Armando Iannucci on “The Death of Stalin”

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 16 March 2018

⏱️ 34 minutes

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Summary

As the fourth season of “Veep” came to an end, director Armando Iannucci turned from chronicling the foibles of cynical western democracy to something darker still: life under dictatorship. He found his source material in the French graphic novel “The Death of Stalin.” David Remnick compares Iannucci’s new film to “Get Out”—a real horror story that is also a comedy of terror. “I wanted to take myself out of my comfort zone by taking on these themes that involved death, destruction, and paranoia,” Iannucci tells him. As the brutal dictatorships of the twentieth century fade into history, Iannucci wants to remind people—especially those frustrated with democracy—just how horrific totalitarianism really is. Plus, Svetlana Alexievich, who won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature for her oral histories about life in the U.S.S.R.

Transcript

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0:00.0	These are just anecdotes, but it's building up into something more coherent.
0:09.0	And I think it's interesting to really try to unravel what his ties.
0:13.0	There's this sort of country city divide for their own convenient, and then it's not clear where it goes next.
0:19.0	From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production
0:24.6	of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:28.8	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour.
0:30.6	I'm David Remnick.
0:31.8	I'm a pretty big movie buff, and if you were to go about engineering the perfect film for me,
0:36.8	total Remnick bait, it might be a little like this.
0:40.1	It would be set in the Soviet Union, where I lived for four years as a reporter.
0:44.4	It would be a dark political comedy because I thrive on that stuff.
0:49.3	And it would have actors like Steve Bouchemmy and Simon Russell Beale.
0:53.8	And at the same time, it would be so foul
0:56.1	mouth that I'd be embarrassed to take my kids even though they're in their mid-20s. Now, that happens
1:02.1	to be more or less an exact description of the death of Stalin, directed and co-written by the great
1:08.2	Armando Ionucci. I'm not going to pretend to be impartial here. I've loved everything I've ever seen by I'm Eonucci, the thick of it, and in the loop which he made in his native Great Britain. Hi, fetus boy, lesson one. I tell you to fuck off. What do you do? F off? You'll go far. And Veep, which he created for HBO starring Julia Louis Dreyfus.
1:30.9	Jonah, don't talk, don't stay. You need to fuck off and go back to Westworld. But, man, you need to fuck off. But, ma'am. I say fuck off. Three fucks, you're out. Yes, ma'am. Yeah. In the death of Stalin, Ian Uchi shifts his focus from the grubbier precincts of Western democracy
1:45.5	and takes a look at one of the most brutal regimes in Yeah. In The Death of Stalin, Ionucci shifts his focus from the grubbier precincts of Western democracy
1:45.5	and takes a look at one of the most brutal regimes in history.
1:49.3	And like Get Out, it's a horror movie that's absolutely hilarious at the same time.
1:53.5	And maybe one that cuts a little too close to home for some since it's currently banned in Russia.
1:59.7	Armando Ionucci join me in the studio.
	...

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