Director Rob Reiner gets real about the famously fake Spinal Tap in his new book

A scene from Spinal Tap II: The End Continues. The classic 1984 movie recently got this sequel, plus a companion album and a new book.Kyle Kaplan/Bleecker Street via AP

As comebacks go, the fictitious heavy-metal trio Spinal Tap has dialled up to 11 again. More than four decades after Rob Reiner’s 1984 mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap, not only is there a new sequel (Spinal Tap II: The End Continues) but a companion album and new book (A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever) as well. Rob Reiner spoke to The Globe and Mail from Los Angeles.

First, a non-Spinal Tap question. If the Archie Bunker character from the 1970s sitcom All in the Family, which you starred in, were alive today, would he support the MAGA movement?

I don’t know. He certainly was a conservative. And definitely a racist. There are a lot of elected Republicans who are kowtowing to MAGA because they have to. It’s where the power base is. But I would say there are a lot of mainstream Republicans who reject MAGA because it’s essentially an authoritarian regime. This is a weird time in our country, a very weird time.

Now let’s talk Spinal Tap. The film This Is Spinal Tap was not well received initially. But today there’s appetite for a film sequel, a book, even a new record album. Is it all validation that you got it right originally?

Well, yeah. People didn’t know what I was doing. But over the years, it caught on. The rock world started to accept it. People began to understand it. Listen, the Library of Congress put it in the National Film Registry. The catch phrase, something going to 11, became part of the Oxford English Dictionary. It literally made it into the lexicon. So, it’s more than validation. Its seals of approvals are all over the place.

You write in the book about getting back the rights to This Is Spinal Tap. Was that the starting point to a sequel?

Harry Shearer [who plays bassist Derek Smalls] sued. We never made any money on the first film. We got the rights back and got together and thought, “Well, now what do we do with it?” Originally, we didn’t want to make a sequel. It’s a high bar. But then something very natural came out of it. The guys themselves hadn’t played together in 15 years. After the first film, they played everywhere.

Spinal Tap played concerts in St. John’s, Barrie, Ont., and Vancouver on Canada Day in 1992.

They played Royal Albert Hall and Wembley Stadium and Glastonbury and Carnegie Hall. So, we felt a reunion tour after 15 years apart was a natural jumping-off point. What’s happened to the band? Is there bad blood? That became the basis for the second film.

The story of a rock band reunion involving senior citizens wouldn’t have been believable in 1984, when the first film came out.

You’re absolutely right. In the first film, I asked Derek Smalls what he saw for the future. He said, “I don’t see us at 45 farting around stage.” Little did he know, or little did anyone know, that we’d still be seeing the Rolling Stones on tour today. Paul McCartney is still out there performing. So, it makes sense now to have a band in their late 70s, one of them in their 80s, still doing it.

Harry Shearer, Michael McKean, Christopher Guest and Reiner attend the Los Angeles Premiere of Spinal Tap II.Aude Guerrucci/Reuters

Can you talk about the research into heavy-metal bands you guys did for the first film? Going to a Judas Priest concert in 1980? Harry embedding himself with Saxon?

There was a crossover between the rock world and the improv comedy world in the 1960s and ’70s. Anything that we saw we used. The backstage rider scene came out of an article in Rolling Stone. The endless party was about Van Halen. Spinal Tap losing its way to the stage was something that happened to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. We just took from what we knew and what we had experienced.

In satirizing both heavy metal and rock documentaries, you were just absurd enough and just accurate enough to make it work.

Everything was close to the bone. We wanted to make as real a documentary as we could, and at the same time find the fun in it. I hired our director of photography, Peter Smokler, because he had shot actual rock docs. He was at Altamont in 1969. He knew the world. When we started shooting the first film, he said, “I don’t understand. What’s funny about this? This is exactly what they do.” I said, “Yeah, but it’s just a little bit bent.”

As the title of the book says, which is from the film, a fine line between stupid and clever, right?

That’s exactly right. We wanted to be truthful to what bands actually did. But we twisted it just a little bit to get the laughs.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.