Veep creator Armando Iannucci on adapting Dr. Strangelove and antagonising Elon Musk
Ahead of Dr. Strangelove's premiere at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre this Thursday, Sarah Finnan sat down with Veep creator Armando Iannucci to discuss his latest project, his creative partnership with Steve Coogan and his penchant for agitating Elon Musk on X.
When I heard that Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove was being adapted for the stage, one name came to mind; Armando Iannucci. A master satirist with a penchant for dark humour, he’s built a career weaving razor-sharp political and social commentary into highly successful films, TV series and radio shows. The man behind American sitcom Veep, director of the incredibly funny (and dare I say, extremely underrated) The Death of Stalin and one of the key creators of iconic British character Alan Partridge, his ability to blend biting wit with unsettling realism is a talent that lends itself well to Kubrick’s masterpiece – a film that remains as disturbingly relevant today as it was when it first came out back in 1964.
As an avid fan of his, I was very excited to meet Iannucci who is as friendly and down-to-earth as they come (he batted off my praise with a humble “Thank you”). If you’re unfamiliar with his work, The Death of Stalin is a great entry point, particularly for this project. Was it a reference when working on Dr. Strangelove? Coincidentally, the reverse is true. “When I was doing The Death of Stalin, the producers were saying, in terms of tone, it should feel like Dr. Strangelove the movie. It’s one of my favourite films, and it’s one of the best comedy movies of all time so I was pleased with that. When I was asked if I wanted to do the stage adaptation, it was an instant yes.”
Widely considered one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove was itself an adaptation of Peter George’s thriller, Red Alert. A humorous incarnation of the novel’s plotline, it tells the story of a mentally unstable American general who orders a hydrogen bomb attack on the Soviet Union, triggering a path to a global nuclear holocaust that a war room full of politicians and generals frantically tries to stop. It might sound outlandish if it didn’t hit so close to the bone.
Brought onto the project before Putin had invaded Ukraine, Iannucci says that the adaptation has taken on new meaning since he first signed up. “I thought [the film] was more about, you know, the planet’s in danger, thinking more about climate change and are we just ignoring it – almost like it’s a metaphor for that. But actually, by the time we wrote it and put it on, the planet really is in danger. You don’t need to have seen the film [to understand the play], it’s about a US president and a Russian president in danger of obliterating each other. There’s a mad general who’s about to set off a whole sort of game plan and strategy that will lead to both sides being eliminated, and it’s all down to him obsessing about the fluoridisation of American water. Now, we have America’s new health secretary, Robert Kennedy Jr. (if he’s approved), saying the same thing – that there’s something afoot with America’s water and fluoridisation. So it’s all about conspiracy theories and how, once they take hold, people’s actions become crazy.”
In the original film, Peter Sellers plays four different characters – many of whom have shared scenes together. In the stage adaptation, Steve Coogan goes one further and embodies five different roles. “One of the characters that Steve Coogan plays is Dr Strangelove, who is this non-American scientist who’s brought in after the war from Germany to work with NASA—or as he pronounces it, NAZ-SA. He’s working on technology, and really being so focused and enthusiastic about technology that it’s almost like he’s willing on the destruction of the world so he can kind of prove his theory about how humans can live with augmented body parts and so on,” Iannucci explains. “As that’s happening, there’s Trump with Elon Musk, another person who’s so enthusiastic about his technology that he’s quite happy to say and do anything to just get into power with the president.” I try to refrain from rolling my eyes at the mention of Trump and his new best friend Musk, but can’t help probing Iannucci on his love of antagonising the latter on his own platform, X. His rationale? “I just like correcting him publicly.” Respect! “The relaxation on all that content moderation and so on, it does mean more and more people are encouraged to be spiteful and misogynistic. It’s all to do with free speech, but you know, it’s the whole SpiderMan thing – with freedom comes responsibility. If you are going to say things publicly, there’s a responsibility to be aware of the impact of what you say.”
Reworking a classic of such stature for the stage must have been daunting, but Iannucci took it all in his stride – even if he didn’t originally know that it was the first time th Kubrick family had agreed to an adaptation. “I’m glad I didn’t know that when I said yes because it might have made me nervous,” he laughs. What would Stanely Kubrick make of this adaptation if he were still alive? Iannucci’s not sure, but the Kubrick family are “delighted” so far which is reassuring, to say the least. “Something that one of them said at one of the rehearsals was, ‘There’s a line in it, and I couldn’t remember if it was in the film. I thought it was in the film. I went back and watched the film. It’s not in the film.’ And I thought that’s good, because we’ve done our best to come up with new scenes, new material, new characters, but they should feel part of what was already there so people who do know the film will see some of their favourite moments. But on the other hand, it’s got to be full of new surprises as well. Anyone who hasn’t seen the film gets the whole story from start to finish afresh anyway, and if it sends them later to go and watch the film, that’s great. That was satisfying, that the family didn’t feel we’d come in and just ruined it for them.”
