UGO: I just popped the movie in again this morning -

Christopher Guest: Into what?

UGO: Into my DVD player.

Michael McKean: Oh, good. Because if you tried your toaster oven, it wouldn't work.

UGO: What was it like to explore this kind of music?

CG: Well, it wasn't that much of a reach, because we're old enough to have been around for the real thing, so we were sniffing around with what was actually happening and playing it, so we had a context more than just going in cold. It was fun to write songs in this genre because no one else does, according to my research.

Harry Shearer: According to our lawyers.

CG: Yeah, so we did it and we had fun doing it. It was fun to play, and it shows, because you can hear each other; unlike the Spinal Tap shows, which are really loud and after a lot of years, that dulls the senses.

MM: Well, not that the senses weren't dull to begin with.

HS: A lot of people have, thinking they were nailing us, talked about the lack of politics in the material, and we were focusing specifically on a large group of people who were affecting a folk stance and playing folk instruments, but were basically trying to have pop hits in the period just before The Beatles hit. And those are the bands that we were writing about in the picture, so to try to write their material was to sort of wash your mind free of any of that other stuff and try to go as catchy and as hooky and fake-folky as they would have, which is sort of fun.

MM: In the late '50s, there really was this supposition in the music business that rock and roll was about to evaporate. I mean, Elvis went into the army! They thought that was the end of the world. So they were looking for something to replace it and among the candidates were calypso and folk music. Anyway, groups we were parodying really were the kind of the kinder, gentler, more oblivious brand.

UGO: As actors, is it gratifying to have a DVD where you can see deleted scenes?

MM: I haven't actually seen what's in the supplemental material myself, but as far as Best in Show and also the Spinal Tap reissue, Waiting for Guffman, it was nice to see stuff I hadn't seen before just as an actor, and songwriter in the case of Guffman.

HS: But as actors, there's nothing more gratifying than being in one of these movies. So I don't think any of us sits around longing for stuff that has been cut, because Chris does an amazing job of, with an increasingly large number of people, making sure that everybody gets a chance to score. So whether something else turns up on the DVD or not is not nearly as major a gratification as the picture in the first place.

UGO: Have you heard any reaction from any of the folk acts that maybe you were parodying?

CG: Yeah.

MM: Specifically, from Peter, Paul and Mary, we have had actually had very positive, if horrified, feedback from them.

UGO: How did you hear from them?

MM: Well, actually, Harry got an email...

HS: ...from one of their daughters, yeah. Said, "My Dad really liked it and was a little scared going in, but really liked it." And I heard from somebody that Kingston Trio, they liked it. It sort of replicates what we experienced with Spinal Tap. Every time we'd run into somebody in heavy metal, they were always flattered that we did a movie about them, and I think it's the same with the folk guys. (In old man voice) "Somebody remembered us!"

UGO: How does the folk audience react to your music?

MM: Well, we don't quite know what the folk audience consists of right now. We know who comes to our shows, and I don't know whether that was an audience of folk fans so much as it was people who had seen and enjoyed the movie, and I think that's primarily what we're gonna see. But in 1993, we played our first gig as the Folksmen, and we played at a real folk festival along with Peter, Paul and Mary, Kingston Trio, Arlo Guthrie, Richard Thompson, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Richie Havens, I mean the whole thing.

HS: The whole mishbucha.

MM: The whole mishbucha...see I'm a gentile, I can't make that sound. But, the reaction is kind of like maybe a palette cleanser. I mean we know we're kidding, they know we're kidding.

HS: We're the sherbert of folk.

MM: Something like that. But it's been very positive. I think if you come to the show, you know pretty much what the deal is. No one is gonna be shocked that we're not real.

UGO: Your style of filmmaking really lends itself to DVD. Are you heavily involved in the creation of the DVDs of your films?

CG: Yeah, I basically pick the scenes and sometimes there are scenes that have never been cut at all, and I set about to work with the editor. Because of the nature of improvisation, we get a lot of material. We got 80 hours of material for this film.

UGO: 80 hours of different scenes?

CG: 80 hours of total footage, and we have an hour of new material on the DVD.

UGO: The characters in the bands all have such rich backstories. How do you set about creating them?

