Christopher Guest

Christopher Guest was born in New York City in 1948. He’s best known for writing and starring in “mockumentaries” like This is Spinal Tap (1984), Waiting for Guffman (1996), and A Mighty Wind (2004). His father, Peter Haden-Guest, was a British diplomat to the United Nations and a member of the House of Lords, and young Christopher divided his childhood between London and New York. He soon discovered he had a knack for mimicry, and would practice various accents in his family’s tiled New York bathroom because the acoustics were good. He still starts work on a new character by pinning down his voice first.

He gets many of the ideas for his movies by eavesdropping on people around him. Once, he overheard a drawn-out and somewhat absurd conversation between the bass player of a well-known rock band and the band’s manager. The conversation inspired Guest’s most famous film, This is Spinal Tap.

Once Guest has a project underway, he gives each actor a biographical sketch of his or her character and a rough outline of what should happen in any given scene, but leaves the actors to improvise their dialogue. “In real life, people fumble their words,” he says. “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.”

-Writer's Almanac Feb 5th 2015