The Death of Stalin is absurd but it's '50 per cent true', says Armando Iannucci

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The Death of Stalin is absurd but it's '50 per cent true', says Armando Iannucci

He's the master of weaving fiction and fact, and the new movie from the creator of Veep and The Thick of It is his most ambitious blend yet.

By Karl Quinn

For a comedy, The Death of Stalin makes for unsettling viewing. On the one hand, Armando Iannucci's period film seems strangely familiar, the speech patterns and political squabbles of the inner circle of the Kremlin echoing those of his fabulous TV creations The Thick of It (the acerbic comedy set in the political corridors of London's Whitehall) and Veep (ditto, only relocated to Washington).

On the other hand, the outcome of those squabbles in The Death of Stalin isn't momentary embarrassment over policy backflips or a fudged sound bite on the evening news. It's people being dragged out of their beds at night to have a bullet put through their brains.

In other words, the stakes are so much higher that laughter doesn't always feel like the right response.

"It's a strange sort of comedy," Iannucci concedes. "People say, 'How can you do comedy out of Stalin?' Then you tell them the stories.

Actor Jason Isaacs (left), director Armando Iannucci and actor Steve Buscemi on the promotional trail for <i>The Death of Stalin</I>.

Actor Jason Isaacs (left), director Armando Iannucci and actor Steve Buscemi on the promotional trail for The Death of Stalin.Credit: Brent N. Clarke

"There's a strange tension in it, it's like watching The Godfather – you know someone's going to go, but you don't know who and you don't know when. A lot of the comedy comes from the absurdity and the tenseness coming together to create a kind of hysteria."

His movie is an all-star affair set immediately before and after the death of the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in March 1953. Its subject is the jostling for power prompted by his sudden demise. And despite all that absurdity and hysteria, Iannucci insists "at least 50 per cent" of it is absolutely true.

It opens with a live radio broadcast of an orchestral concert. Stalin is listening in the Kremlin, and he enjoys it so much he wants a copy brought over immediately. Only trouble is, it wasn't recorded. Heads will surely roll if he ever finds out.

In a panic, the engineers lock in the audience and orchestra and prepare to do it all over again, this time with every note committed to disc. But as they're about to start, disaster strikes. "The conductor faints, bangs his head, he's unconscious," says Iannucci in his soft Scottish burr. "They scour Moscow for a replacement. He comes in and does it in his pyjamas."

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Writer-director Armando Iannucci (with headphones) on the set of the film based on events around the death of the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in March 1953..

Writer-director Armando Iannucci (with headphones) on the set of the film based on events around the death of the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in March 1953..Credit: Madman

When it's done, "they give the recording to Stalin, and he has a stroke". Here, Iannucci admits to taking a liberty with the facts for the sake of plot. In his film, this is all in one night; in real life, the concert happened three months before Stalin died.

But now we return to the story as it really unfolded. "Stalin had told the guards on his front door that he never wanted to be disturbed. So he has a stroke, falls over, and they don't do anything. So he lies there for like a day – this is true as well. They don't call a doctor because Stalin had lots of doctors rounded up because he was convinced they were trying to poison him." So, with Stalin dead on the floor, the committee convened an emergency meeting to decide what to do.

Five committeeman and a funeral: Dermot Crowley (left), Paul Whitehouse, Steve Buscemi, Jeffrey Tambor and Paul Chahidi in <i>The Death of Stalin</I>.

Five committeeman and a funeral: Dermot Crowley (left), Paul Whitehouse, Steve Buscemi, Jeffrey Tambor and Paul Chahidi in The Death of Stalin.Credit: NICOLA DOVE

Iannucci admits to one more liberty in this madcap set-up. "In reality, in that concert they got through three conductors, because the second one who turned up was so drunk they had to get another. I just thought that would be too much."

He didn't set out to make a film about Stalin, but he did want to tackle the subject of dictatorships, and how one person can come to terrorise an entire country "just by dint of their personality".

Simon Russell Beale as Beria and Jeffrey Tambor as Malenkov.

Simon Russell Beale as Beria and Jeffrey Tambor as Malenkov.Credit: Madman

More prosaically, he wanted to make a film in Europe because he was tired of commuting from London to Baltimore for work, as he had done for the first four seasons of Veep. "It was two weeks there, one week at home. I was jetlagged four months of the year."

He had been reading about Mao, though he had steered clear of Hitler. "He's the go-to guy for evil, so I wanted to avoid that."

Think of the children: Rupert Friend, centre, as Vasily and Andrea Riseborough as Svetlana.

Think of the children: Rupert Friend, centre, as Vasily and Andrea Riseborough as Svetlana.Credit: Madman

Stalin came to him via the French company Quad, which made its mark with the animated feature Ballerina. It had bought the rights to the graphic novel La Mort de Stalin, which was published last July. "And I read it and thought, 'Well this is it, this is perfect. This is the story.'"

The $10 million film was mostly shot in London – there's a lot of terrific Soviet-style architecture in the municipal buildings of the capital, Iannucci observes wryly – with some exteriors captured in Moscow and Ukraine. "We kind of crept in and crept out." Vladimir Putin was not invited to set.

We need to talk about the elephant in the room.

