Christopher Guest wings it . . . again,
Mockumentary Mascots started with a 27-page outline
Mockumentary filmmaker Christopher Guest gets inside the oversized heads and furry bodysuits of sports team mascots with his latest improvised comedy mockumentary — and gives a shout-out to Manitoba in the process.
Mascots had its world premiere at TIFF on Saturday, ahead of its Netflix release Oct. 13.
Mascots’ arrival marks 10 years since Guest’s last movie, For Your Consideration, was released. The Oscar-season spoof also bowed at TIFF, as did the 1996 comedy Waiting for Guffman, which Guest co-wrote with Eugene Levy.
Guest recalls when the “small” Toronto movie fest was called the Festival of Festivals. TIFF’s program book now has “7,000 pages,” he says, a rare moment where he cracks a joke during our chat in a Yorkville hotel suite. Like many professionally funny people, Guest is quite low-key in person.
Corky St. Clair, the off-off-off-off-off-Broadway director Guest played in Waiting for Guffman, makes an appearance in Mascots, as a crop of dancing and mugging hopefuls compete for the coveted Golden Furry at the 8th World Mascot Association Championships.
Many of Guest’s reliably entertaining cast members from past projects are back: Parker Posey, Jane Lynch, Jennifer Coolidge and Fred Willard among them.
There are also new faces, including Veep’s Zach Woods and The Campaign’s Sarah Baker as a baseball team’s bickering octopus and turtle mascots.
Chris O’Dowd, who worked with Guest on his HBO series Family Tree, is the hotheaded Irish-American Manitoba hockey team mascot, The Fist.
Typical of Guest’s work, Mascots had no script, only a 27-page outline. Actors were also given Guest’s extensive, meticulously researched backstories created for their characters, what he calls an “emotional skeleton.”
The rest is up to them, with all dialogue improvised. There are no rehearsals.
“I meet with them. This is the characters, this is what happens in the scene,” Guest explained. “This isn’t just people yapping and we’ll see what happens . . . everyone has to adhere to the story.”
Nor are the actors fed questions. They know who they are and they’re meant to talk about themselves while the camera rolls.
“The reason I use the same people is they’re the best at this work,” Guest said.
He said he’s often asked why he doesn’t cast certain actors and he replies, “Well, they don’t do that kind of work. People think wouldn’t you want the biggest movie stars? It’s not about that. It’s about a very specific kind of work.”
Like the small-town theatre actors with big dreams in Waiting for Guffman, or the outsiders who believe they can step up to the big leagues of the dog show world in Best in Show, those who don the mascot gear are earnest about the power of the arena of “mascotary” and their place in it.
“That’s where the earnestness comes in. They see something bigger for themselves,” Guest explained.
The idea for a movie about sports mascots came from Jim Piddock, who co-wrote Family Tree, although Guest had some knowledge of the world thanks to his son with his wife, actress Jamie Lee Curtis. He had been a mascot at his school.
Guest was a pioneer of the fauxdocumentary as an improvised screen comedy with This Is Spinal Tap (1984), teaming with Michael McKean, Harry Shearer and writerdirector Rob Reiner on what is now considered a classic.
Guest’s dim-witted lead guitarist Nigel Tufnel gave the movie an enduring bit with the line about his amplifier going “to 11.”
It’s even in the Oxford English Dictionary, said Guest, a fact he finds “kind of bizarre.”
Did he know what he had as they made the movie 32 years ago?
“We thought, ‘This will be a funny idea. We’ll just do this and have fun’, and we did it in a way that people had not done at that point, which was improvise the film apart from writing the songs,” Guest said.
“But no . . . that would be incredibly arrogant and presumptuous,” he said.
“You shouldn’t be allowed out of your house if you’re thinking that.” Mascots screens Sept. 17 at 9:15 p.m. at the Ryerson Theatre. Go to tiff.net for details.