As the politics of today plunge way past the point of parody, Armando Iannucci has trained his incisive wit on the politics of yesterday. (1950s Soviet Union, specifically.) It’s a strategy borne of both fear and defiance at the prospect of history repeating itself.
The path to Iannucci’s new film, The Death of Stalin, began as the master satirist was exiting his HBO hit Veep in 2015. After four seasons on the stateside companion to his British dysfunctional government saga The Thick of It, Iannucci sought to trade Veep’s West Wing setting for the shadowy halls of a fictional dictator. He envisioned a rebuke to the rise of authoritarian rulers like Berlusconi, Putin, and Erdogan, which has occurred in tandem with the alarming spread of fascist groups like the National Front in the U.K.
“These people are speaking a language that I thought had disappeared,” Iannucci says.
At the same time, French producers Yann Zenou and Laurent Zeitoun, who had acquired the graphic novel Death of Stalin, approached Iannucci about adapting the piece as his next project. Author Fabien Nury’s vivid rendering of Stalin’s last days made Iannucci decide not to bother with a fictional dictatorship when the stories behind the real thing were so absurd but true.
The Death of Stalin, which is now in theaters, tracks the paranoia-fueled power struggle in the immediate aftermath of Josef Stalin’s fatal stroke in 1953. (Adrian McLoughlin plays the ailing ruler.) Master maneuverer Lavrenti Beria (Simon Russell Beale), the head of the Soviet secret police, butts heads with Nikita Kruschev (Steve Buscemi), the minister of agriculture, with deputy prime ministers Molotov (Michael Palin) and Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor) jockeying for position as well. Iannucci paints the proceedings with details that reveal how terrifying an atmosphere Stalin had created, the dictator lying for hours in a puddle of urine behind closed doors because his own guards are too afraid to go in and check on him. The scheming in the new film plays like an amplified version of the palace intrigue portrayed in Veep, but the difference is that in The Death of Stalin, if someone makes a mistake, they get killed.
“It’s almost like humor is one of the last things people surrender,” Iannucci says. “You’re still telling yourself you have a bit of freedom left because you’re making jokes about the person pointing a gun at you.”
Although the movie was shot before the U.S. presidential election concluded in 2016, it took on new resonance afterward. As Donald Trump’s campaign surged, it further embodied the climate of creeping authoritarianism Iannucci was satirizing with his film.
“Trump’s campaign ads, especially the last weeks of the election, looked like the sort of ads you’d get in a dystopian sci-fi set in 20 years’ time,” the director says. “One ad talked about a conspiracy and money men, and that’s when I felt we are back in the 1930s and this is not good.”
The comedy that once propelled shows like Veep and The Thick of It feels insufficient in the face of MAGA and Brexit, tethered as it is to pre-2016 ideas about the world.
“If we’d had a kind of Trump figure running on Veep, he would have gone away after three episodes,” Iannucci says. “That is the issue in that, it happened. It’s a reality. It’s not a fictional comedy idea anymore.”
Even the film’s lone touch of surrealism–the fact that the American and British actors in lead roles all use their natural accents–is intended to add a frightening blast of reality.
“I thought if they all started putting on Russian accents, it would feel detached from the audience, it would feel like it was happening in a foreign country far away,” Iannucci says. “I didn’t want people to feel that. I wanted people to feel this is happening in front of you now, and it’s your world.”
“[Dictators are] so suspicious of musicians, poets, novelists, artists, and comedians because they love being in control,” he says. “The thing about a book or poem or a play or a painting is you cannot predict the effect it will have on the observer, and they hate that. They just don’t like anything where there is the potential for the unpredictable, which is why they remain so suspicious of anyone with creativity.”
As dictators and aspiring authoritarians continue thriving in 2018, Armando Iannucci is making movies like The Death of Stalin to celebrate the fact that he still can.