Filmfest DC Returns for its 32nd Year of International Cinema

Something Fishy This Way Comes

The DC Film Society's 26th Annual Party "And the Winner Is..."

By Charles Kirkland, DC Film Society Member

On Sunday, March 4, 2018, The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences held its 90th Annual Oscar awards ceremony and strangely the DC Film Society held its annual party at the same time. The strangeness was not in that the two events were held at the same time but in the oddities that occurred in the evening.

Despite shrinking numbers for Oscar awards viewing in recent years, the Arlington Cinema and Drafthouse was packed to capacity with an overwhelmingly and unusually large number of newcomers to the event. Director Michael Kyrioglou welcomed everyone during the Red Carpet show and introduced our returning hosts for the evening, WETA’s men Around Town, Tim Gordon and Travis Hopson. The dapper-dressed Gordon and Hopson who seemed like they stepped off the carpet themselves, welcomed the audience and took special care to bring the rookies up to speed about the schedule of the evening. They made sure that everyone knew about the silent auction, the Predict-the-Winners contest, and even the trivia contest for prizes that were to be held during the show.

Then the show began. Kimmel opened well but it was nothing in comparison to the opening from our hosts. Gordon and Hopson opened with their usual jabs at each other and the coming festivities of the night. They shared their opinions on the upcoming results and entreated the audience for their thoughts. It was at that moment that it was clear that this was not the regular Film Society crowd.

This crowd was alive! The requests and prodding from the hosts were effective but not nearly necessary. The whole Drafthouse was jumping with conversations, comments and clamor. Not only did they bite the bait of the hosts but they fought the hooks as they openly fought too the validity of two trivia questions posed by Tim Gordon.

The most interesting part of the night turned out to be the Predict-the-Winners contest. One of the six categories in the contest for the night was the Best Animated Short where Kobe Bryant’s underdog film Dear Basketball won the Oscar. Three attendees had perfect ballots for the evening. Even stranger was the prediction by Travis Hopson that neither the favorite Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri nor the underdog, dark horse horror movie Get Out would win Best Picture. In one move, Hopson established himself as the Captain of the ship without anyone understanding until The Shape of Water won. As the fairy tale, fish story captured its Oscar, Hopson caught us all hook, line and sinker.

Once the festivities ended and all the prizes were dispersed, another great night was had by all who packed into the party.

Thanks go out to The DC Film Society Coordinating Committee Members and Volunteers, Tim Gordon, Travis Hopson, Allied Integrated Marketing, Arlington Cinema N Drafthouse, Filmfest DC, DC Shorts, PR Collaborative and Women in Film & Video for making it all possible.

The Cinema Lounge

Adam's Rib: Lessons From High Noon

The Death of Stalin: Q&A with Director Armando Iannucci

By Annette Graham, DC Film Society Member

An advance screening of The Death of Stalin was held March 15 at Landmark's E Street Cinema. Director Armando Iannucci was present to answer questions and the discussion was moderated by Michael Bishop, director of the National Churchill Library and Center in DC and executive director of the International Churchill Society. The Death of Stalin is a comedy/satire about Stalin's death and the subsequent power grab by the members of the Council of Ministers. It stars Steve Buscemi, Jeffrey Tambor, Simon Russell Beale, Michael Palin and others. This Q&A has been condensed and edited.

Michael Bishop: It's a privileged to talk to the director of this film and creator of In the Loop, The Thick of It and Veep. Congratulations, Armando. Let's set the scene where in 1953 Winston Churchill is back in 10 Downing Street, Eisenhower has just become president of the US and Stalin has just keeled over.
Armando Iannucci: What could possibly go wrong?
Michael Bishop: Exactly. A perfect combination. What was it that drew you to this pivotal time, the death of Stalin in 1953?
Armando Iannucci: It's not a period that is covered a lot in western cinema. The Nazis are big box office and if you're looking at Russia, maybe espionage and spying in the Cold War. But that Stalinist period in the early 50s is slightly... But the real reason is that I was thinking about doing something about a fictional, contemporary dictator. That was going to be my next comedy or drama. I hadn't decided if it was an American dictator, a British dictator, whatever. Things have been happening in democracies all around the world. These strange strong leaders have been emerging, the Berlusconis, and the Putins, the Erdogans and people who change the constitution so that they can never be removed from office. Then I was sent the French graphic novel The Death of Stalin which had all this of what you've seen in the film laid out in front of me--the concert at the beginning which was true, Stalin falling over and the guards not knocking on the door because they were too scared so him being left there for a day, which was true, everyone arguing about whether to get a doctor and what doctor to get because Stalin had put them on a list which was true and so on. And I thought, why come up with a fiction, because here are the themes I want to talk about. And it's true, it's horrifying, it's absurd, it's comic in a strange kind of nervous way. And it's true. The moment I read it, I thought, this is the film I want to make.

