Armando Iannucci: ‘This is a great time for British film production – I’ll be shooting all future projects on home turf’

Armando Iannucci has said that he is keen to shoot all future film and TV projects in the UK as it’s a “great time” for British production.

The Veep and The Thick of It creator shot his new film The Death of Stalin on British soil and has convinced HBO to let him do the same for his forthcoming sci-fi show.

“I do think the British film and televisions industry is fantastic and world-beating – I defended the BBC a couple of years back,” he told the Standard.

“I think this is a great time for British production. We’re doing more things internationally, like Game of Thrones and the Night Manager; it’s all British writers working on Veep and that sort of thing.”

Hollywood filmmakers are currently switching production from the US and Canada to the UK because of the fall in costs due to Brexit, which have been cut by 20 per cent.

But while recent blockbusters like Wonder Woman and The Mummy were shot in the UK, the future of European arthouse films could be in jeopardy as EU film funding post-Brexit is still unclear.

Iannucci has insisted that now is the time to be “cheerleading” the British film industry, and developing more home-grown projects.

“I think we should be cheerleading our industry, it’s amazing and I’m committed to filming in the UK,” he said.

The Scottish writer and director will be a developing his version of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield here next year and is then set to film a pilot for Avenue 5, a futuristic space-set series.

“We shot much of Stalin here, David Copperfield and I said to HBO I’d do another show but it has to be done in the UK and they said ‘fine’. I think we should celebrate it more, we should be proud of it,” he said.

In his latest film, starring Steve Buscemi, Michael Palin, Jeffrey Tambor and Andrea Riseborough, Iannuci tilts his satirical gaze away from democracy and towards dictatorship.

“I’ve done democracy and I was looking at dictatorship and I thought about doing a fictional dictator,” he said.

Iannucci was then shown the French graphic novel of the same name and realised that it was the perfect fit: “Why spend your time inventing a story when this is the truth – a lot of this actually happened.”

The award-winning filmmaker said that he hopes the comedy can make people think more about “what happens when democracy falls apart”.

“It’s important that people still participate in democracy and defend democracy,” he said.

Palin, who plays Soviet politician Vyacheslav Molotov in the film, said he had complete “confidence” in Iannucci’s process.

“I had confidence in Armando and his team of writers he had with him,” he said. “They listen to you, they talk to you, if there was anything they were worried about you’d work it through. It was a very consultative process.”

The Monty Python star said that the dynamic between the diverse cast worked immediately, with no clash of egos.

“There was very little competition, because we all liked each other’s work, we genuinely did,” he said.

“We were just pleased that Armando had chosen us and we felt like it was working and it was working as soon as we started rehearsals. For me to work with someone like Paul Whitehouse, who I think is one of the best comedy character actors in the country, that was great.”