Alistair Harkness
story and another story and another story.”
Which isn’t to say the film is not rich in contemporary parallels. The links between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump and the chaos that has ensued in the US since Trump’s election last year make a film about corruption, disruption and dangerous ineptitude at the heart of a superpower feel incredibly timely. Film, though, is a slow-moving animal, not great at responding quickly to current events, so any resonance has more to do with the fact that Iannucci’s antenna were already up when he started thinking about doing another film three years ago. Back then he had a sense that something was in the air, that something smelled not quite right, that something was “rotting on the fringes of democracy” as he puts it. “I was thinking of doing something about absolutism and authority figures. I was reading about Mao and Lenin and I don’t know whether that was because of being aware of movements like Le Pen in France and Farage here, but it was harking back to stuff that was happening in the 1930s and I was just on the tip of looking at that and asking if there was something in the offing.”
His first thought was to do something on a modern day dictator, or perhaps set something in the future. Then the French production company that held the rights to Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin’s graphic novel got in touch and asked him if he wanted to adapt the book. “I read it and thought, ‘Well, this is the story I want to tell. It’s laid out there in all its horrible and absurd detail.’ It was an instant ‘This is it. This is my next film.’”
The fact that it really happened was also a big reason for doing it. “In that period, the Nazis are the Darth Vaders of historical movie making. The great terror under Stalin isn’t something that’s addressed or looked at. Because Russia fought with Britain and America against the Nazis and won, there’s almost a feeling of ‘Let’s not dwell on that.’”
But dwell on it he has and the results are hilarious and horrifying in equal measure, the fearful idiocy of Stalin’s inner circle undercut by their murderous actions as people are routinely shot, burned, beaten, disappeared and, at one point, “reappeared” for sinister political purposes. The bodycount differentiates it from Iannucci’s razor-sharp TV work and his Oscarnominated debut In the Loop . “I was going into this knowing I was deliberately out of my comfort zone and thinking I should take the audience out of their comfort zone. The one thing I knew was that we mustn’t pretend this wasn’t happening. We should be respectful of what did happen, rather than try
“I was going into this knowing I was deliberately out of my comfort zone”
Alan Partridge.”
Perhaps the biggest casting coup was Simon Russell Beale as