Interesting interview.....Enjoy !
Ben Stiller's midlife crisis TOM SHONE July 23, 2010 - 11:58PM
The first thing Ben Stiller does is walk to the window of the Chateau Marmont and point out across the rooftops: "See that house behind those palm trees?" he says. I peer and nod. "I used to live there. Back in '96, '97, it must have been."
"You've been in LA how long?" "Twenty years," he says returning to sit on the sofa, his arms across his knees. "A long time."
Time has been on Stiller's mind a lot recently. It seems only yesterday that he was tweaking the pomposity of Bono and Tom Cruise on The Ben Stiller Show or voicing Gen X disaffection in the film Reality Bites. These days he calls Cruise to ask him to play a cameo in a movie and, every time he looks around, the actors coming up behind him get younger and younger. "It's the Disney Channel, starting them so young," says Stiller, now 44. "It's amazing to me, life is just flying by. All the challenging things that come with having young kids – their energy, keeping up with them, being able to engage, being able to balance your life – you realise it all goes by so quickly. I see how quickly my daughter got to eight; having a second kid, I realised, wow, even four comes by really quick."
Advertisement: Story continues belowStiller hasn't bought a Porsche or run a marathon or any of the other activities with which men fend off their midlife crises. He did what movie stars do: he made a movie. Directed by Noah Baumbach, the writer/director behind The Squid and the Whale, Greenberg stars Stiller as a greying malcontent in his 40s called Roger Greenberg, recently released from a New York psychiatric ward, who has gone to stay in his brother's house in LA. He spends most of his time composing letters of complaint to heedless corporations ("Dear Starbucks . . . "), making panicky doggy paddles around the pool or looking up old friends, all of whom seem to have moved on.
"I'd been looking for a role like this for a long time," Stiller says. "Early on, Noah and I were talking about how everybody would say, 'Oh, I know a guy like this. The guy who always has an opinion or something to complain about.' But it also represented a part of ourselves, too. He's a guy who literally can't believe that he's in his 40s and he's become that guy."
On screen, Stiller is an uptight dervish, scuttling from one humiliation to the next, shoulders hunched, brow scrunched, a man betrayed by his own body. In person, he resembles Ben Stiller's calmer, better-looking older brother. Dressed in khaki trousers, blue T-shirt, trainers, his hair longish, with wolfish grey streaks, he has the slightly matt affectlessness of the off-duty comedian, speaking in mild sentences from which extreme judgments have been carefully excised.
Collaborators all say the same thing: Stiller is patient, meticulous, detail-oriented.
"We spent a lot of time together going through the script line by line," Baumbach says. "Talking about the character, more philosophical questions about ageing, about our own lives."
Stiller's performance is mesmerising – audacious and slightly spooky, as it always is when comedians drop the mask. "I didn't see how screwed up the guy was until I saw the movie," he says. "Like, wow, he really has some issues. I just assumed from the beginning – I had to believe that he was, on some level, not just this asshole. I felt an empathy for the guy."
So what was the connection? He pauses. "There was a loneliness about him," he says finally. "All these things that he thought were ahead of him in his life were not ahead of him. He's been on his own for a long time, treading water, with all these regrets . . . you know . . . I've been fortunate enough to have a successful career and I have an incredible family and people I love and friends. All these wonderful things that help offset the pain of the failures. But what if I didn't have that? What if I didn't have something that could take my mind off the time I screwed up that audition for My Cousin Vinny, or my fourth callback for White Palace with Susan Sarandon where I just froze up?"
He cocks his head at what he has just said. "I don't think I've ever mentioned that to anyone," he says and laughs. "But you move forward. Greenberg is the guy who doesn't have that."
It's almost as if this beetling misanthrope represents the flipside to all the success Stiller has enjoyed. And his success has been dizzying. Stiller has appeared in nine films that have earned more than $US100 million apiece – more than $US2.8 billion in total.
In 2000, he married fellow actor Christine Taylor, whom he met while filming the pilot for a Knight Rider spoof, and who has subsequently played opposite him in Zoolander, Dodgeball and Tropic Thunder. It was Taylor who brought to his attention the little cheek-sucking moue he performs when he looks at himself in the mirror – Derek Zoolander's "blue steel" look.
