Really interesting guy

Christopher Guest guest taught my documentary film class for a week. He was incredibly chill and personable, although he has a very wry and dry wit in real life just as much as in his films. God have mercy on you if you ask him a dumb question. One girl asked (jokingly I hope) if he was going to make his next film on our campus and he just shot her the most chilling look and asked her why she thought he would even be slightly interested in doing that. Another guy him, "What he thought about film school since he went to NYU", to which Guest replied, "Well I didn't go to film school, so apparently not much". Mostly though he just talked about his work. He creates very detailed back stories for all of his characters as he writes with Eugene Levy, and all of the on camera work is improvised, following a basic plot outline. He's a very hands on director, even when he's in scenes he'll tap the cameraman with his foot to tell him to zoom in. Editing is a crazy yearlong process where he sits with the editor and goes through hours and hours of footage. He's there for every decision. The best part was the end of the week though, when a few of us took him out to lunch. There he talked about the Broadway adaptation he's working on of Guffman called "Red White and Blaine", since this was during the writer's strike he couldn't really do much else. He also is a huge collector of guitars and mandolins, and was working on releasing some crazy mandolin jazz album. Really interesting guy.