Fall Films

Catherine O’Hara on ‘For Your Consideration’

Catherine O’Hara has appeared in more than 40 films, and her unforgettable characters in three previous Christopher Guest efforts – Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, and A Mighty Wind – have earned her a following and the reputation as one of the finest comedic actresses of her generation. I caught up with O’Hara by phone this week to talk about the highly anticipated Hollywood satire For Your Consideration.

Austin Chronicle: You’ve been doing quite a bit of flying around lately.

Catherine O’Hara: I was at the London Film Festival last week. Then back home to L.A. for a couple of days. Now, New York for the press junket. Just spent all day going from room to room in the hotel talking to tables of reporters. There was one guy that fell asleep right in front of me.

AC: How gracious.

CO: It’s all a little discombobulating. But it’s silly to complain. Who am I kidding? This is a great job.

AC: Here, you play Marilyn Hack, an anonymous veteran of the Hollywood acting corps who comes to hope she might have a crack at an Oscar nomination.

CO: With Marilyn, I was trying to bury that part of her. That was a big dream of hers. A world that on the practical side she probably wouldn’t be a part of but apparently still held some hope for. For me, it’s fun to try that, to play a character that’s not inherently funny. You know, to try and find the humor in the ridiculousness of people taking themselves so seriously.

AC: Well, I couldn’t stop laughing at Marilyn’s roaring intoxication scene after the Oscar nominations are announced. You also did a drunken soliloquy as Sheila Albertson in Waiting for Guffman on her husband’s penis-reduction surgery. You play “plastered” so convincingly. Have you seen inebriated people before, or, more personally, have you ever been inebriated?

CO: Uh, yeah, come to think of it, I have seen a drunk person before. I’m sure I’ve been drunk before but missed seeing it. You know, if you play a character that buries a lot of stuff, doing drunk is a great way to exorcise it all.

AC: Tell us what a Christopher Guest/Eugene Levy script looks like. Is it like the fairly standard 110 pages?

CO: No, no. Waiting for Guffman was the shortest. I feel like it was only around eight pages. But as the stories have widened out in the subsequent movies and more characters appeared, the scripts have become longer. I don’t know, something like 20, 30 pages. The scripts are basically detailed scene outlines.

AC: So you and the other actors write it; you fill in the blanks through improvisation?

CO: We provide all the dialogue, but the final result is really closer to that beat-by-beat outline of Chris and Eugene’s vision than most movies you work on. Each scene, each beat is there in the finish, just without the dialogue.

AC: Do you run everything by Chris beforehand?

CO: No, not at all. Unless it’s going to affect the set or props, you don’t run anything by him. You don’t need to. He has no rehearsal; you just start rolling. On the first day of shooting, you see each other in the trailer, and we’ve all been working on our look, and you just go with it. Chris is like Corky St. Clair in Guffman – you feel like with him you can do no wrong. His style is “What’s the point of inhibiting people when you can let them fly free?”

This article appears in November 10 • 2006.