Christopher Guest

Spotlight By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

Jack-of-all-trades Christopher Guest, throughout his life, has been an actor, a director, a comedian, a writer, and a composer. He was a regular on SNL, and he's played a washed-up rock star, a toy soldier, a lord, and an eleven-fingered count (a personal favorite role of mine).

And I haven't even gotten into his roles in any of the films he's actually directed. For the past decade or so, he's been making critically-acclaimed mockumentaries every few years with comedian friends such as Fred Willard and Eugene Levy. The trend began with Waiting for Guffman in 1996 and continued on with Best in Show and A Mighty Wind. Now, he's back with the same familiar crew in their first non-mockumentary, a comedy about awards-season speculation called For Your Consideration.

'We were actually going to do medieval,' Guest says about the process of coming up with a new idea for a film. 'Medieval was the first idea. Because they had big hats, and they lived in castles, and that was really funny for about a day.'

For someone known as a comedian, that bit of dry humor is about as close to a joke as you'll hear out of Guest, who in the interview remained simply matter-of-fact about his career. 'I don't look at myself as a film director. I look at myself as me,' he says. 'Maybe I'll come up with an idea, but I don't have to come up with an idea and make a movie, so maybe I'll make another movie and maybe I won't. I don't really know.'

Like the three mockumentaries, Guest co-wrote For Your Consideration with friend Eugene Levy. 'I have an idea for a film and I will call Eugene and say 'What about this,' and we come to some consensus to see if we can make this work, and then we go to our office and write the story.'

Also like his past films, this one deals with sweetly ignorant people in show business, this time on the set of an independent movie called Home for Purim. When someone finds something written on the internet about the film's Oscar potential, no one knows how to handle the news.

'To say to someone, 'I bet you're going to get nominated for an award,' I think the person saying that doesn't realize what the person on the other end is going to go through. There's no way to process that in a healthy way.' As someone in the business himself, Guest clearly empathizes. 'It shows the fragility of where people are in show business, their feet aren't on the ground really. You know, someone who looks at a good review of themselves, and looks at a bad, they're just going to be bouncing off the wall because there's no equilibrium, it's either one or the other. That was interesting.'

Also interesting is finding the balance between reality and comedy in his characters. 'These are people who are aiming a bit too high for their talents and for their IQ, which I find interesting'You can look at Waiting for Guffman, and those people, it may seem funny that they're just doing this regional theater, but it's all relative. If you went backstage at a Broadway show and you said Al Pacino's in the audience, those people would go insane, they would have the same reaction. They would be running into walls.'

He walks a fine line with his characters: they're all rather stupid and untalented, but you sense he has respect for them nonetheless. Guest is alternately highbrow and practical about their shaping. 'I don't know if I would call them satires; people have, but I would say they are observations of humans,' he says at one point. Then again, he might just be trying to service the comedy. 'Eugene and I always talk about lowering the bar with these characters' intelligence. Because if we were playing smart people who were intelligent, I don't see where the humor would be'it's way funnier to play those other people who have no idea what's going on in the world.'

For Your Consideration's underlying nature, though, is bittersweet. Guest is very curious about the idea of stardom in general. 'They have the stars on Hollywood boulevard, and 90% of them are probably people you've never heard of'it's a weird thing, and it's kind of sad, too.'

Perhaps because of this, Guest enjoys living outside of the spotlight. 'We have a fairly regular life. We have two kids, it's a fairly regular life.' He's happy to talk about the more mundane things. 'My son loved Flushed Away,' he mentions. Then he adds something that may almost count as another actual joke: 'For ten year old boys, anything with a toilet is good.'