Armando Iannucci is not exactly a household name here, but that might just change after the release of In the Loop.
For anyone who laughed riotously at the antics of Iannucci's fictional government servants during the festival screenings of In the Loop, its mainstream release is a blessing in disguise. With dialogue so sharp, edgy and delivered with machine-gun like precision, just latching on to some of the most outrageous profanity ever filmed demands repeated viewings.
But In the Loop is not exactly Iannucci's first foray into a spoof involving politicians. Indeed, it is in many respects the feature-length sequel to the very successful The Thick of It which has still yet to screen here.
Taking a moment out from completing another series of the critically acclaimed satire, Iannucci is quick to point out that you don't need to be familiar with it to be in on the joke.
"I didn't feel I wanted viewers to have done any previous background build-up, the film is for everyone. I'm also trying to target a more international audience and hence it was written that way."
One of the most interesting aspects of In the Loop is the fact the wry British humour translates so well in a North American context. In fact, with quite a big percentage of the film set on Capitol Hill, and half the cast from across the Atlantic, was there any fear that the comedy would alienate American audiences?
"I've never bought into that thing about Americans not having a sense of humour," says Iannucci. "In fact some of my favourite comedy is American - just take Seinfeld, The Larry Sanders Show and The Daily Show for instance. I see In the Loop as really a screwball comedy, which is an American tradition after all."
Indeed, amid the expletive barrage fronted by Alastair Campbell parody Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi), are some cleverly constructed interactions between the American characters, most notably James Gandolfini as the US army general, and Mimi Kennedy as career politician Karen Clarke.
"James Gandolfini and Mimi Kennedy went off and worked up their own little story about whether they had previously had an affair. It wasn't scripted at all, but worked so well that we just had to go with it."
Allowing characters to play a little fast and loose with the script is a technique that is actively encouraged by British director Mike Leigh in particular, but it also has the tendency to come unstuck. Iannucci is well known for encouraging actors to riff on the script while the cameras roll, an approach that was a little daunting for some of them, but you'd hardly know it.
"Eighty-five percent of it is script; the improvisation is just there to dirty it up, make it feel naturalistic. I'm not expecting actors to come out with perfectly formed zingers from nowhere," says Iannucci.
"For instance, a lot of Malcolm's expressions are Peter; he will spend a lot of time standing in a corner saying them again and again, just so that his mouth memorises the shape it has to make as the words spew out."
In the Loop contains some of the most creative use of swearing ever heard in cinema. Just working out where one curse finishes and another starts is a triumph of concentration, and somewhat amazing in that the BBC let it leave the building intact.
"Well, The Thick of It pretty much set the precedent for where we could go, it was done as a little low-budget experiment, and as such I was pretty much left alone. The thing is, the language is there because that's what that world is like. If you go to the backrooms of No. 10 or wherever, they are always swearing. These people are relentless gossips anyway; they aren't that hard to get in touch with."
Caricatures of politicians and real-life spin doctors are rife within the film. Scottish actor Peter Capaldi, whose character Malcolm is an absolute tour de force, is unabashedly crafted from the real-life persona of Tony Blair's communications chief Alistair Campbell. Legendary for his liberal use of profanities, Mr Campbell hasn't always seen the funny side of his doppelganger.
"The only two politicians who reviewed the film said it was really boring and not very funny, which made me feel that they had seen it all before, which is a bit of a worry," muses Iannucci.
"Actually, it was Alistair Campbell who reviewed the film, and he said it was boring. That was great, because then all the other newspapers jumped on why Alistair Campbell doesn't have a sense of humour."
Attention to detail is one of the things that gives viewers of In the Loop an uneasy sensation that perhaps this silliness is just a little bit close to the bone. Iannucci is quick to point out that such madness is difficult to conjure up, and anyway he didn't need to stray far from what he was actually given.
"Well, take this for instance, when the film opens with Malcolm coming out of No.10 Downing St; that is actually No. 10 Downing S. They let us film there. When we turned up, of course all the real Malcolm Tuckers had brought their little cameras with them, because they wanted to take photos with Peter Capaldi. They love it, they love the attention."
On a reconnaissance mission to Washington, Iannucci mocked up a BBC pass and managed to give security the slip at the US State department. Finding himself with ample room to roam the corridors and take photographs to assist the set designers for In the Loop, Iannucci took some time to watch government officials at work.
"These people [government bureaucrats] work in offices, so fundamentally they just think they are going through their own sort of office politics in a way, and they lose sight of the fact that they may be little penpushers who sit at a desk, but the results of their actions? There are enormous international consequences.
"Washington is a city that runs off politics and therefore anyone, if they're ambitious enough in Washington, can find power, can find a little corner of an office somewhere, where you can acquire your own little empire; that's the frightening thing."
One of the most ludicrous moments of the film revolves around a fictional committee set up to disguise its actual nature: war. However clever the set-up is, you can't help but feel that this is a pure moment of artistic licence.
"Oh no, that is totally based on fact," insists Iannucci. "Dick Cheney actually set up a committee called the Office of Future Plans about invading Iraq and Syria, and then every senator involved in foreign affairs wanted to get on it. So he kept shuffling it around, and did in fact move it four doors down and open it up under another name. So that's all true."
The elephant in the room throughout is Iraq. Nobody actually ever mentions it, but it doesn't take a Mensa qualification to figure out what every character is alluding to.
"The closer I have got to it, the more I have come to realise that nothing comes as a surprise, and that is one of the reasons that I didn't want to say it was Iraq I was talking about, because I sort of wanted to leave it slightly open, that it could be today or could happen all over again. I wanted to leave that as a possibility."
So is everything rosy now that Mr Bush has been replaced by the Obamessiah, and his His Tonyness is but a distant memory?
"I think there is a danger that we think it's all different now, everything has changed. The thing you realise from these things is that it doesn't change. A change at the top doesn't mean that everything else is completely different. I mean, there is already talk about doing a surge in Afghanistan now, and even that is a softening-up exercise for an invasion of Iran.
"It's like Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson with Vietnam, it's the people of the left who are fed up with being accused of being soft on the enemy, they go more over the top. It's normally the right-wing presidents who end up doing peace deals, and the left-wing presidents end up starting wars.
"Though, I'm suspicious of David Cameron really, there's something about his sudden recruitment by the world of ecology and niceness which I'm finding hard to believe."
Clocking in at a pretty trim 100 minutes, Iannucci is quick to point out that In the Loop might tick along at a great rate of knots, but it was quite some process wresting it into shape.
"The first cut was actually four and a-half hours. Towards the end of the edit it was a real struggle to get another half an hour off the film, I had to take my three favourite scenes out. They were individually really funny, but they just held the film up . . . It was all about keeping the comedy at the forefront all the way through. Thank heavens for DVD extras, when it comes out the DVD will be five inches thick!"
He is savvy about current affairs and he has a nose for skulduggery, but Iannucci is quite insistent that the appeal of In the Loop extends beyond readers of broadsheet newspapers.
"Don't feel you have to know anything about politics, it's fundamentally about office politics, and it's about how people behave. This sort of thing goes on everywhere. We showed the film to a whole group of Washington outsiders - sure, they laughed all the way through it, but at the end they said, yep, that's how it is, they didn't feel that they had been poorly portrayed. That's scary."
