Despite not winning Best Original Screenplay at last night’s Oscars – it’s a Fix favourite, so knowing our luck, why would it? - Armando Iannucci’s In The Loop was last year’s freshest big screen comedy, and British to boot. So let’s re-celebrate with this reprint of our meeting with Iannucci.
In a scene that could be straight out of Armando Iannucci’s award-winning TV show The Thick Of It, I arrive at BBC TV centre to interview the man himself. A flustered PA greets me at reception to tell me that we have to walk 15 minutes to another building, where he is waiting for us. We are running late: as usual, we have had to sell an organ to get the magazine to print. The Fix is now down to one kidney and half a liver, and this was the only time Armando was available for interview. We get to the eerily modern BBC media centre and go all the way to the top floor in the lift. When we get to the room, he is not there. He’s at TV centre, where we just came from. I wonder if his old friend Chris Morris is organising the interviews today. Anyway, half an hour later, after two brisk walks, I sit in Armando’s BBC nerve centre, deep in the bowels of BBC towers.
One of the most influential people in comedy is sitting opposite me here, and as I start the tape rolling, I am trying not to throw up on his shoes from exhaustion. “I’m going to have a Bounty, would you like half?” Born in Glasgow, Ianucci got into comedy aged 12, where he would MC school charity gigs and thieve all his material off the radio.
“I really got into comedy through listening to it on the radio – Hitchhiker’s Guide… and a host of other shows that I imagine you have never heard of”. After years of gigs on the school charity gig circuit, Armando did what he describes as the only careerist thing he has ever done, and went to Oxford University. “Although I was very pleased to be going to university for academic reasons, in the back of my mind I did think they do comedy there as well.”
After leaving university, he got his formal training in radio production at Radio Scotland where, due to the wealth of production talent available, he was able to hone the talent for accurate pastiches that he later became synonymous with on The Day Today. “You had really talented people from different elements of broadcasting, sports, news … at Radio Scotland”.
The Movie
If anyone is in a position to rectify the list of abominations that is British comedy films, it’s Armando Iannucci. With his list of directing, producing, and writing credits on shows like The Day Today, Alan Partridge, and The Armando Iannucci Show, there probably isn’t anyone better equipped to make this thing work; but why is it that we make such great comedy on British TV, but when it comes to film we have The Parole Officer?
“In America, people gravitate to film, and no one cares two hoots we’re here. I’ve always detected a rival camps mentality in this country. Add that there is also very much an attitude of ‘we like what you do, but can you not come and do what we do?’ and the comedy just evaporates. I just want to make the thing. I’m more interested in stories.
“With In the Loop I very consciously wanted to structure this film as a screwball comedy, but I was also aware that the films I like in terms of comedy are This Is Spinal Tap, Airplane!, Annie Hall, and Monty Python’s Life of Brian - they are not filmic masterpieces, they are just funny films. The priority is the script and the performance, getting the laughs. In the same way as on The Day Today we would say, “This is too comedy”, I found myself on In the Loop at certain bits saying, “This is too filmy”.
Like any screwball comedy, the plot - or the MacGuffin, as it is sometimes known - of In the Loop is unessential. What the film is about is the characters that inhabit it, and the research that Iannucci has done on the American side of politics turned out some pretty interesting characters. “We met some pretty interesting people over in Washington, including some ex-CIA operatives. I managed to get into the state department and take some pictures just with my BBC pass. You hear a lot of faux wisdom like, ‘The first rule of holes is stop digging’, and, ‘The bigger the meeting, the less substance is discussed.”
“One guy we met in the senate told us that they didn’t have much time for ‘members’ - the elected officials. They all walk around in a daze in Washington because they are so tired. Which is a bit of a concern with someone like John Bolton (who the character Linton is based on), as he keeps a live hand grenade on his desk.”
Part of Armando’s comic talent is his ability to shine a very bright light on his subject matter through the depth of his research, and with politics he has stumbled upon an oil well of material. “I never think in comedy that I want to tell people how to vote, or how to think. I enjoy watching the drama of politics, and the more I’ve watched it, the more I want to unpick its bad argument and bad logic. How, irrespective of whether you are on the left or the right, you just misuse information and distort information, and before you know it, terrible things happen. And the whole Iraq thing was a sort of summing up of that, the absurdity of saying we are going in there because they have weapons of mass destruction. He hasn’t got them and none of us are going to resign over this because at the time I thought it was the right thing to do.”
Armando’s done a great job with In the Loop and, although it’s not up there with …Spinal Tap or Annie Hall, he’s brought some respect back to British comedy films that has been lacking for at least the last 20 years. In the Loop works so well because the camera just sits back and lets the chaos ensue, and this very much sums Iannucci up. “I tried not to analyse things too much when we were doing Alan Partridge. Someone sent in a thesis with a diagram about how the show worked and how it obeyed the Aristotelian Unities of Time, Place, and Action. You looked at it and went, ‘It is sort of true, but none of us thought that before we wrote it’, which makes you realise that you can’t really analyse anything.”
If you missed it on TV last night, In The Loop is also out on DVD now.
