This Friday, the loudest rock band in history returns to the big screen with “Spinal Tap II: The End Continues.” A sequel to the 1984 classic mockumentary “This is Spinal Tap,” “Spinal Tap II” reunites director Rob Reiner with the cast of the first film (Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer), who share writing and producing credits with Reiner on a story about how Spinal Tap reunites after decades apart for one last farewell concert.
Fans have asked for a sequel for years, but it wasn’t something Reiner took seriously.
“We never wanted to do a sequel,” Reiner told IndieWire on an upcoming episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “We felt we had done it, it’s done.” Even after Reiner and the cast regained control of the original film and its underlying material thanks to a lawsuit filed by Shearer, they still weren’t sure if a sequel was a good idea.
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“We got together and said nah, we’ve done it. The bar’s too high. We don’t want to do this.”
Gradually, however, the idea of seeing what the band had been up to in the intervening years became irresistible, especially as Reiner talked with his old cohorts and remembered how much fun they had collaborating. “It’s fun when you’re with people who are like-minded and see the world similarly,” he said, adding that the actors have always loved playing music together — they continued to perform and tour as Spinal Tap for decades after the original film’s release.
When they came together for “Spinal Tap II,” however, it had been 15 years since they played together, just like the band in the movie. That premise was enough to get Reiner started, even though the film lacked the personal engine of a movie like “Misery” (which was about Reiner’s own frustrations at how his industry viewed him) or “Stand by Me” (which tapped into his relationship with his father).
“Because a satire, it’s not an extension of my life,” Reiner said, though upon reflection, he did find one parallel. “Oddly enough, I was always one of four guys at different points in my life. In high school, it was me and Albert Brooks and Larry Bishop and Richard Dreyfuss. So the idea of being one of four always felt comfortable.”
Reiner essentially followed the same methodology as the first film, in which he tried to recreate the circumstances of a documentary as closely as possible; while he and the actors mapped out a structure, all of the dialogue was improvised, and no one was expected to hit marks or adhere to a set plan. “I would tell the cameramen, ‘You can’t make a mistake,’” Reiner said. “‘If you see the other guy in the shot, that’s fine. Don’t feel like you have to get out of the way, just shoot what’s happening. Just follow your instincts.’”
Since making the original film, Reiner made an excellent “real” documentary of his own, the HBO film “Albert Brooks: Defending My Life.” Yet he said that experience didn’t really inform his approach to “Spinal Tap II,” because the whole film is supposed to be made from the perspective of the fictional Marty DiBergi, a director Reiner played in the first film as a riff on Martin Scorsese’s onscreen persona in “The Last Waltz.” DiBergi has returned for “Spinal Tap II,” and so has his behind-the-camera sensibility.
“I have to filter everything through what Marty DiBergi would do,” Reiner said. “It’s not necessarily what I would do. My feeling was that Marty hasn’t grown all that much, just like the band hasn’t grown emotionally or musically. Marty has different tools because now he has digital cameras, but it’s not like he all of a sudden became a genius about filmmaking.”
While the overall style hasn’t changed, the technology did enable Reiner to move faster and capture improvisation on the fly more easily than when he was shooting on celluloid in 1984. “You don’t have to put in a new mag every 10 minutes,” he said. “You’ve got a chip that lasts an hour, and I had two cameras instead of one.” Reiner would typically tell his crew to start rolling even before the actors arrived on set, just so that they could capture their entrances and pick up anything funny that might happen.
The original “Spinal Tap” began Reiner’s career as a feature film director, and no one — including Reiner himself — would have predicted from that modest comedy that he would go on to direct everything from sweeping prestige dramas (“A Few Good Men,” “Ghosts of Mississippi”) and fairy tales (“The Princess Bride”) to horror (“Misery”) and romantic comedy (“When Harry Met Sally…”). In spite of all that experience, Reiner said that when he returned to the world of Spinal Tap, it felt exactly the same as it had in 1984.
“It’s like being with friends that you haven’t seen in a long time,” Reiner said. “You pick up right where you left off. It’s like working with great jazz musicians, you don’t have to tell them what to do. They hear the beat, they hear the drums, and they just fall in. That’s the way it was with us — it’s like no time went by.”
“Spinal Tap II: The End Continues” opens in theaters on September 12 from Bleecker Street. To make sure you don’t miss Rob Reiner’s upcoming episode of Filmmaker Toolkit, subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.
