Catherine O'Hara and Jennifer Coolidge reunite with a host of familiar faces from previous Christopher Guest films in the comedy, For Your Consideration. O'Hara stars as the lead actress in a sappy indie drama called Home for Purim who begins to believe the Internet rumors that she may be up for a Best Actress Oscar for her performance. Coolidge co-stars as the film's harebrained producer who has absolutely no idea how to actually produce or promote a movie.
On Scripted Scenes vs Improv: “The Purim scenes were scripted on this, and the rest was improv,” explained O’Hara. “In Guffman the show was scripted, the show within the show, and in Mighty Wind the songs we’d written ahead of time. There’s always something to give you a breath, because we’re talking about the pressure - we should be so lucky to have that pressure - but the pressure of coming up with the dialogue. You just want to be as good as everyone else, and they’re all too good. You get kind of a break on doing the scripted stuff, the scripted Purim stuff. I was a little more aware of what might be funny, we hoped, but ultimately it was just doing it as seriously as possible.”
The Art of Improvisation: O’Hara admits there are plenty of moments when her mind goes blank and lines become impossible to think up. According to O’Hara, the ability to recover from that momentary lapse comes from being a very good listener. O’Hara adds, “It’ so simple though if you just let yourself be in character, because then you can really do no wrong. If you do have a character in there, and you hope that you do by the time you show up on the set, then that’s really all you have to do. If you give yourself to the character and listen and react, if you’re responsible for moving the scene a certain way you do that, you do your job. But if you step outside of yourself and you think about you being funny and what you’re going to come up with, and we all have those moments, they’re tortuous, but really you’re doing no one any good. You don’t serve anyone.”
Catherine O’Hara Analyzes Her Character: “I thought she had talent. I couldn’t show it, but I thought she had talent. The character of Marilyn thought she had talent. So I thought I had talent, but I knew by the script where I was going, so I knew that had to be in her. I wanted to try to vary that. I would think Marilyn wants to present herself as a workhorse actress and someone who serves the script and the director, and it’s not about her. But to help myself I kept thinking, ‘It’s not about me, it’s not about me, it’s not about me, it’s not about me, no, it’s not about me.’ So that when somebody tapped me on the shoulder later and said, ‘You know what? It is actually about you, people are noticing you.’ It was like, ‘Ohhh!’ It just all comes out. Everything that she’s been burying, it just [comes out] because it had to be in there.
I was happy that Chris [Guest] used little things like looking in the mirror. I had stuff on the mirror, because I wanted to be an actress who wouldn’t look in the mirror. Have you ever worked with people who won’t look in the mirror? They are in front of all mirrors and they just keep their heads down, because they don’t want to see anything about themselves there. It’s not about them.”
The Absurdity of Hollywood Reality: Coolidge says the film’s take on life in Hollywood can’t match the reality. “You want to hear a good one? Okay, I’ll give you a good one. This is one that happened to me the other day. I had a producer that I knew from a show I had done that said that they saw me in this movie and what an incredible job I had done in it, and that I was like their favorite. I’m just saying that they said that because it makes the story funnier if I say all the things they said. ‘You’re just fantastic. Blah, blah, blah.’ Well, then I happened to run into them again the next day and they said, ‘How is that new Christopher Guest film?’ And I said, ‘It’s good, I saw it up in Toronto.’ And then they said, ‘Well, I can’t wait to see it; I bet you’re good in it.’ All I could think of was, ‘You told me that I was good in it, and now you’re denying (you saw it)? What is that?’ That can really happen in this town. I don’t know what that is, I don’t know if it was like they were having a phony moment one day and not the next. They’re full of crap one day. I can’t tell which day they were more full of crap. Was it more the second day? Where they’re like, ‘You’re fantastic,’ never saw the movie.
You know what I think it was? I think a good possibility too was that they were being really phony, had seen the movie, were being really phony and then thought the next day that they’d rather not admit [it]. In other words, she forgot that she had said that the day before and then wanted to go, ‘Well, I haven’t seen it so I don’t know if you’re good or not in it, because boy you were bad.’ It is a town full of phonies; there’s a lot of that weird stuff that goes on.”
Playing the Bimbo: Christopher Guest has said that he writes his characters with each of his normal cast of actors in mind. That said, Coolidge’s parts in Guest’s films tend to be the ditzy blonde types. Coolidge laughed, “I don’t think it’s any accident though that my characters are exceptionally dumb, because sometimes… It was funny, when we were on the plane going up to Toronto to promote this, he was asking people questions. There were four people sitting in this horseshoe and he would ask each one their questions. They were smart questions and then he’d come to me and be like, ‘I don’t want to know.’ And I thought he was joking at first, but I think sometimes he just thinks I’m a dunce.”
