Armando Iannucci Created Veep —And Quit It Because of All the Jet Lag
Los Angeles is a lovely place to visit, but it can also be confusing, in a space-time kind of way. Distances are elastic; things that seem close are often far, though rarely vice versa. The consistent sunlight makes it seem like you’re living the same five minutes, over and over again. The time difference—three hours behind the East Coast, where the real decision makers live—makes the mornings hectic, the afternoons a bit dreamy, and on most days coughs up what feels like an extra hour or two, around 5 P.M., when everything goes quiet and calm but the sun’s still out. City of the cocktail hour—if anybody here drank, that is.
For the director Armando Iannucci, who arrived from London last night, Los Angeles is mostly a city experienced out the window of a 24-hour diner. The jet lag makes him rise early—usually at 4:30 or 5 A.M. Then he comes here, to Mel’s Drive-In, in West Hollywood. “I think there's a thesis to be written about how America's got to the position is has got, just in economics, by inviting people over to have meetings in America,” he said one day this week—mercifully, over lunch. “Maybe that's where Trump's trade war should come into play really. It's not tariffs—just have them over! Because you make big decisions and your brain is just like scrambled eggs. For three days!”
He was in town to promote his newest film, The Death of Stalin, which covers the events immediately before and after Stalin’s 1953 death and the subsequent power struggle among the Russian elite to succeed him. The antic, acid quality of the movie resembles Veep, which Iannucci created, and In the Loop, the 2009 political comedy for which he was nominated for an Academy Award, but it’s also considerably darker—this week, Masha Gessen called it “perhaps the most accurate picture of life under Soviet terror that anyone has ever committed to film.”
Iannucci identified one jarring difference in the project relative to his earlier work: “Everything up to now, if a politician makes a mistake, or says the wrong thing, it's embarrassing. No. In this one, people get killed.”
He brightened. “So I'm going to have my standard first-day lunch,” he said, picking up the menu. “Which is always a hot dog. A hot dog and a milkshake and a beer.”
Iannucci, who is 54 and from Scotland, with a majestic, noble nose and a cheery, slightly spacey manner, started coming to Los Angeles years ago. He recalled his first visit, around the time ABC was considering adapting The Thick of It, Iannucci’s grimly hilarious series about British politics for the BBC. “And they flew me out and put me at a very nice hotel, Le Méridien. But then I realized that I was low down in the new pilot. Even though I was the creator, I was very low down. So I spent days at the hotel. Nothing happened. There was a pool. It was very nice. And then it's two days, three days, and by the fifth day. I was thinking: This is crazy. And eventually I was invited to come along to a meeting just to discuss, like, the color of the ties that the cast might wear. That was my first taste of L.A.” He smiled. “But I stored it up and I used it. I did a film In the Loop. Which is about the Brits coming over to Washington. And I just made my experience in L.A. their experience in Washington.”
Since then, he’s developed a routine: stay within walking distance of Mel’s. Rise early, go to Mel’s. Repeat, as often as necessary, until the plane takes off for home. Famously, Iannucci quit Veep after four seasons, because the travel back and forth between London and Baltimore, where Veep shot, became too much. “I can tell you the moment when I decided,” he said, grinning. “It was a combination of jet lag and United Airlines’ inability to apologize for anything. Is this coming across too strong?” He told a story about how a flight delay forced him to miss his 13-year-old daughter’s music recital. “That was when I just thought: I've had enough.”
Death of Stalin, like Veep before it, is uncannily, uncomfortably reminiscent of current American politics, despite being set in the past, and in Russia. “We shot it before Trump was elected,” Iannucci said. But the strongman theater it depicts—immoral idiots jockeying for power, with terrible consequences—“had been brewing around Europe,” he said. In the film, there is a lot of talk about “old truth” and “new truth.” It wasn’t hard to see the parallels. “You know, within two days of being sworn in, Trump started calling CNN ‘enemies of the people,’ which is a Stalinist phrase,” Iannucci said. “Khrushchev actually had that phrase banned, because it was so Stalinist.” In the movie, which itself was recently banned in Russia—a fact that Iannucci takes no satisfaction in; “I think it’s just sad”—Khrushchev is played by Steve Buscemi, honking Brooklyn accent and all, even as bodies pile up around him.
Iannucci finished his hot dog and gathered his backpack. He was headed back to the hotel, he said, for a nap. “The next thing I'm doing for HBO is set in a spaceship,” he said: it’s called Avenue 5, and takes place in the near future, when space tourism has become a reality. “We're doing a pilot. But we're filming in London, because you don't have to come to Baltimore to film in space.”
