Get Folked!

A Mighty Wind's Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, and Christopher Guest (Photo By John Anderson)

Despite having once played a rock & roll band so determinedly outrageous that they bypassed their amplifiers' "10" setting and went directly to "11" (thereby inspiring proto-metallers Motörhead's credo, "Everything louder than everything else"), Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, and Christopher Guest -- aka Spinal Tap -- are curiously reserved during the South by Southwest media sessions for their new improv film, A Mighty Wind, maybe in part because the country is just days from war. If not for the whir of Nikonic autowinders buzzing in the background and the glare-reducing pancake on their faces, the three actors/comedians/directors could cut something of a stoic "hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil" triumvirate on the Driskill Hotel's overstuffed antique couch. As it is, however, they're more in tune with that other notable British music group, with the taciturn, nearly dour Guest playing Lennon, McKean a wiseacre McCartney, and Shearer's quiet Harrison. The Ringo, apparently, is a no-show.

A Mighty Wind is a faux documentary on Sixties-era folk singing groups that reunite for a final time to pay tribute to a fallen comrade-in-folk. As the Folksmen, McKean, Shearer, and Guest (who also directed and co-wrote the film with co-star Eugene Levy) gently satirize the earnestness of the period and the people; so gently, in fact, that the songs they perform (live in front of the cameras, by the way) could well be the real thing, so crisply zippy and left-of-center are they. Guest, who's previously directed more or less the same company of actors in the same improvisational style in Best in Show and Waiting for Guffman, despises the term "mockumentary" and notes that the characters he's created are anything but a mockery. They're as realistic as he can make them, with the film's humor evolving out of improvisational experiences that, for all their silliness, might as well be the real thing ...

Austin Chronicle: Do you have a preference of improv over scripted comedy?

Christopher Guest: I've just found on the last three pictures that we can get a lot of funny material in this manner. So that's why I've done three films like this. Typically, when you have a scripted film, there seems to be more of a limit as to what can happen on a set, you know, it doesn't go much beyond the specific joke. You've rehearsed and you've done the scene many times -- it's a different way of working, and one that's more fun at the moment.

AC: What sort of script do you work with on the improv films? There has to be some sort of at least bare-bones framework to hold the general themes of the film in place, right?

CG: Well, there is no script per se; we use an outline, and then we just sort of fit the characters into that.

Michael McKean: There's usually a paragraph or two describing what happens within this scene.

CG: It's very structured in the sense that the story very much has a beginning, middle, and end, and each scene has a point to it. The characters all have a back history that everyone is familiar with and shares, but there are no words, no dialogue written down.

AC: How much film do you end up shooting? There must be a fair amount of footage that's not used.

CG: In this case what ended up not being in the film was 78 hours of material.

AC: Were any of you the typical class-clown type back in the day? Were you big into acting out during your childhoods?

CG: I'm still acting out.

Harry Shearer: For me, not really --

MM: -- You were different. You were a pro.

HS: That's true, I had a professional acting childhood. I'd do shows with my friends and my dad's tape recorder back in the day, though. I think those were sort of half-written. I didn't trust the cast, however. These people were monkeys and not to be trusted. [laughing]

CG: Cattle, all of 'em.

AC: When you were shooting This Is Spinal Tap with Rob Reiner, was there any inkling of just how revolutionary the film would turn out to be?

MM: We were just desperate for it to be released! There were no guarantees because we had shopped the project around for quite a bit before we ended up making it for Embassy, and we knew that this was kind of a long shot. We knew we wanted to make it funny; we knew we wanted it to have some shelf life, so that it wouldn't date too badly --

HS: More shelf life than Embassy had, for example.

MM: Right.

CG: But I don't think that anybody knows going into something what might happen. I think it would have been pretty arrogant to think this was something that would become what it has eventually become. We were having fun; we thought it was good, but that's all you know, and now it has this life that you don't anticipate.

AC: Did you enjoy doing the Spinal Tap tours? Did the lunacy of the film carry over into the real world at all?

CG: It ultimately became the real thing because from making a movie about people who didn't really exist, you're now out there playing two hours of music in front of thousands of people, and you're on a bus, and you're on a plane, and you're in the Carnegie Hall or the Albert Hall. And it does literally come full circle, because now you've got women backstage doing all the things they do, and there's bad backstage food, and the real and false collide somewhat. Playing is fun, though, and we enjoy it, and once we went on the road as the Tap it was all sort of first-class in the sense that we weren't slogging around in clubs -- we were grownups, in other words.

HS: One way you can tell the difference between us and the real guys is we realized -- too late, I must say -- that the girls who show up and proffer themselves are very often self-selected based on you're lyrical specifications. Hence "Big Bottom."

MM: I'm glad we didn't do that song "Ugly as a Bucket of Worms."

AC: On to A Mighty Wind. Folk singing hasn't been parodied much since Alan Sherman did it back in the early Sixties, right?

MM: There was a group called the Washington Squares about 12 years ago, and they did some folk parodies, but it's been more like people who do other types of parody would include a folk parody or two in their show. Tom Lehrer, who's done every type of musical form, loved to savage the folk form.

CG: It's something that I had some experience with when I was a kid, because I was playing in folk clubs in the Sixties. It wasn't so much about looking for this film; it just sort of organically happened and then became an idea for a film. The [idea of] the Folksmen had existed since 1984. The general sense was that I wanted to do a movie with some sort of music, and the idea to do folk came after that.

AC: Christopher, you and Eugene Levy did the "script" on A Mighty Wind as well as on Best in Show and Waiting for Guffman. How does that work?

CG: Generally, I've had an idea, and then I get together with Eugene, and we work on it for five months or so. You have to work out a story first and then populate it with the characters and the actors who'll play them. That starts to clarify a lot of things, the choosing of the actors. And from there on out it's like any other script except we're not writing the dialogue. That comes later. But we need to know what the emotional dynamics of each scene are as well as how it's going to end up. Also, the people who do these movies are of a caliber of talent that it helps everybody else.

MM: There's also something very helpful about knowing another person's rhythm, as well as knowing what other person you must never look in the eye when they're speaking. Fred Willard comes to mind. It's very difficult to be in a scene with Fred because he's just screamingly funny. It's all we can do not to burst out laughing and ruin the take.

AC: It's been said that during dark political times -- like these -- that satire and parody are two of our most valuable commodities. Do you agree with that?

MM: It's so insanely depressing.

CG: You know, I thought about the idea of what we're doing here with this film, as this war grows closer, and it's just staggering how depressing it is and knowing that this film is what I've spent my whole last year and a half doing. It's very difficult to make my little comedy schtick feel as though it's worth anything at all.

HS: Well, one analogy is with people who had books out or coming out when 9/11 happened -- book tours stopped, hotels closed up. I do a satirical comedy show on the radio every weekend -- Le Show -- and I do it about what's going on in the world, so on the one hand this is grist for my little mill, but on the other hand, in the large context, man ... who knows? Things are bleak.