NYT Magazine:
Christopher Guest’s latest film, “For Your Consideration,” a scathing sendup of award-season hype that opens on Friday, employs his usual repertory of actors — McKean, Shearer, Eugene Levy (who has co-written most of Guest’s films), Parker Posey, Fred Willard and Catherine O’Hara, among them. Guest’s movies take months to write, as he and Levy painstakingly develop characters and plot. In “Consideration,” the unlikely Oscar candidate is the independent film “Home for Purim,” a hokey melodrama about a Southern-Jewish family in the 1940s and a dying mother’s reconciliation with her lesbian daughter. Guest and Levy conceived the film-within-the-film to be written by two self-important hacks (played by McKean and Bob Balaban), community-college professors whose pretensions and limitations were explored so completely that Guest and Levy even wrote the titles for 27 of the fictional duo’s plays. As in all Guest films, the parts were created with each actor in mind. When the outlines were finished, the actors offered input into their characters’ costumes, cars, even the set designs for their homes. Then they improvised their dialogue.
“By that point, Gene and I have written hundreds of cards delineating what happens in every scene,” Guest told me. “We have no rehearsal, just turn on the camera and people start talking.” (In the new film, the “Home for Purim” scenes are scripted).
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