'The Death of Stalin' Is a Hilarious Punch in the Dictatorship

Armando Iannucci is perhaps best known to audiences as the creator of the HBO series Veep, an absurd, hilarious take on the bureaucracies that undergird—or barely maintain—the facade of a functioning American government, accented by ridiculous personalities and violently barbed insults. His previous work, the British series The Thick of It and its movie spin-off In the Loop, took on similar ground across the Atlantic. Now he’s turned his attention to another country and another era.

In The Death of Stalin, out in theaters today, Iannucci commands a stellar cast including Steve Buscemi, Paddy Considine, Jason Isaacs, Andrea Riseborough, Rupert Friend, and Jeffrey Tambor in a farce about the tumultuous days surrounding the death of the Soviet dictator. Adapted from the graphic novel of the same name, The Death of Stalin alternates between wildly funny set-pieces, hilarious machinations among Stalin acolytes vying for power, and unsettling scenes of extrajudicial arrests and murder.

VICE sat down with Iannucci last year at the Toronto International Film Festival where the film premiered to talk about his comedic approach to such dark material and his persistent interest in the absurdities of politics.

VICE: What was going through your mind in terms of depicting this specific era?
Armando Iannucci: I had been thinking of doing something about dictators, or autocrats, or, How does one person captivate a nation? So that's where I was looking, and at the same time they approached me with [The Death of Stalin graphic novel]. And you know, there's something about that era. Maybe it's because George Orwell wrote about it in 1984, and the music at the time, Shostakovich, and his kind of crisis when he wrote something and Stalin took against it. I just found it fascinating. It's so absurd and yet horrific, and yet it's strangely not a story that's often told.

No, you don't see it much at all.
It's like Hitler's the "sexy one," in a way.

And these days, usually when there's a movie about the Soviet Union it's usually the 70s or 80s and the fall.
I thought, for all those reasons, the comedy about it is a comedy of hysteria.

You walk this tightrope. There's a lot of killing in the movie.
Although not much of it is on the screen, but it's felt.

It's felt, and it's quite disturbing.
Absolutely.

But then the next moment there's a huge, uproarious laugh.
What I wanted to do is recreate what it must have felt like to life in that environment. And actually, it wasn't a kind of high-pitched terror, it was a low, background terror. People just had to accommodate themselves to it over decades. You couldn't live with that intensity, so you had to just be aware of it.

In your work, you're making comedy out of the absurdity out of the banality of everything, though here it goes very dark.
We start with banality and absurdity, and the only rational response to it is comedy because the alternative is to go mad.

Was that common in the Soviet Union?
They circulated joke books, Stalin joke books, and jokes about Lavrenti Beria, and rape, and all sorts of things. It's almost like they felt they had to tell these jokes about these people.

How hard was it to identify, even just in the history, those moments where there were conflicts you could exploit for comedy?
When you read that when Stalin made a speech, everyone had to get up and applaud, but no one wanted to be the first person to stop applauding, you just think, Well, gee, take that to its logical extreme and they're still applauding now. It's that craziness.

That's evident in the committee meeting after Stalin has died, where it's almost a problem of how communism operated. This idea that it's for the group, so it's unanimous, but it isn't. Not at all.
I was listening to a writer-historian [Sheila Fitzpatrick] who wrote a book recently called On Stalin's Team. It's about the others around Stalin. And she said that Stalin welcomed criticism, if the person criticizing the topic was responsible for that topic. So if you were in charge of transport, then you could say to Stalin, "I disagree." But what he didn't like was someone who had nothing to do with transport taking an opposing view about the trains. He regarded that as factionalism.

The way that it manifests is particular to communism and communism under Stalin in that era, but it's a thing you see quite commonly, this idea that we can achieve a consensus.
Why don't we all just get together and hammer it out?

But it seems like that's not what politics is actually about.
Well, because for a politician to achieve consensus means that politician is compromised, and also they've ceded power to someone else. So that's why, although politicians talk about it, they don't actually do it that often. It's not in their nature. That's going on in the UK at the moment, because after the latest election result, which was very much—no one won. You'd then think that all the parties would get together to discuss Brexit negotiations, but that's not what happened at all. The Conservative Party is carrying on carrying on as if they've still got a huge majority, but they have a minority.

As though the election has gone as intended.
The only minor issue we have with it is the result. Other than that, the lead up to it, the process, all went brilliantly.

The movie seems to draw on things that are happening today, even though you're really just dealing with things that happened back then.
Absolutely, and that wasn't a conscious, do it like this and that will remind people of this [thing]. There was none of that. We shot it [in the summer of 2016], so it was before Trump had even won the nomination, let alone the presidency. But I think it's because these things go around in cycles. History has lessons to teach us, and we should remember them.

There were some odd casting choices in a number of respects. At the top of my mind is Steve Buscemi, who I wouldn't have expected in the role of Nikita Khrushchev. Did you have him in mind when you were putting it together?
When we were writing it, we didn't have anyone. But Steve can do funny, but he can also do scary. He's such a versatile actor. And when I was chatting with him about it, I was talking about how Khrushchev is very verbose and there's almost something Italian in him. He uses his hands a lot.

Part of the dynamic of the movie is that you have these bureaucrats who are dealing with bureaucratic things, who all aspire to be more than that, but who can't actually accomplish it. Beria goes way too far, for example. What responsibility did you feel to the history?
Responsibility is the right word. I mean, I said right from the start, millions died, the terror, the gulags, is something that we have to respect and acknowledge. The comedy isn't making fun of those people, the comedy is about the absurd logic that went on in the minds of those deciding the fate of these people. But I knew from the start that we had to show the very real consequence of the decisions that you see being taken in the Kremlin. That's why, every now and then, we go out and you see people being taken away or being released.

In terms of the political maneuvering, how much of that was true to history?
When Stalin died there were already the beginnings of what seemed like another huge purge being planned, this time of the Jews. He was preparing lots of lists of Jewish doctors and others, and there were actually some buses being lined up ready to round them up, and then when he died, Beria, in his attempt to become the liberal, all the buses went away and everything stood down.

The way you throw in "liberal" vs. "radical" in the movie, and the fact that they seem to confuse the two, it almost implies that there isn't a coherent ideology.
It's about survival in the end. It's about I want to take over, because if I don't take over I'll be shot.

But then where does the ideology come in? You've got a country that's founded on ideology, and yet they don't seem to hold to it.
But did they ever?

Probably not. Was that part of your exploration? Not just the bureaucratic bumbling, but the fact that these people are deeply hypocritical.
Yes. In a strange way, apart from [Vyacheslav] Molotov, Michael Palin's character, who is trying rigidly to adhere to the party.

Even the way he keeps switching sides.
It just drives him crazy. He's a crazy man. But you get that in any belief system, don't you? In any religion there'll be those who are fundamentalist and end up doing really absurd things because they're taking it literally, to the letter.

In your films and TV work, you see that kind of bureaucratic absurdity, and you see that it happens everywhere.
Any system that has a power structure in it, you forget that it's human beings, and human beings are all fallible. But we don't seem to have a system to deal with our fallibility.

But that's the attempt of politics, right?
Publicly it's the attempt, but privately it's the same rushed meetings, quick decisions made, changes of mind, trying to cover your tracks, trying just not to be found out.

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