Making one of writer/director/actor Christopher Guest’s signature comedies is a group effort. But contrary to typical Hollywood politics, that’s a good thing. Guest and actor Eugene Levy, who have co-written four feature films together, lampoon the film industry with their latest, For Your Consideration, a film about the manufactured hype that surrounds many releases today.
Guest and Levy are known for their low-budget approach to filmmaking, which minimizes the input the studio has in the filmmaking process and allows the creators freedom and control over the finished product.
“This is the only experience I’ve had in this business where the creative input you put into the movie is exactly what you see when the movie comes out,” Levy says. “The studio doesn’t creatively interfere, Chris has final cut on the movie; it’s not the studio – they leave all the creative elements to the creative people.”
Guest agrees. “As it should be,” he says. “A large movie with a big budget is a tremendous amount of pressure on the people making that movie to have it succeed. And the bigger the budget, the committee gets bigger.”
But Guest and Levy are not the only people who contribute to the film. After they write an outline with specific scene settings and what Levy calls “extensive backgrounds” for each character, the familiar team of actors they’ve worked with since 1996’s Waiting for Guffman comes in and fleshes out the film.
“We lay the story out and provide each scene with enough exposition to move the story along,” Levy says. “All of the dialogue is improvised.”
The duo’s latest, For Your Consideration, follows the production of period drama Home for Purim, and the flurry of activity that follows after a blog mentions a lead actress’s performance has been described as Oscar-worthy.
“We see actors, directors, agents, press people, journalists, all kinds of people,” Guest says. “It’s the spectrum that you really see in Hollywood,” though Guest and Levy say many of the scenes are based on their real-life experiences that have been toned-down so they’re more believable to the audience.
For Your Consideration marks a departure from Guest’s distinctive mock-documentary style of filmmaking, though he shot around 50 hours of footage for the 86-minute film, which he spent 11 months editing. According to Guest, he and Levy don’t set out to mock anything when they make films, so he doesn’t use the word “mockumentary” to describe them.
“We don’t go about this as making fun of something,” Guest says. “We make a movie, do our best, and hope people like it.”
But by selecting such specific populations of society to zero in on — the regional theater enthusiasts of Guffman, the professional dog show circuit of Best in Show, the aging folk musicians of A Mighty Wind, the Hollywood hierarchy of For Your Consideration — Guest and his cast are able to explore the idiosyncrasies of people who take themselves too seriously. The characters are so painfully sincere that many of the film’s finest moments straddle the line between hilarious and cringeworthy.
The difference between Guest’s approach and making fun of these people is the fact that Guest and company’s attitude toward each film is earnest, not mean-spirited. The sincerity involved in deflating the pretension of these small groups of society marks a departure from the typical Hollywood farce. And in For Your Consideration, Guest and Levy target their own Hollywood community with a refreshing, self-aware eye.