Most American viewers are unlikely to be familiar with Armando Iannucci, which is too bad, since his work as a writer/producer/creator has generated some of the funniest television in the history of the British Empire, including the ingenious postmodern TV-news satire The Day Today (and its radio cousin On the Hour); two series focusing on Steve Coogan’s inept TV and radio personality and desperate demicelebrity Alan Partridge; Time Trumpet, an absurdist digest that looks back at today’s news from the 2030s; and The Thick of It, a vérité political satire that shares a tone, a style, and several characters with In the Loop. He spoke to The Stranger by phone from his BBC office in London.

In the Loop opened the Seattle International Film Festival, and the audience generally seemed to enjoy it. But I’ve talked to several people who seemed baffled by the film because they knew it was political but they couldn’t really discern an ideology in it.

Well, should there be? Other than some of these terrible things happened? I mean, I’m glad you said that, because I’d hate for them to discern an ideology.

I feel like political-satire movies are easily hampered by ideology.

Well, in the writing of it, in the shooting of it, and fundamentally in the edit of it, I just thought, what is funny? What is funny? Now, for something to be funny in this film, sometimes it’s funnier because it’s more real, more believable. And I found in the edit, I was actually taking scenes out and lines out that individually made me laugh but actually in the context of the rest of the story kind of seemed too unreal. So I would take stuff out. But at all times in my editing process—’cause the original cut was, like, four hours to start with, I was trying to get it down to an hour 40—I thought, I want to keep in what is funny. I don’t want it to be like 20 minutes of hard-hitting, serious polemic or anything, because I thought that then would just destroy any kind of final effect of the film.

The premise seems to be that powerful people are interested in staying in power, and all the things we think of as their ideological positions are just sort of window dressing. They’re just ambitious people.

And also, good people… they’re not evil, you know. They don’t commit crimes, and they don’t go out and murder people in order to get on or anything like that. It’s fundamentally ordinary people who over a process of months and years compromise themselves so much that they’ve forgotten what they were meant to be doing in the first place. I think fundamentally people go into politics because they want to achieve something. I mean, god knows it’s such a terrible life they lead anyway; they’ve got to get something out of it, and it’s just that series of little compromises—maybe people start off doing compromises but tell themselves that it’s for a greater good, you know. The longer I can stay in power or the higher up I can go, then the more I can put into practice all my core beliefs which are fundamentally good. And I just find that interesting. And you know, going back to the lack of ideology, I kind of wanted to leave it, at the end, that the audience had to ask themselves what they would do under those circumstances. You can’t really tell until it happens to you. And I didn’t want to go around saying, these are the bad guys, so they will do bad all the way through the film, and these are the good guys, they will only do good throughout the film. It kind of then takes that responsibility away from you, to decide, you know, what is the good thing to do? Who knows.

The mundaneness of those human compromises almost makes it worse than if you were saying there’s a totalitarian cabal in the heart of the government.

Exactly, exactly. I remember the guy who we met from the CIA saying he spent his first year in the CIA dreaming that someone would come up to him and say, “See that room over there? If you go through that room, that’s where you’ll find the real CIA. With all the big flashing lights and the computers and the maps of the world with all the secret weapons and stuff.” But it never happened. It never happened. He just sat at a desk. He was in the real CIA all the time.

The film and the series both have an interesting way of mourning language. Everything everyone says is always figurative and representational. Nothing actually means anything. It’s just a conglomeration of what politicians and press decide people will think—and of course, people then do believe it. It’s accurate and funny, but also chilling. More chilling than the stuff progressive political analysts are always warning us about, because it means anything is possible.

Well, yes. And also, if you think this is believable, then you start asking yourself: My god, is that really what happened then? And the thing is, no, it’s not what happened. It’s a comedy exaggeration of some things that we’ve heard and some things that we’ve made up. On the other hand, when we played it to, in D.C., to a room full of Washington insiders and House members and staffers and people from the State Department and whatever, they were laughing all the way through at what they said was the accuracy of it. In the end, they said more or less that is how it happened. Because it’s the cumulative effect not just of your Dick Cheneys and your Tony Blairs and so on—it’s all the people, the thousands of people working underneath, all deciding individually: Do you know what? I’ll just keep quiet. Because otherwise something terrible will happen to me.

It seems like there’s this critique in a lot of your work: the absurdity of important and self-important people saying absolutely nothing at all with total conviction.

Absolutely, yes, yes. Because you sort of realize how much your life is shaped by just what you are told. And when things are told with conviction, you tend to believe them. And part of the way, say, an episode of The Thick of It works is that the politicians read something in the press and feel they’ve got to react to it. ’Cause they forget that what’s in the press isn’t really based on anything and people aren’t really taking it that seriously, but for some reason they are and it just gets to them. It’s just that thing of overreacting to stuff, when the people saying the stuff have been making it up anyway. At the moment, we go on so much about reality TV and how that’s dominating the schedule and there’s nothing more unreal than reality TV because it’s just nonactors being put in scenarios that are artificially created for our entertainment. But it’s very contrived, and it’s edited, and it’s well scripted and storyboarded and packaged and trailed and talked about and reviewed as if it was a drama, because, well, fundamentally it’s been turned into one.

And then normal people see reality TV and sort of want to become one of those people, and they do everything they can to seem like reality-TV people.