About 60% of the stage adaptation is completely new, but the team worked tirelessly to ensure it was cohesive, that it didn’t feel disjointed. Anything they added was brought in “under the wire” as Iannucci puts it. “I didn’t want it to sound like, there’s the film and then this bit’s us. In the end, it’s [about] the show. You have to make the show as good as possible so it has to feel part of a whole.”
Another major edit was in the portrayal of women throughout. In the film, there’s only one real female character and she’s a bikini-clad secretary. That didn’t sit well with either Armando or director Sean Foley. “It’s a lot of men in a room,” Iannucci says of the story, citing one line that always gets a laugh—‘We’re all men here and that can only mean one thing; we’ll sort this out peacefully.’—we acknowledge the fact that it is basically a lot of men with big hats and lots of medals trying to impress each other.” Iannucci is well-intentioned in trying to modernise the story but unfortunately, it’s still a reflection of the modern-day – just last week we learned that there are the same number of men named James as there are women in our new Cabinet (that’s three if you’re wondering).
There are some new words – we invent the notion of pre-Terence, which is attacking someone before they attack. It’s a change of the policy of deterrence, which is threatening them if they do attack, what you do is you preter, which is you attack them before they attack, and that’s called retaliation.
With works spanning all genres and mediums, Iannucci has earned many laurels over the course of his career including an Oscar nomination, a Golden Globe nomination, five BAFTAs and four Emmys amongst other things. His work is never boring, he agrees, telling me that “there’s no science” to how he decides what to do next. “It just depends what the thought is or what the story is… there’s no pattern to it. You can’t predict. If I’ve just done a big, long television series or something, I kind of feel I want to do something different from that so a play is great because it’s very intense – the writing and the rehearsal – but then once it’s done, it’s done. It goes out there, and it has a life of its own. There’s not much more you can do once it’s up on stage. That kind of variety is important.”
As fans of Iannucci’s will know, his work is engrained in popular culture, so much so that a word he coined for The Thick of It—omnishambles—was named Word of the Year by the Oxford English Dictionary in 2012. Staying true to his love of language, there are new words in Dr. Strangelove the play, he assures me, drawing attention to one in particular. “We invented the notion of pre-terrence, which is attacking someone before they attack. It’s a change of the policy of deterrence, which is threatening them if they do attack, what you do is you preter, which is you attack them before they attack, and that’s called retaliation.” I hope he’s not giving anyone ideas with that one…
On his 30+ year creative partnership with Steve Coogan, the Scotsman claims it works because they each have their own projects too. “We’ve got a shorthand,” he smiles, adding, “I think it’s lasted because we don’t do it all the time. He has his own life and career, and I have mine, and we come together to do things like Alan Partridge or, you know, a bit of filming, and something like this. I think that’s what keeps it sane, but also it means we don’t get sick of each other.” If you’ve binge-watched Sky’s new Boyzone documentary, you’ll know what happens if you spend too much time with any one person… bickering, resentment and ultimately, a breakup. “We’ve always been able to keep it at a measured pace,” Iannucci says.
Their shared sense of humour certainly helps too. “We’d go insane without it,” Iannucci says in response to my musings that humour can be a coping mechanism when times get tough. What role does he think satire plays in today’s increasingly polarised society? In his opinion, it fulfils two roles. “I suppose analysing what these people are doing. Because I think Trump does see himself as an entertainer. For him, it’s all about popularity. It’s all about viewers, audiences, crowds, the greatest this, ‘I’ve done the most that’. It’s not really about the nuts and bolts of policy that can take months, years even, it’s about the instant hit. For Musk, it’s about attention. The more attention that’s given to any of the things he says or people say on his platform, the more money it makes… you might run a business like that but it’s not how to run the world, and unfortunately, we’re at that point. So anything we can do to actually shine a light on what it is they are saying, and does it stand up and does it make any sense? Or is it crazy? Anything that can do that, I think is a good thing.”
Dr. Strangelove will have its Irish premiere at Bord Gáis Energy Theatre February 5-22. Tickets are priced from €21.50 and you can get yours here.
Imagery courtesy of Bord Gáis Energy Theatre