Michael Bishop: So a lot of it is unbelievably is true but it takes a certain kind of imagination to look at the death of the most murderous tyrant of the 20th century and say that's comedy.
Armando Iannucci: Comedy = tragedy plus time. I think there is something about events like this that are so crazy that the only way you can respond to them is through comedy. They circulated joke books under Stalin, jokes about Stalin, Beria and torture, and gulags. You could be shot if you had one of these on you. And yet people felt the need to come up with jokes. As if to say, "You can take my livelihood away, you can take me away but I can make fun of you. You haven't got me here." And it's interesting. I knew that there were two elements to the film, one was the comedy and one was the horror as well, and they were going to run alongside each other. I thought the only way to make them work and earn their right to be with each other was if they all were derived from the same thing which is true events. So after reading the book I went out to Moscow and did more research and found more to put into the film. Because I thought that was going to be the template for what we work with. Now it's our dialogue and I changed the timeline here and there, and we've had a bit of playing with. But fundamentally, I wanted to get the look of it right and to recreate as convincingly as possible in the audience--and you can tell if this has been achieved--a sense of anxiety, a low level of anxiety all the way through. Because that must have been what it felt like, on a daily basis, to just not know how you were going to get through the night, if you or a member of your family were going to get hauled away.

Michael Bishop: You did a lot of extra research as you say; it wasn't just the graphic novel. Is there one thing that you learned that you said you just had to put in the film?
Armando Iannucci: Vasily, Stalin's son did lose the entire ice hockey team in a plane crash. He had been advised not to put them on the plane and he tried to cover up because he was too scared to tell his father. So he rounded up friends of friends. The concert at the beginning, in reality went through three conductors, not two. The first one fell, the second one they hauled in was drunk so they had to get a third one. Beria loved putting a tomato in people's pockets. Svetlana writes about him poking Stalin's body, just to make sure he was dead. And then Stalin recovered and pointed to the picture. And Beria was mortified and fell to his knees crying as if he's back. And then when Stalin finally died, he was jumping up and down like a child. Stalin would make everyone eat a huge meal late at night, get them drunk. He would instruct his own staff to only give him water, not vodka. But he wanted to get everyone else drunk, just to see what they said. And then when they were ready to leave he would say let's have a movie. He loved cowboy films, he loved these 1930s westerns, which they got over from here. They weren't translated into Russian; they were in English. He would hire a translator to translate live. And these tranlsators were petrified. One of them couldn't speak English, but didn't want to say, so he learned the dialogue in advance and memorized it and just hoped he was saying the right lines. And another one was so petrified and to get everything, he described what was happening in the film as well. "And now John Wayne is shooting from his gun." They would say, "We know this, we can see it." They were just so petrified. So all these incidents we found and there is possibly another film in what we couldn't fit in.

Michael Bishop: Everyone knows you are a filmmaker, but in films as in politics, timing is everything. You've managed to release this film in the US, just as UK-Russian relations are at their lowest point in decades. You've got people dying on park benches and other catastrophes. Tell us about the Russian reception of the film.
Armando Iannucci: Well, it's been mixed (everyone laughs). The audiences that have seen the film have said two things. It's funny and they've been emotional about it and say, "Thank you for making this film." And I've been very careful as we made the film. The first thing I said to the crew is that we have to be very respectful about what happened to the people. There's no comedy there; we want to show that absolutely as it happened. The comedy is in the Kremlin, in the politicians. Someone in the Ministry of Culture withdrew the license for the film. So it was banned from the cinema two days before it was due to get released. The press had seen it; I had done all my interviews. They dubbed it into Russian and I was having a great response. Can you actually ban a film in this day and age? Russians, of any country in the world, are very good at going online, hack into any website that has this film. (everyone laughs) How are they going to ban this film? All they've done is increased its profile so the Moscow Times ran a report saying that 60% of the people in Russian now want to see this film, just because it's been banned. I know they were worried about the upcoming Presidential election and we know that Putin is a stickler for no country interfering or affecting the election (everyone laughs). That's an absolute red line that he will not cross. So maybe that's what's happened and once that's out of the way, if Putin wins [subsequently he did win], then maybe we can get the film back.

