who’ve told me they often feel like CEOs of major companies. They have so many moving parts they have to juggle constantly!
IANNUCCI: Absolutely, and while trying to keep the whole creative picture in your head. In the first season I directed five of the eight episodes, and in fact, in the second season, I found it worked a lot better if I only directed one episode out of the ten. [That way] I left enough creative space in my brain to look at the season as a whole and was able to stand back and view everything in context. That worked a lot better because when you are directing there really is no time to do anything else!

WS: When you start working on a season do you have it all mapped out before you start writing?
IANNUCCI: I’ll have it mapped out to half way and a little bit beyond but I deliberately hold back on the last two or three episodes until we are much nearer the time to shoot those, because we find that while we’re shooting, we are constantly refining the stories and the characters and the situations.

So in season two the last couple of episodes were really written very quickly rather late on. In my head I had kind of worked out what was going to happen but we only wrote it much nearer to the time we shot the episodes. There was that element of freneticism and ticking clock in the story lines anyway, so that kind of added to it. And similarly in season three I roughly know how it’s going to progress, but I will only decide what happens in the last four episodes in a few months’ time.

WS: I’ve read that in season three you are going to be taking the characters out of D.C.?
IANNUCCI: Since season two ended with the prospect of an election campaign only 18 months away, I think that the staff and Selina will very much want to start putting down roots all around the country, and preparing that whole machine of fundraising and drafting volunteers. We’ve done two seasons examining the D.C. milieu and I think it would be good now to see how Washington affects the rest of the country and therefore having Selina and her team come in to contact with the states, the governors, the lobby groups, the special interest groups, the population. It would give the show another layer of complexity.

WS: For characters like Jonah, the painfully obnoxious West Wing liaison, or Dan, the hyper-ambitious deputy director of communications, were there people you had in mind that inspired them or were they an amalgam of a number of people you had seen?
IANNUCCI: They are amalgams. Jonah was based on one person we met, but in the end there is no relationship physically to that person.

Dan is that very sharp young D.C.-er who has got a career mapped out on the back of an envelope and very set view of where he will be when he is 30. I had Anna Chlumsky in mind for Amy [Selina’s chief of staff] but it was interesting because several chiefs of staff of senators did look like her and act like her, so that was great. When Anna met up with them she thought it was amusing to see the similarities. And for the role of Sue, Selina’s secretary, [we noticed that] secretaries are very formidable people! They are the gatekeepers to their bosses’ precious time. They are the samurai warriors for the whole operation!

WS: Was it deliberate not to give Selina a party affiliation or for us to never see the president?
IANNUCCI: It was kind of deliberate when we set off because I think it’s clear she is a left-of-center centrist Democrat. I much prefer not to name the party because I don’t want the comedy to get into, oh that’s Democrat comedy or Republican comedy. As long as we get the details accurate—it’s not like we have invented a whole new party with a whole new set of beliefs—we can get on with seeing how the process works in Washington.

WS: Selina is single and divorced. There have been divorced presidents, Reagan was, but do you think that being single as a politician is a liability in America?
IANNUCCI: Well, I think she thinks it might be. It is something that has concerned her and something she will have to deal with one way or another before the campaign properly starts.

WS: Certainly her getting pregnant in office was a problem.
IANNUCCI: Exactly.

WS: And her ex-husband, whom she has been fooling around with again, he’s a gem!
IANNUCCI: Well, see, you just know nothing good is going to come from that!