In The Thick Of It with the writer/director of In the Loop
This is the complete transcript of my interview with Armando.
The article derived from this interview can be found here.
Why did you decide to adapt The Thick of It it into a film?
“I wanted to mak e a comedy, I didn’t think it would be about a war, but when I read about the sort of dysfunction going on in Washington, the different departments not speaking to each other and how they hadn’t really planned anything, and how the Brits were just manipulated and so on. The more I read about that, well that is a farce, and though well that’s the story, that’s the screwball comedy I was looking for. And then, because it was set in the world of politics, and 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.
Unfortunately I haven’t been able to see the show yet...
Well only Malcolm Tucker is there. It’s a domestic department.
But it has the same satirical tone?
That kind of look, that kind of almost eavesdropping, slightly documentary feel. But you don’t need to have seen the series at all to get the film.
On that note, the movie is shot in a very contemporary hand-held way. Obviously this was a deliberate choice –
It’s both a stylistic and a practical thing in that I tend to shoot a lot, you know, 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 spontateous. So in order to do that we make the shooting conditions as flexible as pos`sible which involves the location just having a general lighting space, no marks so I’m not telling people where to stand, you know, I say, don’t look for the camera, the camera will find you, just go where you like. We have hand held cameras, and two cameras on the go at once. That’s the practicality, but I also wanted it to feel like you’re eavesdropping on something, that you’re not getting the glossy, Hollywood version of how events occurred, but actually you’re seeing what really goes on. You’re being invited to see a film you’re not mean to see. That you’re getting the first unedited rushes that will later be sanitised and cut down.
I read that you have a very specific mix of script and improvisation?
Yeah, well we start with the script, and I wouldn’t shoot until we’re happy with it.
But if the script is 200 pages, does that mean the film is half of that?
Well the first cut was four and a half hours. But I think it’s to do with the fact that I want to be surprised, that I don’t want to go in thinking this is the big scene, this is the scene that will offset that, i’ve storyboarded this at that point, i kind of don’t know what the highlight is going to be, what’s really going to stand out. Alot of people remember the scene in the children’s bedroom, now to me in the script that was just a little incidental throwaway scene that came at the end of a big long sequence that in the end I cut. But when you see it on screen that sums up... And the other thing was that point in the middle where 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. Originally I think he said something else like “Oh well I can see both sides”, but just wasn’ t doing it. I try and shoot as much in story order as possible, so that you can remember what the story is. And then I thought actually Toby’s just said that phrase as he left, why doesn’t he just use that phrase.
So Toby had that line first?
Yeah.
Which made the second line even funnier.
Yeah, and again that’s a line that people quote afterwards, but that wasn’t even in the script when we were shooting, you know, it’s just a product of...And I kind of like that, I want to be a bit surprised by what we come up with. So things I think were going to be the big thing I cut, and the little things become more interesting.
How did the cast cope with the improvisational elements?
Well some of them are used to it because they’ve done the TV show and others were a bit more wary, but I say to all of them, the very first day I was rehearsing the program each member of the cast came up to me and said “everyone else is great, but I’m terrible”. And at the end of the day I had to sit them all down and say look each one of you has come up and said how fantastic everyone is and how terrible you are, I wouldn’t have chosen you, I wouldn’t have cast you otherwise. Because it is quite a tall order to ask of someone, to try and be coherent, funny, literary, persuasive, all at the same time. And I say to them sometimes it’s not trying to come up with new funny stuff, it’s more about just making it feel real, that you would say that line at that point because he looks so furious. And sometimes when I ask them to improvise they do the script again but it just comes out in a slightly different order, a much more natural order rather than you have to say that line now because that’s what’s written. I say, ignore that, if the line at the end seems more relevant, just say the line at the end. And 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. I’d say about 85% of it is script, in the final edit.
How involved were you in the edit, I assume it was a very long process?
It was longer than the shoot! The shoot was thirty days and the edit was four months. And it’s easy to get it down to 2 hours, but I wanted it to be an hour and a half. Because I think for a comedy that’s the natural length.
I’m curious about the structure, though, if the script was 200 pages, were the things that you cut out just subplots?
Yes, there were whole other storylines. It’s funny, we did for the DVD, which not out here but is in the UK, there’s another 30 minutes which I haven’t put back in the film, but I put continuously, so it’s a continuous 30 minutes parallel to the movie, so it’s the same action, just seen from other characters. And what I found was the toughest part was that I wanted to loose ten minutes from the film, so I had to cut my three favourite scenes and I think I was only keeping them in because they were my favourite scenes.
