A MIGHTY WIND Continued from page 1

Ok, so if they really do enjoy folk music, what music do they really hate? “I have that ventriloquist record,” ponders Guest. “But then there’s skate rink organ music.” “The easy answer to that is polka music,” cuts in Shearer. “There’s a lot of exciting polka music,” deadpans Levy. “I agree,” says Shearer to Guest, “Organ music at a baseball game or a hockey game is really worse than elevator music - it’s about as low as you can get.” With all this goofing going on, on set and off, there must be millions of outtakes. But Guest says “There are times when we make each other laugh, but there’s no outtakes as there are in other movies. There are whole scenes on the DVD which don’t fit in the movie which are really funny but are not right in the context of the story we needed to tell. There are no outtakes in the traditional sense though I guess. “We all have a great creative investment in films like this whether because we’ve written songs in it or decided the look of the characters - all of the impulses are running in the opposite direction - in the scene you’re only thinking about what the character is thinking about in terms of what’s going on in that scene. There’s no prankish impulse going on behind that, there’s only a few opportunities to get this right. Nobody is going to succeed by sabotaging their role.” “And that’s not going to make it funny,” cuts in Shearer. O’Hara says “I think Chris is like a really good parent who lets the child fly free but guides them so you feel like you’ve come up with everything yourself even though you’re being guided by this script. But the dialogue’s all improvised and you have so much freedom in developing your character. And Chris basically never says no. He rarely says cut, he says “roll out!” maybe [he’ll call for] another take, maybe not but the dialogue will change. Sometimes you want to keep a particular line in, but it’s fresh every time. The beautiful thing that Chris does is make you feel like you can do no wrong.” But, perhaps the biggest test of all was the reaction of the folk world in the States. “There’s a kind of folk world in the states, every city has folk clubs, but there’s no real folk establishment,” says Guest. “It doesn’t represent anything in the industry in terms of record sales. It’s not as it was in the 60s when it represented the peak of what was happening in recording. It’s nothing like that now, it’s more on the fringes.” “I get a lot of e-mail [about this] because I do a radio show,” adds Shearer. People were setting up folk chat boards and wondering whether this movie would be good for them or not - and then someone saw a preview and said oh we can relax, it’s not about us. A friend of mine attending the screening said “It makes my skin crawl - in a good way.” “I would love to do the show at the Royal Festival Hall,” muses Shearer. “I haven’t had as much fun in my life as doing the show with these guys. I spend two-thirds of the show watching the others and I have best seats in the house for that and then it’s amazing because we get to play too. Chris is more laissez faire with the live shows and it’s amazing what people bring in and how the stories of all the characters are moved along. But we all go from where we left you when the movie ended.” Where on earth did Levy dig up his character of Mitch? “It wasn’t modelled after any one person, it wasn’t modelled after Ozzy or Brian Wilson, although I can see the similarity, but it really wasn’t. We creatively did the back story for this guy and the closer we got to shooting I was getting more nervous that we’d painted such a picture of this man who’d lost everything and was so sedated on drugs [that I was thinking] what is this man going to be like? “I modelled the voice patterns after a guy I knew growing up in my home town of Hamilton, Canada, he was kind of a clerical guy.” And on that note, watch out for the folk fanatics at a concert hall near you. Mighty Wind - movie information PHASE9 movie review Back to movie interviews

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