by MARK SLUTSKY

After parodying heavy metal artists, small-town theatre folk, performing dogs and folk musicians, Christopher Guest and company have come somewhat full circle with their latest comedy, For Your Consideration, set in the comically fertile world of indie film. Like Guest’s other films, Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show and A Mighty Wind, the movie features a large and talented cast. Unlike those films, For Your Consideration is a more or less straight narrative, without the mockumentary trimmings that have characterized most of his other work.

Guest himself plays Jay Berman, director of movie-within-a-movie Home for Purim, and Catherine O’Hara is faded former star Marilyn Hack, whose career is revived by nebulous Oscar buzz surrounding her performance. The media attention that follows and all the attendant hoopla and heartbreak provides the core of the film, which features performances by Guest regulars Fred Willard, co-writer Eugene Levy, Parker Posey, Harry Shearer, Michael McKean, Bob Balaban, Jane Lynch and Jennifer Coolidge, as well as relative newcomers like Ricky Gervais.

Guest, Levy and McKean sat down at the Toronto International Film Festival to talk about the movie’s origins, comic collaboration and awards madness. “In 1979 I was working on a film as an actor,” Guest says. “When we were about three weeks into shooting, someone came up to the director of photography and said, ‘You better get your tuxedo ready.’ I remember thinking, ‘What?’ We had just started making this film! What the hell are you talking about? And I could see a change in this guy—he suddenly became even better in his own mind and he wasn’t nominated and obviously he didn’t win, and I thought ‘Well, this is the perfect thing.’ And that was in 1979.”

“We’ve all kind of had a taste of it,” Levy says. “Michael was actually nominated for an Oscar, for the song in A Mighty Wind, and well, I guess, did you come remotely close?”

“I stopped speaking to you, actually,” McKean jumps in. “And most of my other friends as well. No, we knew we weren’t going to win—my wife [Annette O’Toole] and I were nominated for this award and we never discussed it. And afterwards I was like, ‘What was your speech like?’ And she told me and I told her!”

Sadness and sketch

Like most of Guest’s movies, For Your Consideration focuses on talents who are more, shall we say, marginal: has-beens, also-rans, almost-couldas. “There’s nothing funny about people who are the top of the heap, to be honest,” Guest says, “Because they have money and they have access to things. The people who you can relate to, the people who are struggling and who are in that position are more interesting.”

And as hinted at with Levy’s somewhat tragic character in A Mighty Wind, it seems like the filmmakers have taken care to foreground the sadder human element of these characters. “We’ve done a lot of comedy for many years, and to make this interesting for us, you need to have that element,” Guest says. “I guess that becomes more important, because it’s more lasting. We’ve done sketches in the past, we’ve done all kinds of things, but I don’t know, it’s just more interesting and more dimensional.”

“It’s the strongest kind of comedy when the audience has an emotional involvement with the characters,” Levy adds. “There’s no question. Otherwise it’s sketch. It’s Airplane!, which is just hysterical and great, but when the jokes stop, your movie stops. If the audience isn’t with you at the end, you’ve kind of only got three-quarters of a movie. Your movie’s over when the humour stops. From the beginning we had the same sensibility, that innately in the body of the work, along with the humour, was that these people have to be real.”

Genre jumping

Guest seems to chafe at the most popular term for his previous films: “Well I never have made a ‘mockumentary,’” he says, “But I’ve made movies in a documentary style. We determined, after having done three like that, that we wanted to move on to a narrative form, just because we wanted a change.”

And although For Your Consideration still depends heavily on the cast’s improvised dialogue, the shift in genre definitely changed up the process a bit. “It was tremendously difficult,” Guest says, “Because when you’re doing a documentary-style, at any point you can throw in an interview, or throw in a still photograph of Eugene with his eyes crossed, which is going to get a big laugh. And you can go on to the next thing. But in this, in a narrative, you’re going from scene to scene, there is no way to bail out, and as the person who sits with the editor for 10 months, it’s really difficult. Really, I mean it’s an unbelievably hard one to do.”

“Even the editing techniques in a documentary help,” Levy says. “You can jump-cut from one joke right to the next.”

“In this, it’s just scenes playing out.”

For Your Consideration opens this Friday, Nov. 17

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