A MIGHTY WIND FEATURE with CHRISTOPHER GUEST, EUGENE LEVY, CATHERINE O'HARA and HARRY SHEARER

The SPINAL TAP team are back and this time they’re focussing their satirical eye on the world of folk music. Christopher Guest, who directs the folk comeback artists as well as starring as one of them (Alan Barrows), reveals, “It’s all improvised, every word, and we have 80 hours on film of this. The process is [always] the same. Eugene (Levy, co-writer and Mitch in the film) and I worked for a period of months to figure out the story and the back history for all the characters, and the songs were written prior to making the film. Every scene is structured so we know what happens in each one, but there’s no dialogue written, and no rehearsal. We only shoot for 26 days, so it’s not a question of luxury, a lot happens in one day. On a typical conventional movie shoot they maybe get through 3 pages of script in a day, we’ll get through 20.” Phew. Sounds exhausting. “But it has to be a team effort. There’s no competitive aspect to it, if there was we wouldn’t be able to do this kind of work. Eugene and I sit in an office and we talk about it and it becomes apparent quickly who would be good for what part, [so] the parts are generally conceived with those actors in mind, and there are not many actors that can do this kind of work. That’s why so many of them have been in these last 3 films.” “I haven’t done a lot of singing in my career,” says Levy. “I did a little folk singing in the 60s. The first public appearance I made was in front of an audience in the first year of high school in a singing group because my brother was in it. They were really great. I thought: Wow! This is neat! So I formed a singing group myself. Eventually I got into skits and comedy and stuff like that. But I couldn’t make a living doing it - I’ve got a musical ear and I can carry a tune but the idea in this movie was to do the concert at the end which we were told would be done live. This put a little added pressure on to what I thought was a relatively good singing voice, the fact that we were supposed to be playing professional folk singers who had many hit records took a little work for me, and I think I can speak for Catherine as well, as two of the non-musician people. It was exciting but scary!” “I think he’s being a little modest!” adds Chris. “He has a wonderful singing voice and he’s a talented musician. I couldn’t have gone into this film arbitrarily assigning people these roles if I knew they weren’t musical. When I did BEST IN SHOW, we were editing one of the reels when we heard some of them singing, it was just a left over bit of footage. It turns out that during a break this is what they’d been doing. I found out Michael Higgins (Terry Bohner in A MIGHTY WIND) had arranged it. It was an amazing arrangement. It gave me a lot of impetus to go into this film knowing that they could do this. And Michael arranges all the vocals for the Main Street Singers [in the film].” Catherine O’ Hara explains the hilarious lyrics for her catheter song towards the end of the film. “Jim Piddock, who plays my husband Leonard, had a catalogue of medical supplies. There was this show at the end of the movie and Chris said I would be singing for my husband wares, so Jim loaned me this catalogue. I asked Chris if I could write the song and he made me feel that I could. So I went through this catalogue and all these things are real. I wish for none of you to know these personally, but buttock straightener and penis clamper are real products Leonard would be selling, so I sang about them very seriously and I tried to make the music as pretty as possible.” Harry Shearer adds “[In Chris’ films] you as the actor have a great deal of involvement in your character from start to finish. Unlike a normal movie where you arrive and your wardrobe etc. is all sorted out for you. In these movies you’re invited to come in and talk with wardrobe people and decide what your character would wear in every scene.” Guest denies that the film mocks folk music: “We weren’t mocking it. This music is a specific kind of folk music. I played this kind of folk as a kid but it was real folk as opposed to the commercialised version. We needed to write songs that were enjoyable for people to listen to [while] watching the movie and that were fun to play for the musicians. We’ve now been doing a tour of the States of all the bands in the film and it’s fun to play these songs, they’re engaging in some way. What happens after this, I don’t know. We’ve sold a few CDs off this though!” “I feel proud when people tell us how much they love the CDs,” adds O’Hara, “because there are a lot of songs on the CDs that are not in the movie; and I wish you weren’t ashamed and that you like it!” “There’s probably a group you can go to that’ll work that out for you!” suggests Guest. Continued on page 2

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