Looped into In the Loop

Before I could finally spit out a review of the brilliant political satire IN THE LOOP -- which is an absolute scream, see it if you haven't -- much of the critical world has already reviewed it.

But I gleaned a few interesting things from listening to the director/co-writer Armando Iannucci (a Scottish chap with an Italian name, who created The Thick of It, a TV forebear for In the Loop) interviewing with Elvis Mitchell on KCRW's The Treatment.

Mitchell:  We were talking about screwball comedy, and that was something I noticed when watching the film. It almost feels like something like the Front Page, one of those dialogue-driven comedies where people are really going after each other... It's like watching a play,  there has to be that kind of character doesn't there?

Iannucci:  We spent an awful lot of time not just in the shooting process, but in advance fleshing out the characters. I cast the film really early on. So that the writers know precisely who it is who is playing each part, what they look like, sound like, what their own natural verbal tics are -- so that they can then write those parts to that actor.  Actors do their own research but then we spent about 2-3 weeks rehearsing the scenes, workshopping them, improvising around the scenes. Just to get the relationships between characters going.  The shoot is very cast driven.
...   I really don't consider the final writing process  to have happened until I've watched that first take of the scene. Sometimes in the end I'm taking some of my favorite lines out, simply because I think  that though it's a funny line it destroys the atmosphere and the reality.  If it comes on a point where you can't believe that character under that load of stress at that point would ever come up with something so well thought out... And also we don't give the actors that much time to learn their lines or indeed to say them. [laughs] Because I want to capture that essence of in politics people are making things up, I want to capture that look of panic in their eyes as they say the words.

I was very much aware of those Preston Sturges and Howard Hawks, those fast talking dialogue-driven films of the 30s and 40s, and I really liked that model as something to structure the script around. The plot underneath all the profanity and realism and so on, was deliberately structured along the lines of a screwball comedy, where two or 3 different things are happening in different environments, and they all start coming closer toward each other and affecting each other and then a madcap climax in the last 15 minutes. That's something I always found satisfying watching so I was very keen to get that sense of screwball comedy.

Listen to the rest here: KCRW The Treatment: Armando Iannucci