B.L. You guys have known each other for more than 20 years, and especially given your tight relationship since Spinal Tap does the improvisation process get any easier or is it still scary?
M.M. Chris keeps hiring new people and that's only scary for the first nano-second. But the answer is, no. The three of us have been improvising together for a long time but as this cast has grown it's just getting better and better, and easier and more fun.
B.L. Chris, for you to be the one who has to go through all of this hilarious material must be mind-boggling. When you made Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show you had over 60 hours of footage to cut down to 90-minute films and I'm sure it was not different on A Mighty Wind. Are you a glutton for punishment?
C.G. You figure out pretty quickly what you need to tell the story. Even in a conventional script, things are written where when you are looking at the movie, you say, "We don't need a certain scene and we can go right from one to another." Doing this, it's ten times that because I had 80 hours to look at. But I see a scene in the cutting room and if it's about something that doesn't get us to where we need to get to, it's gone, even if it's funny. It'll eventually be on the DVD if it's a good scene.

B.L. Harry, what was it like working with these guys again?
H.S. We had performed as the Folksmen fairly recently. In 2001 we opened for Spinal Tap as the Folksmen so we've been working together fairly sporadically/consistently. This was the first time that I have worked with Christopher as a director. I didn't appear in his first two movies and so that was a different relationship that I had ever had with this group before, and yet I was also acting with Chris and Michael as these guys.
B.L. So how was Christopher as your director?
H.S. Christopher establishes such a feeling of trust on the set and you just really feel safe. To be able to go out on a limb and improvise, that's the first thing you need to feel, is safe. It extends all the way through to the cast and crew into the audience; they trust the audience to get the joke too.

B.L. What makes folk music such great material for parody?
C.G. I think any backdrop where people take themselves seriously...
M.M. Earnestness is the key!
C.G... is going to work. Truthfully, we happen to like music and it's fun to play this kind of music, and because they take themselves so seriously it immediately lends itself to this kind of comedy.
H.S. There's a little twist too. All the folk people take themselves seriously but what all three groups focused on in this film have in common is that they take themselves seriously, but they really didn't have the right to! They weren't given permission to; the folk institute didn't authorize that, so that's the double twist here.

B.L. Michael, what are your thoughts on why folk music is great fodder for parody?
M.M. I think these two guys speak for me. I agree that the main thing is how seriously do you take yourself and in this particular case, like Harry alluded to, these are people who climbed aboard a commercial bandwagon looking for their next pop rather than doing speeches off the back of a truck. It's not even a slight difference; it's a vast difference.
C.G. In any given pursuit, or in this case in folk music, there are performers like Loudon Wainright and others that have a great sense of humor and write and perform brilliantly. There's no point in being someone like that because those people are doing a great job. But in any given area, like classical music for example, there are people who take themselves very seriously and that's funny.