[TimT]

Spinal Tap is back. Director Rob Reiner says they're still dialed up to 11

Spinal Tap, the fictional band at the center of the film, was known for its excesses both on- and off-screen. The bass player stuffed his pants with a foil-wrapped zucchini, while the lead guitarists boasted of amps that "go to 11." Reiner both directed the film and played a documentary director in the movie.

Now, in the sequel Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, the band returns for a reunion concert. As in the original film, the band is portrayed by Michael McKean, Christopher Guest and Harry Shearer. Everyone's older in the sequel, but make no mistake: None of the characters has changed.


"The beauty of these guys, the members of Spinal Tap, is that in all those years, from their 20s, 30s up now until their 70s, they have grown neither emotionally or musically," Reiner says. "There's no growth. They basically are in a state of arrested development for, like, 50 years. And the only growth that there is, is maybe skin [tags] from getting older."

Reiner says revisiting the project came easily, especially since it meant working with the same collaborators: "We're still able to — as Chris Guest calls it — 'schnadle' with each other back and forth."

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"After 15 years of not working together, we came back and started looking at this and seeing if we could come up with an idea, and we started schnadling right away," he says. "It was like falling right back in with friends that you hadn't talked to in a long time. It's like jazz musicians, you just fall in and do what you do."