CG: Well, Eugene Levy and I who wrote the story, and structured this, take probably 5 months or so just to come up with the story and the backstories, and within each backstory there are jokes, because the album covers and titles of the records become funny and those photo shoots become funny in themselves, and it does eventually create this credibility. The deeper you go, the funnier it is, I guess. We did all those shoots, in one day, all those album covers, and that was amazing.

MM: Chris is also very lucky to work with this guy Joe Garrity, who is the production designer, who gets the joke almost before its come out of your mouth. It's amazing.

CG: Sometimes, he gets it after.

MM: Yeah, sometimes he gets it after.

CG: And the photographers are sensational. Everyone has to be on the same wavelength or else the whole thing falls apart.

UGO: So when the actors arrive, their backstories are in place?

CG: Oh, deeply, absolutely. Everyone knows what the scenes are about. The movie has to be even more structured, in some senses, than a professional movie, and then you can play with the actual dialogue, but all the facts have to be known.

UGO: Mr. Guest, do you enjoy the fake documentary style you work with now, or do you want to go back to the more traditional style of something like The Big Picture?

CG: I don't think anyone has anything down. You know, it depends on the story. I have an idea for a new film which I'm not talking about publically yet. It really depends on the story, whether I choose to use that form or not. You think you have something down, you're pretty sad.

MM: But sometimes, the people who think they have something down, sometimes they really do. I mean any movie with a "3" after its title...they know how to make that movie, they've made it three times, and as long as you keep buying tickets, they will keep making it. To have something down is not necessarily to do it well.

CG: I don't perceive it that way. I tell the story I like, and if it works with this formula, if it's great working with these actors, why not do it?

UGO: So a new movie is in the works?

CG: There's nothing in the works in the sense that I'm getting paid. But there's something in the works in terms of my brain, yeah. I just haven't talk about it yet.

UGO: How do you guys go about finding the voices for your characters?

CG: (In thick Italian accent) There's a place down on 47th street. I go there all the time, just go down and get a voice.

MM: (Also in Italian accent) Voices N' Stuff it's called.

CG: Every actor comes to that in a different way. Some people have some kind of exterior thing; whether it's hair and then it becomes a voice, and some people have a voice they've been fooling around with since they were a kid. It happens in different ways. It really is an organic mystery, which is a good mystery.

MM: Sometimes you might be going along a certain path in how your character's gonna sound, and then you realize other people have maybe scooped you on that. Originally, my character was gonna be Canadian, because American actors never do Canadian accents, so I was gonna do that then I realized Eugene and Catherine were gonna be Canadian, as they are in real life, and I thought "Oh, man! Think of something else."

HS: What's another funny country north of America?

MM: That's pretty much it.

HS: We ran out.

CG: But you went with Canadian anyway.

MM: No, I didn't. You weren't listening.

CG: I wasn't listening. I haven't seen the movie.

HS: Also, we had done these characters before the movie, so we had kind of locked into how these guys looked and sounded earlier. But Chris did say before the movie "Don't feel you have to be bald, but if you are, you're gonna have to shave your head because we're not gonna have bald caps." So he gave me the option of whether I felt loyal to the 4 people who had seen us in public before or not, but I just felt I felt more comfortable keeping the continuity of the guy that I knew because it helped me. You make those choices sometimes just because, if you already know something about a character, you'd rather hang onto that than reinvent that.

UGO: Speaking of continuity, will you be in drag in the future?

HS: We don't call it drag. I'll be "on my journey."

MM: All shots, some surgery?

HS: Yeah, ASSS, all shots, some surgery. That was interesting, because you talked about have you heard from real folkies, but I have heard from real transgender musicians. "You must know my story! You must have written this about me!"

UGO: The Folksmen opened many times for Spinal Tap. Now that the Folksmen are sort of "The Folksmen"...

HS: (laughter) I know where you're going...

UGO: ...do they get their own opening act, so to speak?

CG: We actually talked about Tap opening, flipping it, but if people knew, it would create a strange...it wouldn't work as well...

HS: Yeah...

MM: It's the wrong dynamic anyway.

HS: You can't do loud and then soft.

MM: No.

HS: You'd have blown people's ears out.

MM: You wouldn't be able to hear the songs!

UGO: I got to see Spinal Tap at Carnegie Hall a couple years ago, and The Folksmen opened, and you started off getting booed, essentially.

HS: A little bit.

