“I get asked, ‘Who would you really like to work with?’ I’m already working with them. Smart, talented, funny people, good musicians, an extended family, good friends.”
― Christopher Guest
“You know when you’re young, you have this unbelievable stupidity and arrogance and ignorance all mixed in?”
― Christopher Guest
“I was never in an improv group. But when I went to school, we would do it all day long with friends, not knowing what it was called.”
― Christopher Guest
“My daughter recommended Chris O’Dowd to me after seeing him in ‘Bridesmaids,’ so I watched that and his sitcom, ‘The IT Crowd.’ When I was over in London, we met up, and I knew immediately he was the right person.”
― Christopher Guest
“In ‘Waiting for Guffman,’ the character I played, the Corky character, he’s very serious about what he does, and it’s not meant to be mean that this is a small town and these people aren’t the most talented people. They’re trying the best they can. So to be mean, that would be kind of horrifying in its superficiality.”
― Christopher Guest
“’Waiting For Guffman’ was different right away from ‘Spinal Tap,’ because we didn’t show the interviewer. That person became invisible immediately. That created a different way of tuning it and ultimately editing it.”
― Christopher Guest
“You know it’s important to have a Jeep in Los Angeles. That front wheel drive is crucial when it starts to snow on Rodeo Drive.”
― Christopher Guest
“Peter Sellers is my great comedy hero.”
― Christopher Guest
“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.”
― Christopher Guest
“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.”
― Christopher Guest
“In real life, people fumble their words. They repeat themselves and stare blankly off into space and don’t listen properly to what other people are saying. I find that kind of speech fascinating but screenwriters never write dialogue like that because it doesn’t look good on the page.”
― Christopher Guest
“I spent a lot of time in London when I was growing up and I’ve always picked up accents without even really meaning to. It used to get me into trouble as a child.”
― Christopher Guest
“I spent more time in America, but I developed a very English sense of humour. I clicked into it deeply with Peter Sellers, who is still probably my favourite comedian.”
― Christopher Guest
“I’m married to the person I fell in love with.”
― Christopher Guest
“I painted sets before I ever performed.”
― Christopher Guest
“I rarely joke unless I’m in front of a camera. It’s not what I am in real life. It’s what I do for a living.”
― Christopher Guest
“People want me to be funny all the time. They think I’m being funny no matter what I say or do and that’s not the case.”
― Christopher Guest
“Comedy is like music. You have to know the key and you have to find players with good chops.”
― Christopher Guest
“The movies have a way of seeping out there over time. We don’t put them in 2,000 theaters. It wouldn’t work that way.”
― Christopher Guest
“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.”
― Christopher Guest
“It’s infrequent that that happens – great performances and magical cinematography and great direction.”
― Christopher Guest
“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.”
― Christopher Guest
“Many times I’ll improvise it, which isn’t done a lot in movies or commercials. But a lot of my commercials are improvised.”
― Christopher Guest
“I’m not really premeditative in any way at all. I come up with an idea, hopefully for a film, and then I’m lucky enough to do the film.”
― Christopher Guest
“You can pick almost any field, and there’s going to be weird people.”
― Christopher Guest
“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.”
― Christopher Guest
“The minute the money is more, you lose your control, so then there’s no point.”
― Christopher Guest
“The early parodies that talk-show people did of rock n’ roll in the ’50s were terrible. They didn’t know it, they didn’t like it – and that’s a lethal combination.”
― Christopher Guest
“In ‘Spinal Tap,’ there’s the fake historical quality of ‘Stonehenge.’ It’s something the musicians look at with a mystical reverence. In folk music, it’s the seriousness with which these people approach their ‘art.’”
― Christopher Guest
“People who take themselves too seriously, who can’t see anything else, are usually funny.”
― Christopher Guest
“All these movies are observational comedies. I see somebody, maybe a dry cleaner, and notice how they are. Maybe I’ll decide to turn a person with those traits into a studio chief.”
― Christopher Guest
“I don’t know if I’d mastered that documentary format, but I wanted to move on from it.”
― Christopher Guest
“Most films, when you finish as an actor, you just go home.”
