March 28, 2004

When Tony Blair and George Bush met for the first time at Camp David six months before September 11, they went for a walk with the dogs, established the fact that they used the same brand of toothpaste and sat down to watch a movie together. The movie was Meet the Parents. Ben Stiller, that film’s star, thinks this is hilarious. “I read an interview with Bush and his wife where they asked them what their favourite movie was and she said, ‘Me and the girls like Zoolander.’ It’s just so weird. Aren’t they busy? Shouldn’t they be doing other things?” He asks.

Ever since he played Cameron Diaz’s hapless suitor in the Farrelly brothers’ comedy There’s Something About Mary, Stiller’s position as Hollywood’s top comic antihero has been unshakeable. He has five films coming out this year. Stiller wasn’t exactly unknown before: he had his television debut at the age of eight. Spielberg cast him in Empire of the Sun when he was 22; he had his own TV show in 1990 and directed the gen-x classic Reality Bites. Four years later he went on to direct Jim Carrey in The Cable Guy. But in There’s Something About Mary he coined a certain lovable discomfort that he has been able to riff on ever since.

He has had dramatic roles (Your Friends and Neighbours, Keeping the Faith and his favourite, as the heroin-addicted screen-writer in Permanent Midnight), but in a country that prides itself on its sympathy for the underdog, he is making a killing out of appearing to be a failure. To judge by his films, one would expect Stiller to be paranoid and pent-up: a small, tightly wound bundle of loserdom.

Of course, that’s not how it is at all. He strides across the lobby of the Los Angeles hotel, laid back and low key. He is quite small (1.73 metres), but that’s about as far as the similarity with his celluloid selves goes. He invites me over to meet a friend of his, with whom he’s writing a screenplay and trying to work out what gags he can script for his next talk show.

Stiller’s latest role is one that’s close to his heart. In fact, he says, it was like “fulfilling a fantasy.” Hamlet? No, Detective David Starsky, as in Starsky and Hutch. Hutch is played by Stiller’s frequent co-star Owen Wilson. They are a brilliantly funny team, and have perfected a smooth guy/little guy routine. Stiller has been rehearsing for the part since he was 10 years old, without once harbouring a secret desire to be Hutch.

 

Stiller’s production company, Red Hour Films (the name is a reference to Star Trek), now has a three-year exclusive deal with Dreamworks, for Stiller to write, produce and direct. Has he reached the stage where he can more or less make what he wants? ‘Me?’ he laughs, apparently shocked. ‘No! I guess there are certain criteria for what is successful, and if you want to do anything that’s outside of that power alley, it’s not that easy.’
 

“In my mind, Starsky was always the cooler one. He was just naturally cool. You know, if you were Jewish, or Italian or Greek or anything swarthy — he sort of represented all that for the kids. I guess I identified with the character. TV,” Stiller says, “was a big part of the seventies for me. I watched a lot of TV. Too much, probably. It’s like a drug.” He liked The Partridge Family and had a crush on the Bionic Woman. Now, when he watches re-runs of those programmes, he finds them comforting. “You turn on those shows and it just feels like it’s so much a part of who I am.”

But his relationship with television was not as one-way as it sounds. Because by the time Starsky and Hutch first aired, Stiller had already been on TV himself. “Oh that!” He says, when reminded of the occasion when he and his elder sister Amy appeared on a talk show. “It was horrible.”

His parents, the comedy team Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara were asked to co-host The Mike Douglas Show. “Every week he’d have different co-hosts. Like John Lennon and Yoko Ono did it one week and Roger Moore — all different celebrities. And so my folks did it a few times. It used to be a big event for us as kids because we’d drive down with them to Philadelphia in a limousine and there was this famous restaurant there where they had lobsters in a tank.”

Ben Stiller was suspected of being a practical joke even before he was born. His mother was pregnant with him when his parents were looking for a new apartment. “Can I feel your stomach?” The estate agent asked, and once he’d confirmed that the pregnancy was real he explained that he thought they might have been putting it on to jump the queue for the flat. A few weeks later, Ben was born.

His parents’ house on Manhattan’s Upper West Side was full of show-business people passing through. His father is Jewish, his mother Irish (and converted), but show business, Stiller has said, was their religion. “My parents weren’t like stage parents, but I think we were always wanting to be a part of it. It always seemed so much fun, much more than school. It was like, ‘Oh, this is great, they get to stay up late, and people are laughing and applauding.”

At the age of 10, Ben was given a Super-8 camera by his father. He lost no time in parodying the films of the period: “When Jaws came out, we did our own little bathtub Jaws and a lot of basic action drama: like a kid would be coming home from school and he’d get mugged by another kid and then a friend of his would come and find the kid who mugged him and beat him up.” He loved disaster movies — he saw The Poseidon Adventure “literally 25 times” — and as a pre-teen director he specialized in spoofs of the Airport movies — in which his father had appeared.

Amid all this excitement, “School was where I didn’t want to be,” Stiller says. It can’t have helped that his school’s gym classes were held in the crypt of the largest cathedral in America. He describes his teenage self as “not that well-adjusted. It wasn’t a great time. I was sort of confused and not that cool. Probably 13 through to 19 was not a great period for me.”

Then he moved to LA, hated it, and came back. In New York, he worked at the Actors’ Studio and waited tables. His debut as an actor came in 1986, in John Guare’s play The House of Blue Leaves. Stiller persuaded two of his well-known co-stars, Swoosie Kurtz and Stockard Channing, to make a film with him — a parody of The Colour of Money called The Hustler of Money. It and he were picked up by Saturday Night Live, and not long afterwards he had his own show.

The Ben Stiller Show, which was cancelled after 12 episodes but won a posthumous Emmy, contained brilliant spoofs of seventies TV programmes, including a cop-show sketch in which Moses parts the Red Sea without a permit.

Stiller claims not to have particularly fancied Marcia in The Brady Bunch when he was glued to his seventies TV set, but he eventually married the actress who played her in the movie. He met Christine Taylor when he was casting a TV pilot, and five months after they started seeing each other he proposed. When they got married, six months after that, he cast her as the love interest in Zoolander, “which worked out great,” he says, “because I was directing, so it would have been a year when we wouldn’t have been able to hang out that much.” Now they’re doing more work together. Also, there’s someone else to think of: their daughter Ella.

Stiller’s production company, Red Hour Films (the name is a reference to Star Trek) now has a three-year exclusive deal with Dreamworks, for Stiller to write, produce and direct. Has he reached the stage where he can more or less make what he wants? “Me?” he laughs, apparently shocked. “No! I guess there are certain criteria for what is successful, and if you want to do anything that’s outside of that power alley, it’s not that easy.” Stiller retains a commitment to satirical humour, and he thinks that, broadly speaking, America is not all that receptive to satire.

He’s wary of seeming ungrateful, and quickly says he has “a lot of opportunities,” but even so, “producing a movie, let alone a good movie, is hard.” For almost a decade now, he’s been trying to make a film of What Makes Sammy Run?, Budd Schulberg’s forties classic about the workings of Hollywood. “It’s sort of a hard one to get made because the studios always have a resistance to movies about the business.”—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.

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