Ben Stiller

Interview, April, 1996 by Manohla Dargis

Ben Stiller isn't funny - honest. Ben Stiller is very funny, and smart, and cute, too, in a neurotic, New York kind of way. The only son of famed comedy duo Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, the actor/director/writer grew up on Manhattan's Upper West Side with his sister, Amy, and rarely ventured far beyond his family's home unless it was to go to school - or to Vegas, or to Hollywood, or The Merv Griffin Show, where he'd watch his parents work their well-tuned shtick. Now thirty, the younger Stiller has been cultivating his own seriously funny chops since childhood, along with an estimable talent for turning bad luck into good.

To the floodlights born, Stiller briefly landed on Broadway and Saturday Night Live and knocked around in movies like Fresh Horses (1988) before embarking on his very own adventure in television. Created for MTV in 1990, the sharply observed, pop-conscious Ben Stiller Show - featuring its star's lacerating impersonations of Bono, Tom Cruise, and Eddie Munster, among others - subsequently moved to Fox TV and copped an Emmy for writing. Stiller then bounced into the big time as a director with Reality Bites (1994), a fast-and-funny Gen X anatomy lesson that got him into the Sundance Film Festival.

So far in 1996, he's enjoyed scene-stealing roles as a fiendish nursing-home operator in the Adam Sandler vehicle Happy Gilmore, and as a terminally hip SoHo artist in Eric Schaeffer's If Lucy Fell. For his big turn, he plays a nervy entomologist on the trail of his birth parents in David O. Russell's nimble comedy, Flirting With Disaster, which opens wide this month.

Stiller arrived for our interview in Los Angeles after being up for eighteen hours directing Jim Carrey in the upcoming Cable Guy. It is only his second feature as a director, but the strain isn't showing. Two years ago, nearly every article about Reality Bites mentioned that its young auteur was dressed in worn flannel tops and torn blue jeans. For the record, Ben Stiller currently favors a black leather jacket, a dark shirt, dark pants, dark shoes, and a barely there goatee. He smiles a lot, but only when he wants to.

MANOHLA DARGIS: It's been a while since Reality Bites came out -

BEN STILLER: I guess it's been two years.

MD: Almost to the day, actually.

BS: Wow, that's bizarre. Jesus Christ, what the hell have I been doing with myself?.

MD: I didn't want to be rude.

BS: I guess I hit the skids for a while. After Reality Bites my name was dirt in this town. Nobody wanted to arrest me.

MD: I don't think that's true, but were you disappointed by the way Reality Bites was received?

BS: I don't know. I started with zero assumptions: I hate myself. I suck. I should be run out of town. I can't believe I got this far.

MD: Shhh. You're not Catholic - self-flagellation is not an option.

BS: No, I'm Jewish, but my mom's Catholic, so the guilt area is covered. I have the highest expectations, along with the lowest. I tried to put as much of myself as possible into Reality Bites, but in terms of my humor, I'm still trying to figure out what my sensibility is. It's a process, really. I don't feel like I have a very clear idea of what I'm supposed to be, or even of how people perceive me, except that I got put into this Generation X file. Last year, I had two projects that fell apart during preproduction. The first one was this movie that Judd Apatow and I had written about two guys following the Rolling Stones. It was going to be half concert film, half pseudo-documentary. It was Mick Jagger's idea.

MD: He's old enough to be your father.

BS: Yeah, strange. I saved his voice on my computer. So now when I screw up, there's Mick going, "All right, Ben," or, "I think it's very funny."

MD: Do you do this to amuse or torment yourself?

BS: To amuse myself. It was a good experience. He's a nice guy.

MD: So how come it fell apart?

BS: A last-minute casting thing. The other one was Simple Plan, based on a novel by Scott Smith. It's a great book - really stark, not a comedy - about a guy who finds four million dollars in a plane crash and decides to keep it. I had a disagreement with the studio I was working with about the lead part; I got a little Hollywood education on that one. It was frustrating. Then I was in relationship hell and feeling depressed. I was at one of those points in my life where everything imploded and I had to do a little soul-searching.

MD: I'm sorry - I have to stop laughing. It's the way you list disaster after disaster.

BS: No, no, it's funny. I was able to see how all these things happen for a reason.

MD: And you say, "Yes, I have learned from this."

BS: In fact, I did. It was good. I was staying on [writer/director/actor] Eric Schaeffer's couch in New York, and he said, "I've got this movie [If Lucy Fell]. Can you do five days on it?" And I was, like, "Yeah, anything. Twenty-four hours times five is 120 hours. Oh, great, I'll fill 120 hours of my life with something." So I did that and it was fun, and then I did Flirting With Disaster.

MD: Do you ever see the movies you're in?