NewEnglandFilm.com

Late last year, when Michael West and Brett Leigh set out to write, direct, and produce the mockumentary Festival, they made a decision: “We said, ‘When we write this, nobody is safe,’” West recalled recently. Sure, they would be respectful, but this was going to be farce, and the setting was going to be fertile ground: a film festival.

But when I talked with West and Leigh, West described the characters in almost loving terms: people who were struggling against all odds to mount their festival. “These people made it happen. They really did everything they could do. They didn’t give up,” West said.

The movie might make them out to be ridiculous, but in a way that only made the characters more sympathetic, like in the films of Christopher Guest, writer and director of famed mockumentaries Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show. “He could make a cast that was very quirky, but lovable. He makes them very unbelievable to the point that you can’t do anything but love them,” West said.

Writing the script together in December of last year, the team tried to capture some of the spirit of Christopher Guest without copying him. “We never stopped writing and asked, ‘Is this what Christopher Guest would do?’” said West. They developed absurd characters, but tried to make them seem like recognizable people. West saw the film as being “really heavily in the documentary style.”

Likewise, Leigh felt that they “did a good job of satirizing real life. The best way to do comedy is to take real situations and turn it around so people laugh at it.” He said he draws inspiration from the way people actually speak when he writes dialogue: “You have to listen to people talk, and you have to just put it on the page.”

Melissa McMeekin, who plays awkward office assistant Crissy, echoed this idea: “I think the humor is so great, because it’s so real, not telling you when to laugh.” She began to feel sympathy for her character. “You like her, you feel for her, because she doesn’t realize she’s as socially inept as she is,” she said.

Now, months later, people who’ve seen the footage feel the same way watching the film as West and Leigh do upon seeing Guest’s work. “One of the people actually said to us, ‘What’s awesome about this whole thing, what’s really clever, is that in every interview, each person has his or her moment of truth,’” said West.

Maybe this is because in writing and directing, Leigh and West relied on the actors to develop their characters and flesh them out; they reworked the script after casting it to reflect what their actors had brought in to the auditions. “When an actor comes in with something, you don’t want to ignore that. When you direct something, it’s not a one way thing,” explained Leigh. “The most important part of directing is the casting process.” Even on a personal level, Leigh likes to figure out who the actors are. “If you learn their personas with them in the early, beginning stages, you’ll be able to communicate with them on set,” said Leigh.

This meant the script was adapted to fit the characters, not the other way around. “We kind of formed the script around them, rather than make them be the character,” said West. They felt very lucky in the casting process, though the concept for the film made it easier. “When we said the name ‘Christopher Guest,’ we had actors showing up who knew who Christopher Guest was and who could produce it,” West said.

Because of they were so pleased with who they were casting, the directors allowed the actors to stretch and change what had been on the page. McMeekin’s character, Crissy, was supposed to have been shyer, but West and Leigh allowed the actress to make the awkward girl more outgoing. Likewise Tara Brooke Watkins was cast as Debra Downsinger, “an Amish woman with a Minnesota accent,” as Leigh described her, and the actress played the role more straight faced than what they had imagined it to be, which turned out to be perfect.

The latitude they gave the actors gave them a chance to really feel the characters out. “I really noticed that the more I learned about Crissy and explored her character and got her background, the easier the improv came,” McMeekin explained. To this end, she filled in background for the character, such as why she had an eighties look: “I decided it was because she had read in Cosmo that the eighties were coming back.” McMeekin really embraced the role. “When we were on set, she was talking to us as if she were her. She didn’t leave character,” West recalled.

In the end, West was particularly impressed with how McMeekin and Andrew Gerst played off each other. “They were able to improv with the subtext that they were boyfriend and girlfriend,” he remembered. West and Leigh estimated that the final product will be have been about 30% improvised.

Leigh and West hit the mark for creating the independent production they wanted. Making it a small-scale mockumentary, was, of course, partly just practical: “Budget-wise and time-wise, it just seemed better if it was all interviews,” explained West. But both Leigh and West emphasize how much better their experience was because the film was so small. West mentioned a particularly productive couple of days, saying, “It was like this tiny little family coming together for two days. We shot 40 pages.” Leigh said that having a limited budget actually “lets you be way more creative.” They both agreed that having more money would have been a mistake. The only reason they would have preferred name actors would be to draw more people to see the film.

McMeekin also saw advantages to being an independent film, where digital filming means that there is less pressure on an actor on any given take, unlike, for example, The Fighter, the David O. Russell film she recently worked on that features Christian Bale and other name stars. And it can even be freeing: “In the indie film world, it’s a lot more open, where you can communicate your ideas,” she said.