Make no mistake, Catherine O’Hara is a wild card. During the course of our interview the 52-year-old comic actress, dressed in black and denim, with just a hint of fresh-faced make-up, will casually snatch the question sheet from my hands, practise an eerie non-surgical facelift, be playfully argumentative, repeatedly roar with self-deprecating laughter, deny all artistic pretensions, and order two pairs of sparkly silver pumps, size five, from a high-street store. “They’re Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz shoes,” she says, ruminating proudly on her purchases as her assistant scuttles out the door. “They just made me laugh. And they are so cheap!”

O’Hara, whose wide smiling mouth and twinkly eyes are instantly recognisable from both mainstream smashes like Home Alone and independent comedies such as Best in Show, today has plenty to laugh about. She has just turned in a tour de force performance as Marilyn Hack, an ageing screen actress who craves awards season recognition in Christopher Guest’s Oscar-bashing comedy For Your Consideration.

Her Marilyn is a tragicomic wonder of neurotic narcissism played without a shred of vanity by O’Hara. Opposed to youth-obsessed Tinseltown, the actress is seen in the first half of the movie as dowdy downbeat Marilyn, completely devoid of make-up, and in punishing, saggy-faced close-ups.

She admits that acting in the raw like this was a tough choice. “When I saw the finished movie I was like, ‘Ohhhhhh! What was I thinking?!’ I don’t want to name names, but there are certain older actresses who would never look less than, you know, ‘done.’ (Can she mean Jessica Lange? Sharon Stone? Faye Dunaway?) But I knew I didn’t want to go that way with Marilyn.”

Background

• For Your Consideration

• For Your Consideration - review from the London Film Festival

• The feast of St Hubbins

Nip 'n' tuck, no thank you

Catherine O'Hara's latest role parodies the Botox'd movie diva

Related Internet Links

• 2007 London Film Festival coverage

• Times Online Film Trailers

Nevertheless, some of the biggest laughs in the movie come precisely from Marilyn’s looks, especially in the second half, when Oscar buzz and media attention transform her into a plastic parody of the older nip’n’tuck woman — all waxen skin, pneumatic breasts, frozen grimaces and startled eyes. The post-surgery look, she says, was achieved without effects, and maintained through tight control of facial muscles.

“Like this!” she says, contorting her face into a painful portrait of wide-eyed shock.

Is that sore? I ask.

“No,” she says, her voice a low whisper through gritted teeth. “It’s very good for you!” Why? “It lifts your face, naturally. My mom, God bless her, used to do it on her own every day. She had seven kids, and when she died, at 81, her eyebrows were an inch and a half higher than where they were when she was 20.”

Oh.

“Am I scaring you with this?”

For Your Consideration, of course, isn’t O’Hara’s first collaboration with Guest, the writer-director. She has, like Eugene Levy and Parker Posey, become a stalwart in his comedy troupe since the 1996 small-town theatre farce Waiting for Guffman. She describes the Guest method, an improvisational technique unveiled on the set of mockumentary classic This is Spinal Tap and refined through the likes of Best in Show and A Mighty Wind. With only a rough story outline, character identities and certain key scenes in place beforehand, hours of on-camera improvisation are whittled down to the final film. In For Your Consideration more than 50 hours of footage were cut back to 86 minutes of actual movie time, says O’Hara.

The method, she says, is exhilarating. “You’re surrounded by really funny, smart, talented people and you’re just trying to be there and give it your best. You’re in character all the time, and trying to be truthful to what you arbitrarily decide is your truth. It’s insane!” O’Hara concedes that For Your Consideration was a risky venture, given that it was the first non-mockumentary movie from the Guest ensemble — there are no interviews to camera here, no fly-on-the-wall film crews, and no candidly snapped moments. Instead, the resulting surprise is a dramatic movie that savages the vacuous and parasitical nature of the film industry by leaping about, beyond the mockumentary confines, from venal producers to idiot publicists to self-regarding critics and inane talk-show hosts, and all with venomous glee.

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