Steve Pratt talks to actor/director Christopher Guest about his latest musical mickey-take.

IN person, Christopher Guest doesn't struck you as a funny man. He's quiet and thoughtful, quite the opposite of comics like Robin Williams who take an interview as an excuse to launch into a one-man show.

Yet Guest is one of the team behind the heavy metal documentary This Is Spinal Tap, an object lesson in taking the mickey out of a subject in an affectionate kind of way.

He's since done the same with community theatre (Waiting For Guffman) and dog shows (Best In Show). Now it's the turn of folk music in A Mighty Wind which follows three 1960s groups - Mitch and Mickey, The Folksmen and The New Main Street Singers - as they reunite for a memorial concert to a folk music icon.

Guest, who's married to Jamie Lee Curtis and inherited the title of Lord Haden-Guest, and Eugene Levy, best known as the father in American Pie, are credited as the writers, although their method of working is different to the norm. They write a detailed outline describing the characters and laying out the story's key plot points in a scene-by-scene format. Then, on set, the actors improvise.

"Every word is improvised, and we have 80 hours of film," explains Guest. "There's no dialogue written and no rehearsal. So what you see is what's happening. We only shoot for 26 days, so it's not a question of it being a luxury. A lot can happen in one day, we have more than some films have in a week. A conventional movie will maybe shoot three pages of a script in a day. We get the equivalent of 20 pages a day."

He calls it a team effort. Parts are generally conceived with actors in mind. Indeed many of the same performers are used time and again. With A Mighty Wind, they also had to write songs. Not, he's keen to point out, that they are mocking folk music. It's just that he wanted to do another film and have a lot of music in it. "We needed to write songs that were enjoyable to listen to for people watching the movie, and were fun to play for the musicians."

In fact, the bands from the film have been touring the US in a case of life imitating art, or at least the movies.

Both directing and acting in the film makes the process different to other sets. "When I'm not in a scene I have a microphone and I'm talking to the woman shooting the film," he explains. "She's wearing a headset and I'm actually directing her where to go, because it's all hand-held cameras. If I'm in a scene, I tell her what the parameters of it area, but it has a somehow different effect.

"In an interview scene I'm directing where the zooms go, from a two-shot to one person, so it's almost like doing a live television show."

He's ruthless when he comes to edit the film. Whole scenes may be cut, even if they're good, if they don't fit into the context of the story. That's why the DVD will have an extra hour of unseen material.

* A Mighty Wind (12A) opens in cinemas tomorrow.

Published: 15/01/2004