Interview: Armando Iannucci

In The Thick Of It with the writer/director of In the Loop

Timely in its investigation of Bush-era politics, In the Loop is to the current climate as Dr. Strangelove was to the Cold War. As bitingly funny, though distinctly more foul mouthed, Loop is a scathing political satire about the invention of a phony justificaiton for war in the Middle East and the accompanying PR minefield.

Though it features a handful of relatively unknown actors (and some, James Gandolfini, aka. Tony Soprano, known), one could be forgiven for feeling the events on screen have been invented for our comedic pleasure. Consider especially the profanity-addicted New Labour spin-doctor Malcolm Tucker, played by Peter Capaldi, who prowls the corridors of Whitehall and Washington searching for his next victim. The most memorable and over the top character of the film, he is nonetheless based (albeit loosely) on Tony Blair’s right hand man, Alastair Campbell.

He’s not the only element drawn from fact, says co-writer/director Armando Iannucci, “I went to Washington and spoke to people who’d worked in the State Department, The Pentagon, CIA, United Nations and I came back with stories that we put in the film. That whole thing about the committee, the “future planning committee”, was true. Dick Cheney set up the Office of Future Plans, which was about looking into invading Syria and Iran”.

It’s this banal way in which major political and military decisions are made that makes the comedy of In the Loop so effective, an all too close-to-home perspective on a post 9-11 world still in recuperation. This kind of portrayal was important for Armando, “Well you know I haven’t seen Washington portrayed like that. I’ve seen it as sort of sinister and malicious or as being virtuous and heroic but not as being a bit rubbish and dysfunctional.”

The uneasy feeling of reality is complemented by the hand-held documentary style. David Stratton was severe in his criticism of this approach, but it was critical in achieving the feeling of eavesdropping on unfolding events. It also lends itself to the specific mix of script and improvisation. “I tend to shoot a lot. The script is 200 pages, and we shoot about 30 to 40 pages a day, because I just want to get the franticness, so the cast doesn’t have too much time to learn how they’re going to perform something so that it feels spontaneous.”


Two cameras were used at once with flexible lighting setups, enabling the actors to roam where they pleased. The improvisations, though, proved a challenge for the cast, “Well some of them were used to it because they’ve done the TV show and others were a bit more wary. It’s quite a tall order to ask of someone, to try and be coherent, funny, literary, persuasive, all at the same time. Occasionally you write extra bits of dialogue to give to one cast member and give it to them separately so they can just throw it in to see how the others react. Because sometimes what’s funny is not so much the line but the shocked look on someone’s face as they say it for the first time”.

Frequently, what was envisaged as a tent-pole scene became less important than small improvised moments. “Simon Foster is eventually at the committee meeting and is asked his view and all he can think of is "difficult difficult, lemon difficult". We made that up at the end of the day, that line. Again that’s a line that people quote afterwards, but that wasn’t even in the script when we were shooting”.

Armando is used to this style of shooting, having a wealth of experience in UK television and radio. He was a writer on I’m Alan Partridge (which partly explains Steve Coogan’s appearance as collapsing-wall-Paul) and created The Thick of It, the series on which In the Loop is based. Initially it was not his intention to follow on from the TV show, but with a desire to branch out into film and still focus on his political comedy strengths, it became the most practical choice, “I was already doing The Thick of It. I thought well I’ve got that world, we’ve already got some of the characters there, like Malcolm Tucker. So that was the thinking, to apply that to a bigger story.”

The reception, upon its premiere at Sundance, was better than he could have expected, “I hadn’t actually seen it with an audience before, an American audience. Then they started laughing and I was relieved and it got a great reaction. I think a lot of them found it slightly therapeutic, just after George Bush. It was there chance to see it up on screen.”

The reaction from politicians was no less positive, if a bit more cagey. “Though it’s a comedy, you know I wanted to get it right. I wanted to get the authenticity and some of the detail right. It came out in the States in July and there was a screening in Washington and we invited a lot of Washington insiders, and they laughed all the way through. At the end someone put their hand up and said “can we just apologize?”.

In the UK, “Politicians, publicly, hate it. But quietly they say ‘How on Earth did you find out?’”.

For Iannucci's film, there can be no greater compliment.

In the Loop is released in Australia on January 21.

The full transcript of this interview can be found here.