― Christopher Guest
“The reason I work with the same people, it’s not just an accident.”
― Christopher Guest
“Ninety-nine percent of television shows, I’ve never seen.”
― Christopher Guest
“I watch mostly documentaries and things that aren’t remotely funny.”
― Christopher Guest
“I read kind of serious books about fairly arcane subjects.”
― Christopher Guest
“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.”
― Christopher Guest
“People ask me, ‘What’s your next film?’ And I never know.”
― Christopher Guest
“I’ve been buying guitars since 1964, and you fool yourself into thinking it’s the last one.”
― Christopher Guest
“I’m fascinated by real-time behavior.”
― Christopher Guest
“When you hear someone talking in a restaurant or overhear someone talking on the street, there are very different patterns of conversation than you would hear in a conventional movie.”
― Christopher Guest
“I’ve been fortunate. I get to write films. I get to write music in films. I get to play arenas wearing a wig.”
― Christopher Guest
“I started on the clarinet. I was going to a music school – my mother took me – and the guy said, ‘What do you want to play?’ I said the drums, and my mother said, ‘No, you don’t. You don’t want to play the drums.’ So I said, ‘Maybe the trumpet would be cool.’ And my mother said, ‘I don’t think so.’ And then the clarinet was handed to me.”
― Christopher Guest
“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.”
― Christopher Guest
“When you’ve been a character in a movie – and this has happened when we’ve done concerts as Spinal Tap or as The Folksmen – people see you as characters walking out of a movie. And you appear in public, then, to play, it’s a very schizophrenic thing.”
― Christopher Guest
“I don’t read anything about my movies before or after I do films, or any part of show business. I think that keeps me in a kind of place where I can do the work that I need to do.”
― Christopher Guest
“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.”
― Christopher Guest
“My passion is more specific, in the sense that I’ve always liked doing comedy. I’ve always liked doing music. I like acting. And apparently, you need those things in movies.”
― Christopher Guest
“It’s dangerous talking about comedy; it gets to be very tedious and presumptuous.”
― Christopher Guest
“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.”
― Christopher Guest
“If you’re deluded, you live in a place where there isn’t everyone else’s reality.”
― Christopher Guest
“You can’t improvise without a skeletal structure; you can’t just go in and start talking. This is a very misunderstood craft because no one else makes movies like this.”
― Christopher Guest
“I like to play music, and I like to be funny, so I just do both at the same time.”
― Christopher Guest
“Music means a great deal to me.”
― Christopher Guest
“I love being with my family and just being a regular person.”
― Christopher Guest
“We heard about people who went backstage at dog shows with scissors and cut parts of a poodle’s hair off to sabotage the dog.”
― Christopher Guest
“When I look back on what I’ve done, I think I’m drawn to obsession, perhaps.”
― Christopher Guest
“I would overhear these conversations of people who show purebred dogs. They spoke about them as if they were their children.”
― Christopher Guest
“If you don’t like the people, you’re just doing a sketch. Which, in most cases, is comedy minus some emotional backbone.”
― Christopher Guest
“What interests me most are the emotional lives of the people. If I don’t have that, it’s not worth doing, frankly.”
― Christopher Guest
“Nothing is cut while I’m shooting. I edit between nine months and a year, and usually have around 80 hours of footage I have to get down to an 82-minute movie.”
― Christopher Guest
“I haven’t had to do anything outside of show business my whole life. I’ve never been a waiter. I’ve only worked and gotten paid. It hasn’t been a classic example of someone slogging through the business.”
― Christopher Guest
“I started working in New York City as an actor and did many plays. I did regional theater, smaller theaters, children’s theater.”
― Christopher Guest
“I didn’t go to film school. I had been an actor in movies, I had been in plays, and then I just sort of jumped into it.”
― Christopher Guest
“If you’re showing people where it’s smooth sailing, where is the joke? If you go back to any movie, even a conventional movie, with any comedians, they’re either not terribly intelligent or they’re not doing something well.”
― Christopher Guest
“I love documentaries. My problem is when the filmmaker becomes the star.”
― Christopher Guest
“I’ve never seen a reality show. I don’t watch television.”
― Christopher Guest
“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.”