UGO: Is that something you want?

MM: Well, it's the right dynamic certainly. At the Beacon Theater a month later, we forgot to make any mention of the fact that there was an opening act, much less these three old guys, so we got seriously booed, and it was a strange experience being booed off the stage so we could come back on.

UGO: They never figured it out?

MM: About half the crowd did, but the vocal majority...

HS: The guys who didn't do the math. There's three of these and three of those...

UGO: Would you like to have a televized concert?

CG: No, I think that live is way more fun to do.

UGO: Speaking of The Folksmen, why do you think their Saying Something album was such a flop with with he fans?

MM: I'll tell you why. It's because we had g's at the end of each word. We had Hitchin', we had Singin', we had Pickin', all with the little apostrophe. Saying Something', we had two g's. The audience just didn't follow us.

HS: I'm sure we had long, anguished discussions about that very fact.

MM: They weren't that anguished.

CG: They weren't that long, really.

HS: Well, to me, it resonates to the story about the argument at Warner Brothers about the Steven Seagal movies: 3 words, they were all 3 words. When they went away from 3 words, the whole bottom fell out.

MM: 'Cause there's no other reason you wouldn't go to those films.

HS: No, no no. Never.

UGO: The Mighty Wind bands are touring now, and you've got the DVD coming out, just as Spinal Tap always seems to reappear whenever there is a reissue of the film. Is there a connection?

CG: There's totally a connection. We wanted to play, and we always knew we wanted to do some shows back when we were doing the film. But the right time to do it seemed to be sort of obvious, to have it connect.

MM: And I think we knew roughly the time the DVD would be coming out so that we had a good enough advance so that a lot of busy actors could cancel out the middle of September.

CG: It's really hard to get this many people, something like 18 people, a lot of very hard-working people, free for a show like this. Eugene Levy finishes shooting a movie, literally the day of the show, and he's flying out.

UGO: Was it a little nerve-wracking for you as a director that you had a bunch of actors who didn't know how to play instruments and you had this concert?

CG: Well, the subject was chosen knowing that these people were very musical. Eugene had played, but a long time ago. Catherine was a very good singer, and learned to play the autoharp. Parker Posey learned how to play the mandolin. The three of us, obviously, have been playing, and other people didn't play, so I made the calculated risk that this was gonna work out, and they had a month to work on their musicianship. It was more of a risk to do it live, which I guess was the scary part.

HS: I think that the decision to do the concert in the movie live was a very important one, because it made everybody rise to this moment. There was no backup, there was no discussion of "We have it in the studio, we're just lip-syncing." So the trust that he showed in everybody was a big responsibility for us, and I thought that that infused the concert scene with the very kind of energy that these characters would have brought to this momentous potential comeback in their lives. It was a great place where the reality of what we were experiencing met the reality in the characters' lives.

UGO: That makes it a little easier for you guys as actors.

MM: Well, it certainly puts us in the right state of mind, vis a vis the state of our underpants.

HS: From Washington, The State of our Underpants Address. Here's the President!

UGO: Any other movies you're working on now?

MM: I just had the film I did, And Starring Pancho Villa As Himself, which was on HBO. It's now being rerun; it did very well.

HS: HBOver and over?

MM: Yeah. And right now, I'm kind of into becoming a songwriter. My wife and I [Annette O'Toole] wrote a bunch of the songs for this film, including "A Kiss at the End of The Rainbow," the Mitch and Mickey song and "Potatoes in the Patty Wagon," and we've become this kind of songwriting team, and we are, in fact, writing an original movie musical.

UGO: You were the band leader on Primetime Glick as well?

MM: I was, yessir.

UGO: Is that still going?

MM: No, we shot three seasons, and Comedy Central decided to keep the third season kind of a secret, after two years of heavily promoting it. Marty [Short] does have a Jiminy Glick movie coming out, and when he's done doing The Producers, possibly there'll be another season.

UGO: Is it true you're the new Perry White?

MM: I am the new Perry White on Smallville. My wife is a regular on the show, and well they just figured I'd show up on time. And I'd do.

HS: Man, I heard you were the new Barry White.

MM: No, no. See I wouldn't be able to fill those shoes. Or that refrigerator.

UGO: Thank you very much.

All 3: Thank you.

MM: Enjoy the holidays.

HS: There are no holidays.