For Your Consideration
Interview: Christopher Guest on For Your Consideration
Guest felt it was time to try something new. The characters give interviews to on set reporters but that doesn’t make this a documentary. “It's only in the EPK interviews but in a documentary style, you can at any point, cut to interviews or photographs or anything to jump cut within things,” said Guest. "This doesn't have that so this is very different in shooting and editing actually.”
It didn’t change the way Guest gives his actors an outline and lets them fill in the lines. Only the film within the film is scripted. “Only Home for Purim. The rest of it is improvised which amounts to maybe 8 or 10 pages so it is improvised.” Oh wait, and the fake tabloid show, Hollywood Now. “Yeah, they were so it's 14 pages. 14 out of 120 pages so that's true.”
All the regulars are back – Eugene Levy, Harry Shearer, Catherine O’Hara, Parker Posey, Jennifer Coolidge and Fred Willard. But Guest got The Office creator Ricky Gervais into the mix too. “I got to meet him a couple of years ago and I am a great admirer of The Office which was a scripted show, incidentially, that looked improvised. And his next show, Extras, and I asked him if he wanted to do this. He had never been in a movie and this was his first film and he said yes.”
The actual script is credited to Guest and Eugene Levy, a frequent collaborator behind the scenes as well as on camera. That establishes the outline.
“I generally come with the idea for the film. I call Eugene and we collaborate on this. The cast, they're not writing the movie, other than speaking the dialogue. They're not inventing their characters. They have their characters laid out. They are speaking their own obviously in scenes, but if someone were to come to me having given this outline and say, ‘Can I be...?’ the answer would be no. They have a tremendous amount of freedom in the way they look, their dialect. Jennifer Coolidge, when we were making A Mighty Wind, came to me literally 10 minutes before shooting her scene, said to me, ‘Which voice is funnier? This or this?’ And I said, ‘The first one is funnier.’ Ten minutes later we were shooting. It was such a bizarre, funny voice that Larry Miller couldn't even do the take. He had to leave the room. Every time she did that voice that sounds like some country that you don't know where. It's probably not on Earth. They have a huge amount of freedom.”
For Your Consideration is out in theatres now.
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