Armando Iannucci
Appearances
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, dread, yes. I think we're all anxious about something, but for each person it's a different thing. Or we can't quite put a finger on it. There's just a cumulative atmosphere of dread and foreboding, but not quite knowing what.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
Oh, absolutely. It's a way of articulating. It's a way of processing it. It's a way of dramatizing it.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
I'm not arguing comedy is better. It just gives you another way in. And I think comedy... I think it just allows you to open up your mind a bit. If you find yourself laughing at something and then asking yourself, should I have laughed at that? Well, if you've laughed at it, then... You should. It's spontaneous. I think that's why autocratic leaders hate jokes about themselves.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
It's out of their hands. They like stuff where they can tell you what to do. And comedy allows what might otherwise feel a forbidding and inaccessible theme. It allows you that entry point. You know, before making The Death of Stalin, I went back and watched The Great Dictator.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
So not even with the benefit of hindsight, right in the middle of it. And he treads this line between high comedy, fantastic, memorable, comedic moments like, I don't know, Ed Hinkle, the dictator, just playing with a globe, picking earth up in his hands and dancing with it. And then scenes set in the Jewish ghetto, which are not funny, not meant to be funny.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
And it's this balance between the funny and the tragic. And I knew when going into the death of Stalin, that's what I wanted to do. And I said to everyone, when we started filming, I said to the crew and to the cast, it's a comedy, but we must also be mindful and respectful of what happened to the people. We're not making fun of the deaths and the punishments.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
The comedy comes from those inside the Kremlin. And I was holding those two kind of tones and moods simultaneously.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
It all makes sense under something called Plan R. It would remove all uncertainty if we retaliate. Pre-tally what? Pre-tallyate. I think this is a new word. See, conventionally, if the Russians attack us, our only option is to... Re-tally it. Plan R gives us a second option. We pre-tallyate before they even think of tallyating. Nuclear preterence, sir. In a nutshell, it's bulletproof.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
You know, I've spent the last, whatever, several decades examining politicians, their speech and how they use rhetoric to disguise or to pretend something is not what it is and so on.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
You know, in the film, it opens with the Air Force gate saying, Peace is our profession. I thought that was a gag. I thought Kubrick made it up. In the archive, you come in, there's the photo. It exists. This is in the Kubrick archive, he says. He saw this photo of an Air Force base with Peace is our profession written on it. So again, he's taking what's true and just putting it in.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
And it was real. It was real. I know. I know. And that's when you just think, You don't have to embroider it, you know. If what is true makes the point, then make that point with the truth. You know, with the death of Stalin, as we researched the story, we kept finding more and more stories that were just absurd but actually happened.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
Vasily was high up in the Soviet Air Force. He was overpromoted. He was drunk. He was in charge of the ice hockey team. He sent them to a tournament in an ice storm. He was warned there'd be a danger to the flight. The flight went down. He lost the ice hockey team. He was too scared to tell his father. So he just recruited like friends of friends for a new team who were terrible.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
And that's such a bizarre story, but it says so much about even his son was scared of him. And that's why I'm saying it's all about the truth. It's the truth of what people really felt at the time. How can we get to that, that uneasy feeling they had at the bottom of their stomachs for years that they might be rounded up and taken away in the middle of the night?
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
Well, Doctor Strange is one of those films that's always been in my top five movies of all time.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
I think it's the best dark comedy film ever made. I'm a huge Kubrick fan. The other reason I said yes was because, and this was several years ago, at the time, climate change was becoming a much more stark reality. There was a kind of a sensation of, we don't do something immediately about this. The world isn't going to come back from it.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
That sense of us as a collective species still being unable to save ourselves from our own behavior.
This American Life
852: Pivot Point
Everyone on stage realizes there's a good chance the world might end, but they can't quite admit it. It's like a very slow motion car crash that you're watching. And everyone's caught up in it, but unable to, because of their own desire to retain their own status and to prove their point over the enemy, leading to annihilation.