From Selina to Stalin: Man behind 'Veep' talks satire, cynicism
ARMANDO Iannucci likes to tell a story that may explain his take on politics: When the filmmaker’s father was a teenager in Mussolini’s Italy, he wrote for an anti-fascist newspaper, going on to fight, as a partisan, against “il Duce” and Hitler during World War II. But after emigrating to the United Kingdom, where his son would grow up, the elder Iannucci never applied for citizenship or registered to vote.
Iannucci, who dropped out of doctoral studies at Oxford to become a comedian, writer and filmmaker, asked him why. After all, the son said, “You fought for democracy.”
“Ah, democracy,” Iannucci says his father replied. “The last time I voted, Mussolini got in.”
It sounds like a joke from one of Iannucci’s projects, which include the Oscar-nominated 2009 film “In the Loop” and the award-winning TV shows “The Thick of It” and “Veep.” But it helps to understand the 54year-old director’s worldview: “Just don’t think because it’s democracy that bad things can’t happen,” Iannucci says. “Because they can.”
Iannucci’s latest film, “The Death of Stalin,” is a factbased farce, adapted from a graphic novel and set during the chaotic aftermath of the Soviet premier’s death in 1953. Starring Steve Buscemi, Jeffrey Tambor, Michael Palin and Simon Russell Beale, it’s a period piece with surprising contemporary resonance and a nasty bite.
The London-based Iannucci phoned from New York, where he was promoting the darkly comic film, to talk about the challenges of speaking truth to power in an age when political reality sometimes seems to parody itself.
Q: A few years ago, in an interview with John Oliver, you referred to what you do, facetiously, as “harmless fun.” I wonder whether “harmful fun” might not be a better, if oxymoronic, term for the art of the satirist.
A: I’d love to know exactly what kind of harm you think I’ve ever achieved. Political satire can be various things, but I’ve never felt you can change, say, how people will vote.
Q: No. For that, you need Facebook.
A: (Laughing) If you want to change people’s minds, you should go out and campaign. Or you should become a journalist or a lobbyist. All I’ve ever tried to do is to respond when I’m suspicious of something that doesn’t feel right. I’m looking for ways in which I can articulate that — and help articulate it for other people — by channelling various emotions: bewilderment, anger, frustration.
Q: Sounds like a form of therapy.
A: Laughter is healthy. We are the only animal that makes jokes. But I’m also trying to show how certain things can happen. How is it that, under Stalin, lots of people who were perfectly intelligent still acted like crazies? How is it that a political leader can go into office with one set of beliefs, but seven or eight years later, their belief system turns into something else?
Q: So, you see yourself as more evangelist than therapist?
A: I’m not trying to tell people what to believe. I’m just trying to explain, through all that I’ve encountered, and through my observation and my research, how these things come about.
Q: Jon Stewart used to call “The Daily Show” fake news. Now that phrase is being used in an entirely different way.
A: Fake news, in the original sense, is something that looks like it might be satire but isn’t. It has the form of a joke. When we did (the public affairs parody show) “The Day Today” 25 years ago, we were making things up, trying to project them as convincingly as possible. We wanted the audience to think, “Yeah, but this is false.” What’s happening now is you’ve got “fake news” because people want you to believe it. That’s changed how comedians have to approach Trump. The people who I think really have made some kind of an impact against Trump are people like John Oliver, who have got teams of researchers. Basically they’re just laying out facts.
Q: I sense a certain ambivalence about your job.
A: Yeah. I worry, because especially in the UK, comedy acts as a safety valve. We don’t go out in the street and protest, because we have a rich heritage and tradition of satire. It’s that line that (comedian) Peter Cooke used to say about how he admired the comedy done in Weimar Germany and how it did so much to stop the rise of Hitler. Q: Ouch. A: In the UK, our greatest political comedy was done in the
If you want to change people’s minds, you should go out and campaign. Or you should become a journalist or a lobbyist. Armando Iannucci, filmmaker
1980s, which also saw Margaret Thatcher win three elections. I worry whether comedy defuses the anger. My concern today is that any kind of fictional, comic version of what’s going on is not as absurd as what’s actually going on.