"I still do it and I don't realise I'm doing it – she'll point it out to me," he says. "My wife catches me doing it, too," I tell him. "You've ruined it for everyone."
He laughs. "It's just trying to look your best," he protests. "Whatever you think makes you look better." And in that skewed self-perception, that gap between what Stiller sees in the mirror and what his wife sees when she watches him do it, lies the essence of his comedy. He has caught some flak for the broadness of some of his films but his performances are invariably finer than they look, aligning him more closely with the subtle excruciations of British comedy.
"He doesn't play comedy characters," says Ricky Gervais, who starred opposite Stiller in Night at the Museum and cast him in an episode of Extras. "He doesn't burst into the room and trip over or say something ridiculous. It's much more naturalistic. He plays characters who have a blind spot: they think they're acting normally but in fact they're acting like a di*k; who think they're cool and they're not, like Zoolander. There's nothing funnier than someone trying to be serious. You see him getting into the zone beforehand and he's just concentrating on every single take, every nuance, every word. He's a perfectionist, a slave driver on himself. I've never seen anyone work so hard."
Stiller dislikes analysing his comedy – "I talk to my shrink about many things but never that," he says – but admits you don't have to dig far to unearth the roots of all that awkwardness in his adolescence. The son of showbusiness parents Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, he attended the progressive Calhoun School in New York where pupils called teachers by their first names and devised their own curriculum. Even so, "I had moments of real awkwardness and feeling totally outside the loop in terms of being accepted. I wasn't a great student and I definitely wasn't a sports jock. I was into theatre but I wasn't a theatre nerd – I was somewhere in the middle, having crushes on girls and not feeling worthy, trying to figure out who I was. I was kind of a chameleon in high school, sort of a fly on the wall, a little bit."
The fly on the wall picked up a Super 8 camera and started making spoof films: Jaws in the bathtub, Airport 1975 in 10 minutes, that kind of thing: "Pretty rudimentary," he says, although it was his spoof of Martin Scorsese's The Color of Money that caught producer Lorne Michaels's eye and led to gigs on Saturday Night Live, and from there to Stiller's own sketch show on Fox. It was cancelled after six months but has had a healthy afterlife thanks to YouTube – many of the show's sketches, such as his counting class with Bruce Springsteen and Die Hard in a supermarket, have become online cult classics.
His break into movies came with the 1994 romantic comedy Reality Bites, which he directed and starred in, casting himself as the TV station executive who loses Winona Ryder when he corporatises her portrait-of-a-generation documentary. But it wasn't until the Farrelly brothers' There's Something about Mary four years later that his career took off. The film changed the direction of US comedy, opening the floodgates on all the hormonal spelunking and anatomical slapstick that was to follow.
"It wasn't ever a direction I was going to go," he says. "I always thought my work as a director would drive everything and all of a sudden I get these offers. It changed a lot. Everything you do is measured in a different way. Until you're in a big money-maker, nobody's keeping track. Then it's, 'Oh, what's the next movie?' And you're getting paid more money and there's this expectation. And my next movie was Mystery Men." He laughs.
The new Baumbach movie offered Stiller a change of pace, a chance to duck expectations and a rare opportunity to be simply an actor for hire, rather than running the show. Ever since he set up Red Hour Films in 2001, Stiller has been either writing or directing or producing his movies himself. He wrote and directed Zoolander, wrote and directed Tropic Thunder and produced Starsky and Hutch, Dodgeball and Blades of Glory.
"Its great being in a film with Ben," Owen Wilson, a regular co-star, has said. "He worries about everything so you don't have to."Stiller has two movies lined up, a sequel to Zoolander and another Fockers movie with Robert De Niro, but insists he is learning to chill out more.
He laughs when I bring up the Wilson quote. "Owen is a unique individual who has the ability to allow himself to be in the moment and not worry about the little stuff," he says. "He does care, he just has a different way of approaching it."But what does that say about Stiller? He squirms. "I think I did try to control things," he says, but "ultimately for me – maybe it's getting old – family life takes the edge off you. You don't have the time to stay in the editing room all hours. You have to prioritise, decide what's really important. I'm getting to the point where I want to enjoy what's going on right now. I don't want to take it for granted that, you know, hey, I'm working with Robert De Niro."