We need to talk about the elephant in the room. Credit: Madman

Stalin is played in the film by character actor Adrian McLoughlin​, complete with Cockney accent. As Nikita Khruschchev, Steve Buscemi​ sounds exactly like Steve Buscemi. Jason Isaacs plays Field Marshal Zhukov​, war hero and defender of the people, as a barrel-chested Yorkshireman.

That's all quite deliberate, explains Iannucci. "What I said to them all was I don't want any cod Russian accents. It has to feel like you're hearing all sorts of voices, because the Soviet Union was this massive empire. Stalin and [Soviet politician Lavrenti] Beria were Georgian, they weren't Russian, so they had very thick accents and could talk to each other in a different language if they wanted to."

The sprawling cast also includes Jeffrey Tambor​ (Transparent, Arrested Development) as Malenkov​, the nervous deputy who becomes supreme leader following Stalin's death; Michael Palin​ as Molotov, reviving memories of the "splitter" scene from Life of Brian as he obsesses over finding the ideologically correct line on every decision; Rupert Friend (Homeland) as Stalin's idiot son Vasily​, and Andrea Riseborough​ (Birdman) as his daughter Svetlana​, suddenly an endangered creature following her father's death.

But it is Simon Russell Beale as the shadowy puppet master Beria who really commands attention with his lists of names and sudden reversals of attitude – rounding up people for execution one minute, setting them free the next. "He's the one who intrigued me most, because he was loathsome," says Iannucci.

He knows better than most that the darkest characters are often the most fascinating. Malcolm Tucker, the foul-mouthed press officer played so brilliantly by Peter Capaldi in the series The Thick of It and the spin-off movie In the Loop, is one of the great comic creations. But he's also pretty bloody awful.

"Yeah. I know. He's the villain. But you always want Darth Vader, don't you," Iannucci says with a chuckle.

"I'm not saying the guy is a monster. I'm just saying his methods aren't necessarily the best methods. But when he comes in the room you want the audience to go, 'Oh good, Malcolm is in the room'. You don't want them going, 'Oh no, I don't like him'."

Malcolm elevated sweary abuse to an art form (exhibit A, in response to a knock on his office door: "Come the f--- in or f--- the f--- off"). But he is not at all a projection of his creator.

"I don't swear, that's the thing," Iannucci says, and I confess to being just a little disappointed at this revelation. "It's just the swearing is part of the writing because they swear in that world. I mean, Alan Partridge [the TV talk show host he co-created with Steve Coogan] doesn't swear."

So is it the characters that attract you, or the world they inhabit?

"It's the world," he says. "We write the characters as we explore that world, and then of course, casting Peter Capaldi and casting Julia Louis-Dreyfus [as Selina Meyer in Veep], they're the ones that make them three-dimensional, flesh and blood. It's down to them that you have a kind of … sympathy. They give them their humanity.

"People aren't all evil or all good. They're complex and contradictory. We expect all our politicians to be perfect and they're not, they're human and they all make mistakes."

Iannucci has been fascinated by politics since he volunteered for a candidate in the Glasgow byelection when he was 17. He was never tempted to enter the fray himself, but it kicked off a career as observer and parodist that shows little sign of abating.

He's not without sympathy for politicians, but he finds the whole thing utterly frustrating. "I watch the campaigns and I just think it doesn't sound like they're articulating anything that people really feel. The photo opportunity, the visit to the factory, why are they doing that? Why don't they just make a speech that says, 'This is what I think about transport?' I think it's getting worse and worse, it's getting emptier and emptier."

That's the cold reality that Veep and The Thick of It laid bare so brilliantly. But couldn't it be said that in doing so his work has only increased the sense of despondency with which we regard politics and politicians?

"Well, I've contributed to what was already a large amount of despair," he says. "I hope what we've been able to do is show how politics works. The Thick of It was an attempt in a comic way to show what really goes on in the hope that we can't pretend it doesn't happen like that. We can own up."

How close to the truth was it? "Well, a lot of politicians used to come up to us and say, 'The reality is a lot worse; you're just scratching the surface'."

He claims that in the very first episode of The Thick of It, in which his operatives were trying to come up with a policy that cost nothing, he urged his cast to keep improvising even though the scene was in the can. "And within four years, three of the policies they came up with were actual law – anti-social behaviour orders for pets, compulsory to carry your own plastic bag, and a national spare-room database. All law."

And of course, he reminds me, "we did come up with Continuity With Change, Selena's campaign slogan [in Veep]". Which was later adopted by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, albeit unknowingly, as he promised "continuity and change" in March 2016.

The fascination with politics lingers – he recently leant his services to a campaign to try to get younger people to register to vote in Britain – but he has no immediate plans to do another series. He's got a movie version of David Copperfield in development, and there's a pilot for a TV series about space tourism in the works, too. But when the conversation turns – as it inevitably does – to the rise of Donald Trump, you can practically hear the gears clanking.

"Who'd have thought an autocrat in charge of missiles putting his children in senior jobs would ever surface in the United States," he says. "I find it hard to be funny about Trump. I mean he's absurd, but it's deeply serious."

He had been toying with a project for HBO, he says, "a very realistic faux documentary of the next American civil war and how it could happen". But after Trump, he thought better of it: "It might give people too many ideas."

Fair enough, too. Where Armando Iannucci's political comedies are concerned, truth and fiction have an unsettling tendency to become rather blurred.

The Death of Stalin opens on March 29.

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