Q: “The Death of Stalin” is very funny, although people get tortured and shot in it. It also plays as a veiled allegory of the present moment.
A: It’s interesting that I felt I had to go all the way back to 1953 to make that point. My next film is going to be an adaptation of “David Copperfield,” which is set in 1840. And then I’m doing this comedy series for HBO, which is set 40 years from now, mostly in space. It’s almost, like, “Anything but the present.”
Q: I don’t think of “Copperfield” as political satire. Are you updating it in some way?
A: No, it’s not a metaphor for Brexit.
Q: Tell me more about the HBO series.
A: It’s set in the world of space tourism. It’s fundamentally about people who have nothing in common, other than that they’re all in this one spaceship for a period of time, just trying to get on with each other. There’s this element of, when you leave Earth, do the same rules apply? Or is it up to you to kind of create your own rules? There’s a kind of a social experiment going on.
Q: Sounds like “”Futurama” meets “Lord of the Flies.”
A: That’s one kind of extremity toward which it could go, I suppose. Yeah.
Q: Where do you get your facility for language? Your politician characters wield words — from the profane to the lofty — as both blunt weapons and as sharp instruments.
A: As a kid, I was always doing impressions of teachers, and I picked up very quickly on the way people spoke. I was a literature student at Oxford, and I did parodies of famous writers — Shakespeare, Joseph Conrad. It’s a hyper-awareness of style, I suppose. But then, as I became more interested in politics, I became much more acutely aware of how language is abused. How people use phrases to sound like they mean one thing, when in fact they mean the opposite.
Q: All your political characters indulge in this Orwellian doublespeak.
A: Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language” is all about politicians taking metaphors and then draining them of any life whatsoever. I tried to write a PhD thesis on “Paradise Lost” and Satan. He’s the great villain, but he’s mesmerising because he has these wonderful speeches — he’s an orator — and he tries to change the meaning of words: “make a heav’n of hell, and a hell of heav’n.” How can you make a hell of heaven and a heaven of hell? They’re the exact opposite.
Q: Comedians have a kind of power, don’t they? The class clown is kind of like the court jester — not on the throne, but next to it.
A: You can develop a kind of status in society, especially if you’re not particularly sporty or whatever. You sort of get by — people like you — because you can make jokes. But I hated it when comedians started becoming cool, which they started doing about 10 or 15 years ago. I was never cool. I always thought I can get away with not being cool by being funny. But now, (expletive) hell, comedians are meant to be cool as well. Jesus, where will it end?
Q: Is there a difference between humour in the United States and the United Kingdom?
A: On “Veep,” we were all British editors and writers, and it seemed to work. I kind of feel we’re much more international these days in the things we watch. If it works, it works. There’s something musical about comedy. It’s about rhythm. At the beginning, you write what makes you laugh, or what makes your friends laugh. If you start writing what you think might make someone else laugh, I don’t think you’ll write your best stuff.
Q: “Stalin” isn’t just about Stalin, is it?
A: I was already thinking about doing something about a fictional contemporary dictator when the graphic novel crossed my radar. I liked the idea of the conventions of democracy that we take for granted just no longer being present. What is that like? In countries around the world today, things have been happening that are starting to undermine democracy. “Stalin” is set in 1953, but it was for contemporary reasons, as it were, that I made it. When I showed it at Sundance, a woman came up to me at the end. She was crying. I said, “What’s wrong?” And she said, “This story has just happened in my country.” She was from Zimbabwe, and Mugabe had just been deposed by the army.
Q: So, for the satirist, tears are just as good as laughter?
A: Absolutely. In her case, they were tears of relief: “Oh, God, it’s over.”