In The Loop

16/04/2009

Peter Capaldi and Armando Iannucci get serious about swearing for soaring box-office hit

by Jane Graham

Meeting the main players behind The Thick of It, BBC4’s brilliantly-funny, X-rated political satire, is unnerving, even in the abnormally bland surroundings of Glasgow’s Novotel.

Actor Chris Addison is one of the country’s best stand-ups and has a quickfire brain to match his rising reputation.

Italian Scottish producer Armando Iannucci – who has written and produced some of the best British comedy of the last 20 years, including The Day Today and I’m Alan Partridge – is not merely always the funniest man in the room, but also one of the most informed and intellectually robust.

As for actor Peter Capaldi, he’s not just one of Scotland’s greatest stage and screen actors, he currently plays one of the most fearsome characters in the history of television – The Thick of It’s Malcolm Tucker, a government spin doctor so creative with swear words and obscene metaphors that Tony Blair’s communication’s chief Alistair Campbell recently claimed that Tucker’s famous “fuck the fuck off” line came from him.

After two poorly watched, critically (hysterically) lauded series on the BBC, The Thick of It has come to the cinema in the shape of In The Loop, in which the action – previously limited to the UK – stretches to Washington, where British and American Doves and Hawks bat the idea of foreign invasion back and forwards. The film is an absolute joy, a thrilling top-speed ride towards a terrifying conclusion, constantly accelerated by fastly-delivered, brilliantly-funny, sparkling dialogue somehow reminiscent of His Girl Friday, The Sopranos and The West Wing all at the same time.

The move from television to cinema has seen sets, cast and subject matter inflate, but the premise of the film remains true to Iannucci’s perennial beliefs as expressed in The Thick of It – that world events are not created by an enormous, anonymous, impenetrable machine but rather are the results of mistakes, embarrassments and “fudging” by some very ordinary people.

“The more I read about [the Iraq war] in detail I realised it’s less to do with people who are big and powerful and evil, and more to do with people who have lots of responsibility being a bit rubbish. And I thought, that’s quite funny,” a softly-spoken Iannucci tells me as we sit together in one of
Novotel’s beige conference rooms.

“When I went out to Washington myself I met lots of people as part of the research, and discovered that even Washington is slightly rubbish. You see these incredibly-impressive buildings and then you go in and they’re a bit dowdy and tatty.

“The place is mostly run by 22-year-olds who are very intelligent but don’t really know how to wire a plug – tiny kids with lots of responsibility – and sometimes they do things they’re not sure about so they try to cover it up. That’s how things happen. It’s like the banks, full of what you assumed were very experienced wise people that knew exactly what they were doing, and suddenly they’re all saying, ‘Um, sorry, really sorry. It’s just – everyone else was doing it’.”

Iannucci has always been interested in language and how to play with it – he did impersonations of his school teachers at Glasgow’s St Aloysius’ College and wrote parodies of the texts he was reading as an English literature student at Oxford.

His knack for undermining the nonsense of jargon and the pompous self-referential style of TV news was a huge part of The Day Today’s
success, with its Enviromation updates, think pieces by guest commentator Jacques Derrida, “Speak Your Brains” vox pops and headlines like “Portillo’s Face Felt Like Guts Says Girl.”

In The Loop also enjoys poking fun at opaque tech-speak and pomposity, but adds a more sinister, Orwellian dimension, which may sum up the Blair/Campbell era nicely. “Whether it happened or not is irrelevant. It is true,” Malcolm Tucker spits down the phone with total conviction towards the end of the film.

Tucker is one of Iannucci's best creations - he will probably, as Chris Addison says, make all of those 10 Greatest Comedy Characters lists in 20 years time. Tucker is a terrifying man, an unforgiving bully who is utterly amoral and loyal only to his job. Capaldi was not an obvious choice to play him – better known for roles as, in his words "quite nice people" – but Iannucci explains that it was during an improvised workshop with the actor when he was casting that he flashes of the contempt and aggression that would come to characterise Malcolm Tucker.

