PLUME: What direction did you drift in?
BALABAN: Oh, I was completely hooked on movies and plays and theater from the time I was a day old – I was very, very early on in love with movies and I loved plays. I saw Peter Pan when I was 4 years old in the National Company on its way to New York, that Mary Martin was starring in. Maybe I was 7 – I probably am exaggerating a little – and immediately was plunged into the fact that there was an official place to put your fantasies. Up until then I didn’t know what I would do with them all. It was very exciting for me, and I began very, very early on.
PLUME: So this would be the early ’50s?
BALABAN: Yeah. Then I was in plays in school. I remember the first play I was in, in second grade – first grade maybe. I was in The Three Billy Goats Gruff… I played the troll under the bridge. It was very exciting. I remember loving it at the time. I completely remember the song that I used to have to sing. I was just always hooked. But the fact that I was short, didn’t exactly look like your ordinary movie star – it never really occurred to me that I would have a “career” in show business of any kind, although why not? My family came from it, but they were always on the business side. I did have a wonderful cousin who produced a movie called Murder, Inc. that gave Peter Falk his start, named Burt Balaban. He died – he was older than I was by about 15 or 20 years, and he died when he was in his 40s, I think. But other than that, I had no relatives on the other side.
PLUME: The creative side…
BALABAN: Yeah. Not that what they did wasn’t terribly creative, but yes, creative side as we know it – directing, writing, acting type of thing. I was the only one. I was very hooked … I starred in plays in high school, and won little awards in college my freshman year for being in plays, and studied when I was a senior in high school at the Second City with Viola Spolin in a fabulous class that was sort of for teenage improvisers.
PLUME: That was one of the first waves of that class, wasn’t it?
BALABAN: Well, probably it was. Viola Spolin basically was sort of called the mother of improvisational theater. I mean, I find it so odd that 40 years later, here I am wandering around in Christopher Guest movies, sort of recalling all that stuff I used to do when I was 16 or 17 years old and really never thought I would formally make use of, even though I loved it and had a great time doing it. It’s become a real part of my life, now.
PLUME: At that time, what was the most challenging factor of learning improv?
BALABAN: Well, there was nothing challenging. It was just fun. It was great for me, because it was like puppet shows. You know, my puppet shows weren’t scripted, I would just have puppets, and it was very freeing, because you weren’t visible in your puppet shows. You stood above the curtain and the puppets dangled down, and you could just do the voices and say anything you wanted. Which is basically what improvising is, I suppose. I would put it the other way and say that, to me, the most freeing thing about improvisational theater… and I was not necessarily a child or even a person known for easy access to strong feelings or anything, not that I don’t have them, but I’m sort of buttoned down, I guess. Not really, but I give the appearance of that. Improvisational theater was all about, you’ve got your five circumstances – where am I going, what was happening – here you have your list, and then it does the work. You don’t do anything, you simply allow it to happen – which was a great freeing thing for me, and still is.
PLUME: It seems almost to fit into your Midwesterner theory as well.
BALABAN: Yes, it does. It does.
PLUME: Who were your alumni at that time?
BALABAN: In my little teenage workshop?
PLUME: Yeah.
BALABAN: There wasn’t anybody famous. There was a woman named Eugenie Ross-Leming, if you’ve ever heard of her. She eventually wrote some television series and was a performer, I believe. She’s very talented. A young woman named Robin Mencken, who was a relative of H.L. Mencken, went on to marry Country Joe and the Fish and have a child… but that’s not famous, I don’t think. They were just brilliant. Sometimes, I think the very, very best improvisers don’t necessarily – they’re geniuses when their minds and their imaginations are unlocked, they don’t necessarily become enormously successful actors in plays and movies and other traditional material. It’s not that they’re not wonderful, it’s just that the spark of genius that those people have is in an area that isn’t always utilized so much in scripted material.
PLUME: It’s also fascinating when you consider that the majority of good improv artists tend to gravitate towards character parts, as opposed to being “stars”.
BALABAN: Oh, absolutely. The stars of improv theater – Alan Arkin, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Barbara Harris – as leading men and women, they were always left of center, or off-center… left or right of center. They were never traditional leading men and women. They could have been, but they just never, ever were. I suppose they were too interesting to be that. If you’re in the center of the thing, you’re supposed to be a little more like regular people.
PLUME: Do you think improv gravitates people towards each other – that it’s an ensemble action?
BALABAN: Well, it is, and yet it’s not. I mean, it’s completely both … It’s awfully important, if you’re improvising with a group of people, that you’re always aware of taking the focus. Share the focus, share the stage. But that doesn’t mean that you’re a shrinking violet – it just means that yeah, you are part of an ensemble, but when it’s your moment, it’s as fully your moment… as if you were playing Queen Elizabeth in a play about Queen Elizabeth, I suppose. But only in your play about Queen Elizabeth – she’s not any more important than the footmen, and the maids and the butlers and stuff. Gosford Park, I guess you could say. And yet, I think improvisational theater sort of has its share of egomaniacs and stuff, although certainly not in the Christopher Guest movies. I often think of Fred Willard, who plays characters usually in the three Chris Guest movies – and we have just finished another one that will be out in the spring, called A Mighty Wind, in which we delve into the wonderful world of folk singers. Once again, Fred Willard plays one of those frightening people who just will say anything and do anything and rip you apart and have no idea that your carcass is lying bloodied on the floor, and then move onto the next victim.
PLUME: He’s neither left nor right, but circles the center like a vulture.
BALABAN: Oh, he’s scary. I mean, it’s quite amazing. And Fred as a person is so gentle, so sweet, so, “Oh, am I bothering you?” He’s just the nicest person, and this character that he plays in this last movie, which is a cousin of the character in Best In Show – who goes around stepping all over the dogs all the time, and on top of the poor other announcer who’s so serious – this guy is almost worse than that, somehow. And it’s not Fred. There is some demon seed that takes him over when he’s doing these things, and it’s a kind of acting that’s not like acting… that you know, anyway. It’s like being with Corky St. Clair. You can’t see where it’s coming from, it just suddenly somebody came in and took over this other person’s body, and then they leave and he’s going, “Gee, I’m sorry, was I mean to you? I don’t remember anything?” Kind of like an exorcism had happened at the end when they yelled cut. I’m teasing in that it doesn’t really leave your carcass bloodied, but it’s a most exciting kind of experience to be skewered by him. You never know in these movies if a shred of what you’re doing will remain in them, because they’re 100% improvised. There are outlines and very nicely worked out things, but essentially the camera starts rolling and you can – and do – do anything you want. There’s no rehearsal, we don’t talk about it – which is one of my favorite things. I hate talking too much about things when you’re doing them – not that there isn’t a place for it, but not necessarily there. With Fred, you just never know what’s going to happen, and you never know what’s going to end up in these things. But Fred did skewer me especially painfully on this last movie, at one point. I just remember sitting there, trying my hardest… my character was, I suppose – although frankly it was me, I think – just trying to cope with whatever crazy thing Fred was saying. I just couldn’t keep up with him, and eventually just had to sort of quietly stare at him while he just said certain things to me, at the end of which I suppose there were tears in my eyes, and I sat there and he accused me of not having a personality. I mean, it was all your favorite things that you love to hear about yourself. “I’m sure you’re not 5 foot 6.” At one point he just looked at me, he said, “Where do you buy your clothes, the junior shop?” or something like that. It was just like one thing after another.
PLUME: Sort of careless malice.
BALABAN: Oh, it was just amazing. I could almost see a little pain in his eyes, behind this, because it was like, “I’m not doing it, Bob. He’s doing it.” And it was true, actually.
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