Armando Iannucci
speaker
2,955 appearances
51 recordings
23 series
first heard Jan 2021
last heard 4d ago
Armando Iannucci’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 47 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 29.
Appearances
What was interesting watching it in the studio was how annoyed Alex gets when Greg goes rogue on the scoring.
With the scoring, yeah, yeah.
Because there's something going on in Alex's iPad.
Like, it doesn't do two people having the same number of points.
I've just got to redo this now.
Well, Doctor Strange is one of those films that's always been in my top five movies of all time.
I think it's the best dark comedy film ever made. I'm a huge Kubrick fan. The other reason I said yes was because, and this was several years ago, at the time, climate change was becoming a much more stark reality. There was a kind of a sensation of, we don't do something immediately about this. The world isn't going to come back from it.
That sense of us as a collective species still being unable to save ourselves from our own behavior.
Everyone on stage realizes there's a good chance the world might end, but they can't quite admit it. It's like a very slow motion car crash that you're watching. And everyone's caught up in it, but unable to, because of their own desire to retain their own status and to prove their point over the enemy, leading to annihilation.
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, dread, yes. I think we're all anxious about something, but for each person it's a different thing. Or we can't quite put a finger on it. There's just a cumulative atmosphere of dread and foreboding, but not quite knowing what.
Oh, absolutely. It's a way of articulating. It's a way of processing it. It's a way of dramatizing it.
I'm not arguing comedy is better. It just gives you another way in. And I think comedy... I think it just allows you to open up your mind a bit. If you find yourself laughing at something and then asking yourself, should I have laughed at that? Well, if you've laughed at it, then... You should. It's spontaneous. I think that's why autocratic leaders hate jokes about themselves.
Because it's spontaneous.
It's out of their hands. They like stuff where they can tell you what to do. And comedy allows what might otherwise feel a forbidding and inaccessible theme. It allows you that entry point. You know, before making The Death of Stalin, I went back and watched The Great Dictator.
So not even with the benefit of hindsight, right in the middle of it. And he treads this line between high comedy, fantastic, memorable, comedic moments like, I don't know, Ed Hinkle, the dictator, just playing with a globe, picking earth up in his hands and dancing with it. And then scenes set in the Jewish ghetto, which are not funny, not meant to be funny.
And it's this balance between the funny and the tragic. And I knew when going into the death of Stalin, that's what I wanted to do. And I said to everyone, when we started filming, I said to the crew and to the cast, it's a comedy, but we must also be mindful and respectful of what happened to the people. We're not making fun of the deaths and the punishments.
The comedy comes from those inside the Kremlin. And I was holding those two kind of tones and moods simultaneously.
It all makes sense under something called Plan R. It would remove all uncertainty if we retaliate. Pre-tally what? Pre-tallyate. I think this is a new word. See, conventionally, if the Russians attack us, our only option is to... Re-tally it. Plan R gives us a second option. We pre-tallyate before they even think of tallyating. Nuclear preterence, sir. In a nutshell, it's bulletproof.
You know, I've spent the last, whatever, several decades examining politicians, their speech and how they use rhetoric to disguise or to pretend something is not what it is and so on.
You know, in the film, it opens with the Air Force gate saying, Peace is our profession. I thought that was a gag. I thought Kubrick made it up. In the archive, you come in, there's the photo. It exists. This is in the Kubrick archive, he says. He saw this photo of an Air Force base with Peace is our profession written on it. So again, he's taking what's true and just putting it in.
Showing 2901–2920 of 2,955 · page 146 of 148
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