Armando Iannucci

This interview originally appeared in the MIPCOM 2012 issue of World Screen.

 

Nowhere is the phrase “The pen is mightier than the sword” more appropriate than in describing Armando Iannucci’s work. His political satire The Thick of It, for the BBC, produced in cinema-verité style, skewers the inner workings of contemporary British government. He then set his sights across the Atlantic and produced Veep, for HBO, where he lampoons the Vice President’s office.

 

WS: When did you first become interested in politicians and the political process?

IANNUCCI: I first became interested at an unbelievably early age, when I was about 12 or 13. I was one of these political geeks. I always read political coverage in newspapers; I watched it on television. I would stay up late not just for U.K. elections but for American election results, so I’m fascinated by it. There is something about the drama of it, these familiar buildings and the people who come and go, the decisiveness of an election result and what effect it can have on someone.

 

WS: The only depictions that we’ve had of what goes on inside those buildings have been a few TV series and movies.

IANNUCCI: What I wanted to do in The Thick of It and Veep is show what actually goes on, not dress it up as glamorous or sinister. That’s the other side. We always get the spy movies and the malicious conspiracy theory stories or else we get the high drama. I wanted to show the reality of it, while making it funny.

 

WS: Do you think that the crazy behaviors of some politicians are exacerbated by the fact that today there is this 24-hour news cycle?

IANNUCCI: It’s not just 24 hour, it’s the fact that you think you’re in a private function, but if someone has a phone with a camera on it, they can record something and accidentally post online stuff that you didn’t mean to post. It’s a nightmare and I actually do have some sympathy for politicians because we expect them to function on a 24-hour basis and get everything absolutely right, [while preserving] their image as well and look as if they’re energized and young. We put this unbelievable pressure on them. An awful lot of politicians’ time now is spent anticipating how something is going to be analyzed in the media; it almost shapes their thoughts now.

 

WS: Have you written some crazy scenes and then discovered that there are things going on in politics that are even crazier?

IANNUCCI: Occasionally we write something stupid that we just made up and then a politician will approach us and say, “How did you find that out?” In one episode of Veep, the Vice President goes on Meet the Press and forces the White House to change policy. That was the same week that Joe Biden went on Meet the Press and said something about gay marriage that forced Obama to change his views. It’s funny when these things happen—it’s happened in the U.K. as well. We’ve actually invented policies that we thought were amusing and then found out about six months later that they were actually put into law!

 

WS: In Veep, does your cinema-verité style allow you to catch the comedic moment you’re looking for?

IANNUCCI: That’s right, and we light it more or less so we can move 360 degrees on the set. That means it’s quicker to shoot, because we don’t have to reset and relight for all the reverse shots. It means that we can flow a lot more. We can shoot a whole scene uninterrupted and then add in a few notes and suggestions, shoot it again, add in a few more notes and suggestions, shoot it again, pick off a moment that we feel can do with loosening up, loosen it up, so we’re shooting loads of stuff, but we usually end the day on time. For the actors that’s a very heavy day. They are never off. They could be sitting way over in the corner but a camera might still find them and certainly their radio microphones might still be on so we can hear what they say. They are on all the time, which they love, but it does make for a quite intense shoot.

 

WS: Isn’t that like the people they are portraying? Many politicians nowadays feel they always have to be on, too.

IANNUCCI: That’s partly why that style arose, because you want to see the slight look of fear in the actors’ eyes as they turn a corner and see a camera staring at them. That’s what’s going through a politician’s head at the same time—they are making it up as they go along and trying to look as if they know what they are doing. Because we keep changing the script up to the last minute, the actors haven’t had that much time to familiarize themselves with the lines, which is good because it gives a slight edge and nervousness to the performance.

WS: In preparing The Thick of It, did you have writers who had worked in government?

IANNUCCI: These environments are very gossip-ridden. They love chatting, so if you approach them and say, I want to do a show and I want to make it real, this is not a documentary, I’m not out to expose scandal, I’m not out to bring anyone down, I just want to get the details right, therefore I want to get the boring stuff—what time do you get in in the morning, what time do you go home, what’s the office really like?—gradually they fill you in. Pretty soon you get a quite detailed picture of what life is like on a day-to-day basis.

 

WS: How would you summarize the challenges British politicians face compared to their American counterparts?

IANNUCCI: Two things. Power has become very centralized in Britain. All the power resides in the Prime Minister’s office. There used to be a time when ministers running departments were fairly autonomous, but over the last 10 to 15 years the power has resided in No. 10 [Downing Street]. It means that ministerial politicians are fairly restricted in what they can do independently. Everything has to be cleared, everything has to be double-checked and approved. If they get anything wrong, they are hung out to dry. But added to that is the fact that there is no money! So their policies have to be headline-grabbing policies that actually don’t cost any money.

 

In the U.S., I found that there is more power, and what actually happens is, because there are so many checks and balances, no one quite knows where the main power resides. You think it’s in the White House, but Congress can block that. Or Congress passes this but the Supreme Court might overturn it, so there is this slight paranoia where people aren’t too sure whether they are in the right job.

 

WS: A word about The Thick of It’s Malcolm Tucker. Did any one person serve as inspiration for him or is he an amalgam of people?

IANNUCCI: It’s a number of people. Tony Blair’s former communications director Alastair Campbell likes to see himself as the model, but actually Malcolm Tucker is really based on the rather more anonymous set—they were called enforcers, which makes them sound like the Dementors in Harry Potter! Nameless figures who would come out of Downing Street and land on the ministries and just tell them what to do, what to say, how much money they have, what they have done wrong, and give them the line. There are quite a few of those and that is what Malcolm is based on. I think the Malcolm-type figure in politics at the moment is different. He’s slightly trying to show that he is not a spinner and that he’s often accessible and into new media and whatever, but fundamentally it’s that school of person.

 

WS: You’ve done webisodes, television episodes and feature films. What are the story­telling techniques for each one?

IANNUCCI: With the television series you have to have more or less everyone back to where they started after 30 minutes, so you can do the next episode, whereas with a film, you’re at liberty to do anything with them; you can kill some [characters] off. In an episode you have to get all your plot lines up and running within the first five minutes. Whereas with a film you can delay something till halfway through, you can introduce a character just at the end.

 

Doing shorter things on the web, that’s a whole new discipline as well—it’s very concise, every word is important. It’s all about honing right down to the bare essentials. But it’s interesting. I find all these media are converging anyway. There is a very cinematic look to television series now and, in fact, the most original TV shows are the ones where unexpectedly dramatic things do happen to the main characters and they are killed off halfway through an episode and so on. All those rules of conventional TV story lines have been thrown out the window.