Break like the wind

Since rightly conquering Planet Earth with This Is Spinal Tap – without which such cultural fruits as The Darkness could surely never have existed – Messers Michael McKean and Harry Shearer, together with Lord Christopher Guest, have perfected the faux-documentary comedy.

Having previously explored such weird and wonderful parallel universes as amateur drama (Waiting For Guffman), dog-breeding (Best In Show) and barber-shop quartet mania (in The Simpsons, where the crew are frequent collaborators and voice contributors), more and more talents have jumped this particular improvisational comedy bandwagon. Regulars now include Bob Balaban, Parker Posey and everyone’s favourite comedy dad, American Pie’s Eugene Levy.
Their latest outing, A Mighty Wind, sees the gang wickedly sending up those who still begrudge Dylan for plugging in. The plot hinges on a tribute concert which sees classical folkies The Folksmen, commercial faves The New Main Street Singers and the long-disbanded romantic duo, Mickey and Maude all gracing the same stage with predictably tense results. Of course, this is merely a springboard for all manner of eccentricities including colour therapy, model-railway ownership and self-aggrandisement of all kinds.
As ever, some of the characters are inspired – Ed Begley Jr.’s yid-centric Swede has to be his best cameo since popping up as Tap’s speccy drummer lost to a bizarre lawn-mowing accident, while Eugene Levy is wonderful as the former balladeer who perhaps went mushroom-picking in the forest more often than was strictly necessary.
Movie House caught up with McKean, Guest and Shearer recently to find out why these erstwhile rock-gods of Spinal Tap have become purveyors of This Land Is Our Land rip-offs instead.

Moviehouse: There’s an old American adage which states that “Satire is what closes on Saturday Night”, but you lot seem to have done alright out of it. What have you been doing right?

Christopher Guest: Well, we’ve been doing this kind of work for 30 years, and it hasn’t closed yet, but I don’t consider what we do satire. I consider our films to be comedies done in a documentary style. I think they’re just comments with different backdrops that we’ve picked up on.
With this one, it’s folk music and we’ve populated the film with people I hope are interesting and that people like to see. But I’m not going out there to do satire really. The real world is satire to me. In a way, you can take any group of people that do anything and by drawing attention to the seriousness with which they regard themselves and what they do, it’s going to be funny.
Moviehouse:The film format you work with – the mockumentaries such as Waiting For Guffman, Best In Show and Spinal Tap - is immediately recognisable. What kind of films inspired it?
Harry Shearer: My favourite films, and the ones which would have inspired me, are ones like Dr. Strangelove. It was the first film which showed me that you could be funny about stuff that was utterly serious. And then Milos Forman’s first American film Taking Off which is the best film ever made about the 1960s. Oh, and To Be Or Not To Be, an Ernst Lubitsch movie about the Nazis with Jack Benny.
Michael McKean: The main film to inspire me wasn’t a comedy; it was The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner, a Tony Richardson movie with Tom Courtenay. It was based on a wonderful short story and it really woke me up to what movies can do. That’s when I first understood what the director did, and how you can mix and match with time.
Moviehouse:Was it strange going back to a musical theme after so long, and having to write songs again and so on?
MM: Even the process was very fragmented, but that’s the way things usually are. I wrote three songs with my wife Annette O’Toole. And I wrote one song with Chris and Eugene, one with Chris alone and two with Harry. So, it all came together in the end.
CG: I’ve been a musician for 30 years, and it’s really how this whole thing got started. I thought it would be fun to do more music in a film. I knew that the collective were very musical, so we just started to build the story around the actors who could play and sing.
Moviehouse: Eugene Levy has expressed concern that the movie might regenerate folk-music. Are you all prepared to accept full responsibility for such a resurgence?
CG: I’ll be out of the country when that happens. Truth probably is that there’s always a folk revival happening in every city. It might not be the number one seller, but there are folk performers and clubs all over the world. It never goes away.
MM: I think we’re safe from a full-on ’60s folk revival. That kind of music is just too corny. But there are some amazing folk performers. People who do a certain style but haven’t let that stop their music from evolving – Roger McGuinn of The Byrds started out as a folk musician. I’d like to sit and hear him play guitar for 45 minutes or so.
HS: You know, I was reading a piece in The New York Times yesterday about the lack of music that expresses how people are feeling. It was folk’s ability to reflect what’s going on in our lives which made it popular in the ’60s. It was about real stuff that connected to people. Now, if the movie revives that, that would be wonderful.

A Mighty Wind is released January 16