You get the phenomenon now at schools, of when kids are asked what they want to be when they grow up, and they used to be, you know, train drivers and sports, now it’s celebrities. They say they want to be a celebrity. They have no idea what a celebrity does, other than is a celebrity. And you do get people, when they’re 18, 19, who go about the business of becoming a celebrity, try to find out all the parties to get into and the nightclubs to be seen in. And now that you can hire very easily these stretch limos and go around town in a stretch limo and have a party in it, almost live the life of a celebrity… it’s a funny thing. And simultaneously, we want our celebrities to be ordinary—that’s the other thing. We like to see photographs of Brad Pitt, you know, walking into a door and falling over, because that looks funny, seeing someone who’s meant to be famous and in control looking kind of slightly confused and all that sort of thing.

Did you conceive of the character of Malcolm as Scottish and then find Peter Capaldi to play him?

Nope, other way around. We conceived of the character of Malcolm, and then the casting director said, “You must see Peter Capaldi.” And I thought, well, fine, but I knew Peter from the sort of nice people that he used to play, and I just thought, I don’t see it myself, but let’s go. And I didn’t have a script, but I gave him a scenario, saying, “Try and sack me—be nice to me, and then when I resist be very nasty.” And he just went for it, and I thought, that’s it. I found Malcolm. That’s Malcolm. And I didn’t want him to change his voice—I wanted him to be as spontaneous and natural as he could. So not having to think of doing an English accent or anything.

I think Americans fetishize certain British accents (and vice versa)—do you have a sense of his Scottish accent being funny in a specific way? Because, at the risk of sounding completely idiotic, it really is, especially when used to convey anger.

I don’t know because, you know, it’s the same accent as mine. I have no notion of how funny or not it is; it just seems perfectly natural. But, I mean, I don’t notice it, to be honest. I really don’t notice it, because it’s how I speak and it’s how Peter speaks, so what is there to notice? But obviously, it is noticed. So there you go. So people attach all these kind of, you know, because he swears a lot, it’s a swearing Scotsman. Whereas, in fact, [Tony Blair’s Scottish adviser/fixer] Alastair Campbell swears a lot.

There’s also the juxtaposition of him being this massively intimidating figure in a world of posh Empire types.

Yeah, especially with Tom Hollander as Simon. And Chris Addison as Toby. They come from a different background. And to have someone more powerful than them be a bit more earthy might be slightly disconcerting.

Seeing Steve Coogan’s part in this film made me wonder if and when you two would be working together again. Is it something you plan to do someday?

Yes. We’ve been talking for a long time about doing stuff. I really want to do a film where Steve plays about three or four different roles. I’d really like to. I mean, the next film I want to do is a slapstick movie. If this was a screwball comedy, then the next thing is a slapstick movie. I don’t quite know what world it will be set in, but I’d love to do something with Steve.

How did you come to cast Anna Chlumsky, who hasn’t been seen much since My Girl in 1991?

Well, she came to the casting. I also came out to New York and L.A. to do casting—Meredith Tucker was the casting director there. She got Anna in, and Anna was really funny! She did a script, it was funny. I asked her to improvise, she was very funny. I saw Zach [Woods of Upright Citizen’s Brigade], he was very funny. I then asked for Anna and Zach together, and asked them to just insult each other. And they insulted each other for about half an hour. It was a joy to behold. And I thought, great, I’ve found Chad and Liza. And it was only afterward that I was aware of Anna’s history of, obviously My Girl, and then leaving to just have a normal life and normal education, but I thought it was so interesting—an education in Washington. And you know, actually spending a bit of time working on the Hill as a staffer and having a real, in-depth knowledge of how that world works. It’s funny: You choose these people on the basis of performance, and then you realize afterward, after you’ve chosen them, that their performance has been slightly influenced by their experience and their biographies. I mean, when we first met, which was obviously about a year and a half ago now, I think she had only just come back into doing the life of an actress. I think she’d done some theater and a couple of guest spots in a couple of sitcom series. She was in 30 Rock, a few bits and bobs, and I think she was up for another film. It was just that early stage of her rejoining the acting profession. So I was lucky, really, to see her, and I’m sure this’ll lead to all sorts of things for her.

The Day Today has been written about as a forerunner of The Daily Show. I know it’s not the most accurate analogy, but how did your show’s cultural significance compare to what The Daily Show has here?

Well, The Day Today wasn’t a topical show—it was a parody of the news style. But it was made over the period of a year and was not meant to be a take on that week’s news.

But it did deconstruct the idea of the news as an authoritative voice, and the outlandish graphic sensibility—

Yes. I mean, what The Daily Show does really well is, you know, as well as its writing and so on, is be able to kind of forensically pull apart all the coverage and analyze the flaws in it and the contradictions and the false logic and the way certain commentators actually dress up facts, or dress up lack of facts, as something else. It does that really well.

Do you see the comparison being made a lot?

I mean, it has been mentioned, but I think it’s only mentioned simply because both of them involved a guy behind a desk talking to the camera. But, you know, The Day Today wasn’t done in front of an audience, whereas The Daily Show is. You know, I can sort of see why the comparison’s made, but it’s one of those ones that when you analyze it, you realize they’re completely different sorts of beasts, really. But maybe the same kind of comedy world… Maybe it’s aimed at the same type of viewer, I suppose.