“I said okay, take me out for lunch, be very nice to me then tell me I’m sacked. And if I resist just turn on me,” he says. “And Peter did it and it was a bit frightening and I thought – there’s Malcolm. Capaldi has this eloquent way of swearing and he very rarely raises his voice. I thought that was perfect.”

Capaldi himself admits that he came to that first meeting with Iannucci with just the right amount of motivation.

“That day I think I’d already been another audition,” he tells me in another beige conference room. “And I’d been rather unhappy because it was people I’d worked with before but they were asking me to come in and read for this tiny little part. It really pissed me off. So by the time I got to Armando  I was beeling a bit so I just used that.”

So is there a little bit of the Tucker monster in Capaldi then? Despite a history of playing gentle, easy-going, doe-eyed men?

“I’m not that easy going, I’m pretty neurotic, I do get wound up and I have a lot of nervous energy, “ he says, his huge penetrative eyes directed directly into mine. “I may be more of a passive aggressive than Malcolm is. I’m a worrier and sometimes you think, what have I got to worry about, I need to stop – but is it perhaps the fuel that propels me forward? I’d rather it wasn’t the fuel but I’m not sure I can change that.

“I think my comfort zone is a kind of melancholic fug, like quite a lot of Scottish people. But unlike Malcolm, I don’t think people are scared of me, I don’t think I give out those kind of signals – but then when I say to friends of course I’m nothing like Malcolm they say I am!”

One can’t help but wonder if Capaldi’s friends are often waved off with a ‘Fuckity bye!” Perhaps not, but Malcolm’s sign-offs and insults have become legendary among Thick of It fanatics (Thickos?), and there is no shortage of bon mots in In the Loop, including a dismissive “Let them eat cock”, an instruction to a female colleague who uses the word ‘purview’ to “scuttle back to Cranford” and his berating of a government minister who defends a misjudged quote on TV by saying he was merely answering the question: “If he’d asked you to black up, or give him your pin number or shit yourself – would you have done that too?”

The swearing in The Thick of It and In the Loop is possibly its biggest talking point – Iannucci doubts whether the show would come through unscathed were it being launched on the BBC in today’s climate – but the producer himself says his parents never swore when he was growing up and he blushes when I remind him of a scene in his Friday Night Armistice when he coaxed out of a shy puppet (called Tony Blair) that he was “hungry for pussy”.

“The thing about the swearing in The Thick of it is that I want to portray that world as it is,” he says pointedly. “Downing St is a very macho, very alpha male world and they swear a lot. There are some people in the film who don’t swear – there’s a guy in the state department, a neo-Con, who calls Malcolm an ‘S star star T’.  But there’s a joy in the swearing and also I do like silliness as well.”

There is a gleeful silliness in In the Loop, perhaps best exemplified in the scene where General George Millar, played by Sopranos star James Gandolfini, is forced to use a child’s plastic calculator to tot up how many troops the US will need to deploy if invasion goes ahead. His grave speech about how many soldiers will die is accompanied by the sing-song chatter of the talking toy in an absurd juxtaposition of childish humour and grim reality. For Chris Addison, who plays Toby, right hand man to Tom Hollander’s bewildered Development Minister, it’s this combination which gives In the Loop its edge.

“The film has all the top drawer profanities you’d expect and it’s incredibly funny,” he says, from an easy chair in a third beige Novotel conference room. “But in the last act you can feel the tension move up – they’re heading towards a war.  All of Malcolm’s genius is being corralled into trying to prevent a war being stopped. Towards the end you begin to think, holy crap, that’s not funny actually. “

The comparison to Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy Dr Strangelove is not lost on Addison but he points out a crucial, and very contemporary difference.

“In Strangelove they show you at the end what it all means – you see the mushroom cloud going up. With In the Loop, it’s just the end of another office day. As the credits go up you see Malcolm going about his daily business. I like that more than seeing tanks or mushroom clouds because it’s the truth, these people make their own peace with what’s happened.”

Peter Capaldi agrees, and hopes that audiences will leave the cinema dwelling on the lives that fall between the cracks as politics rumbles on. For him, the film concludes on a profound note.

“I see Simon Foster, the Minister, struggling with his ambition and his morality,” he says. “It’s very funny but in the end I think it’s a very sad film."