Christopher Guest will unveil the documentary-style comedy series Family Tree on HBO sometime this spring (release date TBD). Shot in the style of his improvisational films Best in Show, Waiting for Guffman and A Mighty Wind, the comedy was written and created by Guest and Jim Piddock.
Chris O’Dowd (Bridesmaids) stars as Tom Chadwick, a man who has recently lost his job and his girlfriend and has a rather unsure sense of his own identity. But when he inherits a mysterious box of belongings from a great aunt he never met, Tom starts investigating his lineage and uncovers a whole world of unusual stories and characters, acquiring a growing sense of who he and his real family are.
Guest, Piccock and O’Dowd were on hand at the TCA (Television Critics Association) press tour today to talk a bit about the series.
“If it had been a movie I think I could have gotten it made,” Guest said when asked why he had decided to craft this story as a series, “but it doesn’t lend itself to that format.”
Guest was inspired to create the series when his father passed away and he was given boxes of his belongings to go through. "I knew the content of some of these boxes,” he said. “But many things I didn’t know so there was a discovery.”
He found diaries and writings from hundreds of years ago that provided a different vision of his family. He then brought Piccock (who had worked with Guest as an actor previously) on board to help him craft the story which seeks to balance the comedy with the more emotional elements of the tale.
Though the show is improvised, both Piccock and Guest call it a deceptively complex process. A journalist in England had said to Piccock that writing an improvised script must be the easiest job in the world.
“In fact took longer than anything that I’d worked on in 25 years as a writer,” he corrected.
“It’s quite seamless, but took much longer than conventional screenplay,” Guest added. “We knew basis of story, and then had to go into the intricacies of each other’s life. In this case he (O'Dowd) knows what his early life was so whatever he’s going to improvise it has to be built around those things - which are sacrosanct. It’s a deceptively detailed process.”
In hiring their lead they looked for: "A funny person that could handle things that were more emotional and reality based portions of the tale.”
Enter O’Dowd who says the improvisational style is, “intimidating because everybody else is so good and intimidating because you start every day anew. There is a story but everything is improvisation with new characters and you don’t know why they will respond. It’s very freeing and yet there pressure in the moment because you have to work it out right then and there, and Christopher despite his appearance, is a very funny person. It makes for a lively set.”
“I’ve been given an opportunity by the BBC and HBO to do the kind of work that I do, which is rather unusual,” Guest said.
Four episodes were shot in London, at which point the show traveled to complete production in the U.S..
Given what we saw in the series tease, we look forward to seeing how the Family Tree will untimely play out.
Tom Bennett and Nina Conti co-star in the series which also features appearances by Carrie Aizley, Bob Balaban, Ed Begley, Jr., Maria Blasucci, Matt Griesser, Christopher Guest, Don Lake, Michael McKean, Lisa Palfrey, Jim Piddock, Kevin Pollak, Amy Seimetz, Meera Syal, Ashley Walters and Fred Willard.
Source : ign[dot]com
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