Christopher Guest Quotes
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What's interesting about Laurel and Hardy is that in most comedy teams, there's a straight man, and then there's the funny guy. And with Laurel and Hardy, they're both the funny guy.
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What interests me most are the emotional lives of the people. If I don't have that, it's not worth doing, frankly.
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The fun part about doing our movies is that you're creating something using the talents of people rather than finding these pathetic people who are thrust into these situations. That, to me, is completely artless.
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I think fans are so brought up in a culture of rooting for a team since they were kids, ostensibly, and are blind to this idea that people might take offense.
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I wouldn't say I'm a connoisseur of film. I like certain films, but I don't pretend to be a connoisseur of films, no.
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Strangely enough, among my dad's things, I found the diary of an ancestor who was born in 1797 and became a ventriloquist in London. That was quite chilling. It described exactly how I was as a child but 150 years earlier - doing voices, pretending to be a ventriloquist.
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They sell these golf aids that attach to your knee and your head and are supposed to keep your swing correct. It's futile beyond belief. I've never bought any, but I could watch those ads for 24 hours straight. People with straight faces saying this thing will take strokes off your game - that's my peculiar obsession.
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I would make a huge distinction between theater improvisation and film improvisation.
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There are dozens and dozens of improv classes across the nation, but it really cannot be taught.
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Folk musicians have a lot of the same self-importance, but they're way more cruel and jealous than rock musicians - I know this for a fact because I used to be a folk musician.
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It's difficult to articulate how I know it's the right actor, but I do. It's instinct. Intuition.
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Mean doesn't last. Mean is over fast. Maybe this is the essence of everything, which is, to me, if there is no emotional center for what I'm doing, I have no interest in it at all.
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I talk to people of different ages, and a guy who's 38 who says, 'I could've played Major League Baseball, but I had this knee injury...' Yeah, probably not. It's a big thing with men and sports, where they think they could have touched that thing.
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Comedies don't get nominated for Oscars. It doesn't happen. So when we set out to do a movie, it's not what we're thinking about.
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I don't think we've ever known what the hell's going on when we do Tap shows. It's possible the audience are effectively getting to see more of the movie when we play. You know, they know the songs, so anything we do onstage, whether we're meaning to or not, is an extension of the film. Other than that, I wouldn't understand what's going on.
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I find it really appalling when people talk about comedy.
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You can pick almost any field, and there's going to be weird people.
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Music means a great deal to me.
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With a documentary, you can cut away, you can do jump cuts, cut to a photograph at any point to bridge two scenes.
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It couldn't have been more nerdy or bizarre, playing the clarinet. But I studied classical clarinet, went to the high school for music and art in New York City, and then found the guitar and the mandolin after it.
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I went to Bard College for a year. And then, even though I didn't think I should give my blood to the theater, I did go to N.Y.U., which is where I met Michael McKean.
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'This is Spinal Tap' was a film we felt really had to be done like that. It wouldn't have worked any other way. And it turned out to be the first time a fiction film had really been made in a documentary format. I continued to do that, obviously, because it's a fun way to work.
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I am interested in the notion that people can become so obsessed by their world that they lose sense and awareness of how they appear to other people. They're so earnest about it. But that's true of so many things.
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I don't know if I'd mastered that documentary format, but I wanted to move on from it.