Michael Bishop: You have an absolutely remarkable cast. Jeffrey Tambor is so funny. I was completely overwhelmed by Simon Russell Beale, a brilliant Shakespearean actor, as an evil horrible human being.
Armando Iannucci: Simon is actually an evil person (everyone laughs). No. I've seen him play Iago and King Lear and Macbeth. He can do a good villain. What I like about him is that he is very human. In the West we don't know who Beria is, we don't have an image in our head of Beria. And as a cinema going audience we don't know who Simon Russell Beale is. I like the fact that Beria is coming to you absolutely as he is in the film rather than the audience speculating on what other films he was in. Simon was the first person I cast. Opposite Simon we have Steve Buscemi. Beria is very quiet and contained and Khruschev is loud and speaks with his arms and Steve Buscemi was able to play the clown in pajamas at the beginning to the next dictator at the end who is getting people shot.

Michael Bishop: I want to pivot to some of your earlier work. Everyone here knows about Veep. You did The Thick of It with the great Malcolm Tucker. Those of us who know The Thick Of It have probably spent time wondering what Malcom Tucker would make of all this. I don't know what to point to but let's just say the firing of Rex Tillerson by tweet the other day.
Armando Iannucci: Where do you start with something like that? So Rex Tillerson got fired and the person who tried to announce how we was fired got it wrong so he was fired. Now I'm reading today that the deputy head of the FBI might be fired by Jeff Sessions. And once that's done, Jeff Sessions is going to be fired so he can be replaced by someone who then will then fire Mueller. What is going on? I don't understand. Is there going to be anyone left?

Michael Bishop: I'm beginning to understand why you went back to 1953.
Armando Iannucci: I'm running away from the present...
Michael Bishop: ... when things were quiet and peaceful. In your next film you are going even further back into the 19th century. Tell us about that.
Armando Iannucci: I'm doing Charles Dickens, David Copperfield. So that's 1840.
Michael Bishop: Who is going to play David Copperfield?
Armando Iannucci: Dev Patel.

Audience Question: This is getting back to Veep. You don't see the President under whom Selena Meyer is Vice President. Why did you decide to never show the President? In The Death of Stalin the early part of the film is dominated by the actual person of Stalin who takes up a fair amount of screen time.
Armando Iannucci: Well, he is going to die in the first 10 minutes. Well not die, but just have a stroke and poor Adrian [McLoughlin] who was playing Stalin spent weeks lying on the floor in a puddle of manufactured urine. With Veep, I always thought they were so close and yet so far. I remember reading about Lyndon Johnson, master of the Senate, one of the most successful Majority Leaders, the most powerful, influential Majority Leader ever, then becoming Vice President and literally drumming his fingers on a table in his office, wondering if the President would call. He accepted the Vice Presidency because he made the calculation that one in four Vice Presidents become President. That was his best chance. People are respectful to Vice Presidents because they might become President. So I thought it would spoil that dynamic to see the president. With this, I wanted Stalin to be seen in contrast to the image you get of the big tall strong man. In fact he was short, he was in his 70s, he was shaking. He was an old man. I wanted to get that contrast between the image of the great leader and the actuality. So when he dies, they are still struggling with the image. That's what they have to deal with. What would Stalin do, what would Stalin say, how did I wrong Stalin. People in the gulags actually cried when they heard Stalin died, even though Stalin put them there. They couldn't believe he put them there. It must have been someone else; it must have been a mistake. It must have been someone lower down with a grudge. It was the cult of personality, the cult leader.

Audience Question: Looking at a poster on screen, a female character has been inserted and Jeffrey Tambor is taken out [because of sexual harrassmnt allegations]. When you first saw that did you think that will be an easy target for people writing headlines? Given that Stalin is in the title and someone was erased from the poster.
Armando Iannucci: Yes. I saw that. There are ten key members of the cast and we've done about three different posters showing three different combinations. Also Michael Palin was erased--it's airbrushing people out of history.

Audience Question: Since Peter [Capaldi] is done with Dr. Who do you have hopes to work with him again?
Armando Iannucci: [in a mysterious sotto voce] I am working with him.

The Death of Stalin opened in area theaters March 23.

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