And people say that you always have to ditch your favourites –
Because they were holding things up, they never quite advanced anything, they slightly cut it off just as it was getting momentum. As soon as I cut those scenes out it was a better film. But I suppose the advantage of DVD is that you can show those. But I wouldn’t want to put them back in. But the edit was quite long, and with all the improvisation. I kind of work on the basis of doing the story first, then going back and looking at other takes, other rushes. And there probably are still bits of the film that I haven’t seen yet. Because i thought if i watched everything, I’ll go mad, because there’ll just be an infinity of choices. So I’d rather structure it and then if it’s not working, starting dipping into some of the improvisations and other takes and usually find something that is as a funny as the thing you first had.
Obviously the movie is a very thinly veiled Iraq-war allegory, how much inspiration did you take from that, and were there any specific events you drew upon?
Oh yeah, I went to Washington and I 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 and he had to shut it down because every senator that found out about it wanted to get on. Or things like someone said to me the golden rule in Washington being never leave the meeting, if you leave the meeting you leave power, because things are decided very quickly. Madeline Albright, when she was Secretary of State, talked about ladder diplomacy .And I thought wouldn’t it be funny if for one of them there was something they had to leave the meeting for, and we thought about bleeding teeth, and that’s why that’s there. So there was a lot of background research. And you know Chad? Washington is full of Chads, who hang outside bosses doors, and get asked to play squash.
I’m curious how to got these interviews with these people, did you call them up and ask “hey I want to know about you so I can make fun of you”?
There’s a journalist in Washington called Spencer Acerkman, who is the top political blogger of sorts, and he had written about The Thick of It, so I got in touch of him, and he knew alot of the people who worked there. So I said we were making a film and he was great, he organised it. It’s such as small, one industry town, everyone knows everyone. So you only have to know one person, and then you have another and another. So I spent a week talking to people right up to, you know, chief of staff of Joe Biden, right down to officer workers in the back room of the State department.
It certainly feels authentic.
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.
From an audience point of view, aside from the hilarity of it, what do you want audiences to take away from it? Should we feel that politicians are more inept then we already believe?
Well, no, I sort of think I’d actually want people to ask what would they do in these circumstances. Would they just quietly go, well I don’t quite believe in this but I’ll say nothing, or would they stand up. And, if anything, the one elected politiction, Simon Foster, is slightly more sympathetic than some of the people around him. So you know, I’m not saying all politicians are evil, I’m actually saying people can have the noblest of intentions and yet still find themselves in massive moral screw ups. You know, when he’s in the back of the car trying to argue if doing the wrong thing is braver (than the right). But that happened that was in Claire Short, the International Development director in the UK, her diary, decided not to resign today, decided that not to resign was the braver thing to do. So I just felt, well, I want to show the process that leads to that kind of strange decision.
So it is more accurate than we -
Oh yeah. In the UK we’re having the Iraq enquiry, and there’s one journalist whose been attending it everyday, and everyday he comes back and write to me well this was all in In the Loop, why has no one brought this to our attention anymore? Why do we have to have a major enquiry to sort these things out? And the story, 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 but at the end, someone put their hand up and said “can we just apologize”.
Was there a similar reaction in the UK?
It’s very funny, politicians, publicly, hate it. But quietly they say “how on Earth did you find out?”
I was also curious about, in the movie, there’s the British half and the American half, and especially at the beginning, the comedy of each felt different. Was this deliberate?
We very much worked that there were going to be these two camps, so I was casting one camp and then casting the other. And then we only came together quite near the shoot for a rehearsal period in New York, and that was the first time they’d met each other. And it was quite funny because the first day each felt slightly nervous of the other because, you know, someone like James Gandolfini, who’s such a well known figure, Peter Capaldi who plays Malcolm was in Awe of James, you know, because he loved the Sopranos. But within an hour they were improvising and workshopping scenes together. But James told me afterwards, because he’d seen the DVD of The Thick of It, that Peter Capaldi, everytime I see him, just gets nervous because he’s so good. And it’s funny, we’d have this notion that the others are going to be better than us, and then you find out that they’re thinking the same. It’s part of what the film is about – that no one’s quite is impressive as they look. And on the first day of filming we started filming the UK team first, then the US team arrived two weeks in, and again everyone kinda went back to their relative corners, before you know, mixing. It was a great cast, really fun. Individually as well, in person. Because I have this thing that I want to work with people who are obviously up for working hard, especially something like this where it relies so much on the atmosphere. I don’t really have time to spend an hour and a half explaining motivation about a line. There isn’t a time.
Did you have a similar response to film in the UK as in America?
Yeah, it was all a UK funded film so there was no expectation about how it would do outside the UK. But actually the premiere was Sundance, in front of an American audience. We sat down in the cinema in front of an audience , and I hadn’t actually seen it with an audience before, and 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. I think they enjoyed it.
What’s up for you next film-wise?
I want to do a slapstick. A physical comedy, with lots of sight gags. You know, completely different, not set in politics. We’re just working on a story at the moment.
That’s your current project?
I’m doing that and I’m writing something for HBO, just a pilot set in the world of Internet startup.
Sounds great. I wish you every success.
Thankyou.
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