Parody stirs up A Mighty Wind

Canadian-born writer/actor Eugene Levy takes silliness seriously in folk music comedy

Youngsters will recognize him as the all-too-understanding dad in the American Pie movies and, most recently, as Steve Martin's best friend in Bringing Down the House. But comedy fans have been entertained by Hamilton-born Eugene Levy for at least three decades, beginning with his days at SCTV and moving upward in films Splash, Club Paradise, Father of the Bride 2, Like Mike and Serendipity.
However, his superior writing skills are best displayed during his collaborations with Christopher Guest (This Is Spinal) on films Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show. Levy and Guest have teamed up again with A Mighty Wind, a bittersweet mockumentary about a memorial concert featuring several 1960s folk musicians - Mitch & Mickey (Levy and Catherine O'Hara), The Folksmen (Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer) and The New Main Street Singers (John Michael Higgins, Jane Lynch and Parker Posey) - who come together for the first time in years.
Tandem talked to Eugene Levy when he was in Toronto recently.

A Mighty Wind seems less of a send-up than Waiting for Guffman or Best in Show. Was the idea of doing a movie about folk singers closer to your heart or Christopher's heart?
"Well, we both have a great deal of affection for the subject matter. We both did a little folk singing back in the sixties. I don't think even the other two I would describe as send-ups. I think that the natures of these films are all pretty similar. We like to go for a subject about people who take themselves a tad too seriously in whatever it is, whether it is folksingers, or dog-show owners, or community theatre players. That seems to be an area that is right for comedy. So, I think that this was just another way to go. It is a different subject matter but the implication is that you find it less satirical.

But also more nostalgic...
"I think that there could be some truth there. I honestly have seen the cut once, and I really was more concerned with what wasn't in the film. So, by the time I finished watching it I was not necessarily aware of what I was watching. But it may have a softer, a more sentimental edge. I know that we venture into an area in this film that we didn't go into in the other movies. Certainly, with the storyline with Catherine and me I know that it's an area that was kind of odd. You know, a bit of a challenge, and a little dangerous. We felt that this was a good way to go for this third film."

Did you go into it with the intention of being a romantic lead?
"No, but we did come up with the idea that we tried to cover different categories of folk music performance, and one was the more commercial end of things with The New Main Street Singers. Although there were a couple of good songs here and there, these groups were getting into goofy, territory for me. And The Folksmen covered the more political side of folk, the mine disasters and the ship disasters, the Spanish Civil War. And with Catherine and I we try to cover the duo situation, the young lass and laddie that fall in love."

Romantic lead?
"Right. When we were coming up with the story, it all had to do with these people all coming together again for a reunion to get to prepare for a concert, that they did not have a lot of time to prepare for. How do you create a situation where the background of the two characters is so horrendous or so unbelievably difficult that the coming back together provides a real conflict? And the story line we came up with was a couple that was married, went through a horrible divorce, and then it went from bad to worse. The wife goes and re-marries, ends up in a very sane, civilian life, married to a guy that sells medical supplies. Her partner tries to do it alone, doesn't. He kind of gets into a severe depressive state, almost suicidal, and spends years in an institution, really medicated and the last 20 years working in a flower shop. And then these two people come back together after that. It was not so much a romantic lead; I did not see this guy as a romantic figure although I do think that there is something romantic about him. But he was a poet and Mickey loved his music, his lyrics, his poetry. And you kind of see these two people for what they were, and what was it that necessarily attracted them to each other back then is far different from where they are now."

When you and Christopher sit down to write a film like this, how do you two decide which roles to play?
"It kind of gets easier. By the third one you know that you have a cast that you're writing for. Chris and Michael and Harry have been doing The Folksmen for many years. So, in this movie Chris knew that that was his group, that he was doing The Folksmen, they have a lot of songs already done. When we were coming up with the Mitch and Mickey characters, I knew kind of early on that it was probably going to be Catherine that was going to be Mickey. When we actually flushed out the story line with these two people and realized that this is not a really hilarious story line, I knew definitely that it had to be Catherine. I don't think anybody else could have really pulled it off."

Mitch and Mickey seem to parallel quite closely with Ian and Sylvia Tyson's life/career. Were they an influence?
"Not for me. I knew that they had been married, that they had split up, but I did not know personally that much detail about their split-up. Catherine actual talked to Ian and Sylvia Tyson before she started shooting, just to get some background stuff. So Catherine had information. When we were writing the story it was not based on their relationship at all. People said it was based on Sonny and Cher, and I can see the comparison: husband and wife who meet, they start singing together, they become big, they sell millions and millions of records and then they split up. He tries to go a separate way and she becomes a success. But it wasn't modelled after that."

I thought the best part of the movie was the live concert. I was wondering how much rehearsal went into that?
"Into the concert, a lot. That was the scariest thing for me and certainly for Catherine, because we're not singers and we are not musicians. She had to learn the auto-harp, I had to learn guitar. And we are, unlike say, Chris, Michael and Harry, who are musicians and are singers. They are very talented, this is second nature to them, and they have been doing it for a number of years. But for us we knew that one day we would be up there doing that scene, doing that concert, which was scheduled in the last two days of shooting, days that were circled on my calendar like D-Day, you know, scared stiff. It's you and your guitar and microphones and a spotlight and 1500 people and film cameras. So Catherine and I did a lot of rehearsing on that. We really worked on trying to create a song, because the one thing we did not know was what we would sound like together. The more we rehearsed the more we kind of found how our voices blend and what works better, who carries the melody, who harmonizes, what kind of harmony you use and so a lot of work went into that. The great thing in this movie was the fact that the singing was all going to be live at the end of the show. What you see is what's on film and that's pretty exciting."
A Mighty Wind is currently playing in local cinemas.

Publication Date: 2003-04-20
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=2630