― Christopher Guest
“I find it really appalling when people talk about comedy.”
― Christopher Guest
“It’s difficult to articulate how I know it’s the right actor, but I do. It’s instinct. Intuition.”
― Christopher Guest
“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.”
― Christopher Guest
“’The Office’ is an amazing show. So is ‘Extras.’”
― Christopher Guest
“I would make a huge distinction between theater improvisation and film improvisation.”
― Christopher Guest
“There isn’t much improvisation in film – there’s virtually none. The people that theoretically could be good at this in a theater situation don’t necessarily do this in a film in a way that will work, because it’s much broader on a stage.”
― Christopher Guest
“The truth of it is that people are not going to want to go to improvisational theater if it’s not funny. You can succeed in doing all the things you’re supposed to do – be truthful to scene – and if it’s not funny, I’m telling you that no one’s gonna care.”
― Christopher Guest
“In the kind of films that I do, there is an extremely limited number of people that can improvise. The reason the ensemble continues in the movies is because those are the people that can do that kind of work. It’s not just an accident those people are in the film.”
― Christopher Guest
“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.”
― Christopher Guest
“To me, what I realized when we were doing ‘Spinal Tap’ – and the four of us wrote that – is, really, the core of that is the relationship with the two guys who grew up together and that strain when the girlfriend comes in. If that wasn’t there, it’s a very different movie. Then it’s just bumbling guys stumbling along.”
― Christopher Guest
“I’m drawn as well to the lower echelons of things because it struck me a long time ago that it didn’t really matter on what level people were working on anything; it was just as important to them as the people working on what’s perceived as a higher level.”
― Christopher Guest
“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.”
― Christopher Guest
“I don’t do any editing while we’re making the movie. I sit down and watch it all with my editor, we make longhand notes on pads, and then we begin our work.”
― Christopher Guest
“The main thing that’s important to me is getting to do whatever project it is the way that I do what I do, and that’s different. To go to an entity – whether it’s a traditional film studio or some newer company, or HBO, Amazon or Netflix – they would have to know that I need to work the way I work.”
― Christopher Guest
“I myself delve into very arcane things.”
― Christopher Guest
“I knew Dave Raymond, who was the original Phillie Phanatic.”
― Christopher Guest
“I’m a fly fisherman. I make flies. They’re imitations of insects at different stages in their development.”
― Christopher Guest
“I guess there’s something that’s appealing to me about people that are aspirational-slash-deluded.”
― Christopher Guest
“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.”
― Christopher Guest
“There’s something about that idea of looking up and hoping, and thinking, ‘I’m good.’ Some things, like show business, are absolutely subjective. People look at a TV show and think, ‘I could do that.’ And maybe they could do that. But they’re not.”
― Christopher Guest
“When my daughter played volleyball in school, they were the Wildcats. Well, there are about a million Wildcats. Why don’t you come up with another name?”
― Christopher Guest
“I don’t know anyone who’s ever taken a bus. It’s a mysterious form of transportation.”
― Christopher Guest
“As an actor, I trust my ear.”
― Christopher Guest
“If you didn’t know who I was, if I was to walk out on the street without people knowing who I am, you’d think I’m an accountant or a lawyer.”
― Christopher Guest
“I don’t read about myself, and I don’t read any magazine that has anything to do with movies or show business.”
― Christopher Guest
“Some instinct has told me I need to live in a world that isn’t consumed with reading about myself or anyone else or someone’s opinion about something. I need to be clear of that. It’s just healthier for me. I feel happier.”
― Christopher Guest
“The most important thing about my life is this integrity, and you can’t lie to yourself.”
― Christopher Guest
“With a documentary, you can cut away, you can do jump cuts, cut to a photograph at any point to bridge two scenes.”
― Christopher Guest
“I don’t make movies that make fun of anything.”
― Christopher Guest
“What I’m doing in the work I do, I prefer not to just have a series of jokes. It’s nice when audiences can connect with the characters as well.”
― Christopher Guest
“There are dozens and dozens of improv classes across the nation, but it really cannot be taught.”
― Christopher Guest
“’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.”
― Christopher Guest
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