The 2009 British black comedy film In The Loop is a spin-off of the BBC Television series The Thick of It with the film directed and co-written by the show's creator Armando Iannucci. However, not much changed in terms of the wild process that went into writing the script for the film. As the film's co-writer Jesse Armstrong explained, the process that followed the methods developed during The Thick of It television series went like this:
It's exactly the same format as used in The Thick of It. Armando holds it together in the middle. Simon Blackwell, Tony Roche and I meet him then come up with the story line. Us three go away and do the storyline then send it to Armando to be okayed and do the initial drafts. Then Ian Martin does additional material and rewrites as well. So it's a five-man team but all broken down into different compartments. It never feels unwieldy. Once we had the storyline mapped out with Armando, each of us took an act each, if you think of it as a three-act movie. I had the first crack at the first act, Simon at the second and Tony at the third. We looked at them all, Armando gave us notes and we did another rewrite and passed them around. It's not like one person does the plot, one does the jokes and one does the politics, but we all have our different strengths.
This process was quite successful as the script would in fact go on to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. Stay tuned!