Ben Stiller may have had a stinker in Heartbreak Kid, but his newest comedy Tropic Thunder, hits it out of the ball park. In this interview Ben talks about working with Robert Downey Jr., Tom Cruise and the extras fans can expect to see on the DVD, including a surprise cameo.
I would love to have you keep directing. Everything you're doing is just great.
Stiller: Oh, thanks. I love directing and that's my first love, definitely. It is. I really love directing. That's what I've always wanted to do and I feel that hopefully in the length of my career, when I'm not acting anymore, that I'll keep directing.
This is quite an action movie. Can you talk about working with John Toll as your cinematographer?
Stiller: Sure, it's incredible. We sent the script to Toll just because we felt that we had to. We thought, 'Okay, we know that he's going to turn this down, but we have to send him the script to say that we did it.' I got this call back saying, 'Toll wants to meet you.' I had never met him before, but had just been a fan. I really wanted the movie to have the look of a real war film. That was really important to me. We sat down and he's a really serious guy, a very measured guy, but he also has this really dry sense of humor. I sort of laid out what I wanted to do and we talked and we both sort of took a chance on each other, I think, because we didn't know how it would work out. It was amazing to be able to see his process and guys like that are so great with outdoor work. He's amazing too with the lighting inside, but it's all about where and when we shoot. So to get out there with him and his chart of where the sun rises and sets and the compass, he'd be like, 'Actually, if you built the compound there then you'd have a great shot in the late afternoon and we could shoot this way in the morning.' Just that whole process – they're masters of natural light. Those guys just understand when to shoot, when not to shoot and which way to shoot. It's an amazing art form, I think. Then to be able to do all the action with him was great and then to have him able to work on a comedy, he'd worked with Cameron a lot, but this was a different kind of comedy so to get him to shoot multiple cameras – doing that in one direction, we shot three cameras most of the time because there were so many actors, but to shoot a scene where you're shooting two actors across from each other most of the time cinematographers don't want to do that because you can only light in one way, the way that they feel good about, but a couple of times I sort of convinced him, saying, 'Come on, I know you can shoot two ways –' because people were improvising so much and you want to get both sides of it. Of course he's so brilliant and great that he would go, 'Alright, we'll do it.' Then of course it looks incredible because he's just incredible. At the end of the day, getting the stuff at dusk was the best looking stuff and he'd always say, 'Just keep shooting.' Then he'd look at his light meter as the sun is going down. 'I don't know if it's going to come out or not. Just keep shooting.' Then of course you get into the dailies and you're like, 'This is the most amazing thing.' So it was great to work with him and we spent a lot of time together. Then in the final color timing, seeing his process and him showing me, bringing it up at one point, how it affects contrast. All of it, it's just so amazing and was so much fun.
In the notes you said that satire was not your intent. Can you talk about that?
Stiller: Oh, did I say that? What did I say? Shit. No. I feel like the tone of the movie is its own thing and I think there are elements of satire, but I don't think that it should be categorized just as that. There are elements of parody in it, but obviously I don't think it's just that. I feel like it's just hopefully it's own thing with a real story, but also a lot of familiar stuff that we're playing off of since it's a genre that people will know. I wanted hopefully for it to work as both, something that you could go, 'Oh, that's funny because I've seen that –' but it's also funny if you hadn't seen any of those movies too.
Was there any stuff that didn't make the movie that'll be on the DVD?
Stiller: In the movie there's the movie 'Simple Jack'. There's a 'Simple Jack' trailer that we shot that features Mickey Rooney that's awesome. He plays the angry farm owner that's mad because Jack accidentally kills one of his rabbits. It's a very sort of 'Of Mice and Men' inspired vibe. So we have that trailer. The trailers were really a lot of work and so it's not like we had a lot of extras.
What happened to the mockumentary that you were shooting while shooting this?
Stiller: Well, what happened to it is that it's finished now. Have you seen 'The Reign of Madness' website? So we're releasing little bits and pieces of it everyday or every other day up until release, they'll be more and more short bits of it. Then we're going to release it on Apple, on iTunes I think a week and a half after the movie comes out and then it'll also be on the DVD.
What's the running time on that?
Stiller: It's a half hour.
Does it have footage of Robert Downey Jr. Doing the medication from '60’s or '70’s?
Stiller: Well, here's the deal, there's so much stuff that we shot for that. What I wanted to do was put out little pieces on the internet and then have the full thing actually have some different stuff than what you're seeing on the internet. So hopefully it'll be new stuff in the half hour and then because there was other stuff that didn't fit into it, on the DVD we're going to have outtakes and probably about fifteen or twenty minutes of stuff that's not in it. That'll be on the DVD and a lot of that is Robert's. He goes back to live with the family of the character he's portraying and freaks out and sort of has this post 'Platoon' syndrome.
How would you have ever known that Robert could pull this role off, aside from him being a great actor? Did you hear him rap before this or something? [I swear to God, it wasn’t me who asked that question. –Ed.]
Stiller: No. I never heard him do the character. I just knew that he's a great actor. He's brilliant and it was really important to me to hire, to me for this part, somebody who actually was one of the greatest actors of their generation. He is that, but he also has a sense of humor and at that time he was going through the biggest genius actor on the planet. Like, he really was. It was like, 'Okay –' because of everything that was going on in his life. He had his shit together and it was happening and it was like, 'This is it. This is the moment in time to get Robert Downey.' He read the script and said, 'Yeah.' I remember that he read the script and he called me and told me that he loved it. He said, 'This is just really funny, the story, the whole thing.' I said, 'Great. Well, we'll start shooting –' and he said, 'No, no, no. I have to think about it.' He knew that it was a little bit risky and then he said yes and we did a read through right at the beginning before we went off to the location. To see him do that, that was the first time that I'd seen him do the character and he started to play around with it and it sort of revved up and was amazing. Then like he just got into this groove and it was amazing.
I take it that Tom Cruise never took offense to the time you did a parody of him on 'The Ben Stiller Show' from 'The Color of Money'?
Stiller: No.
Can you talk about that relationship?
Stiller: He's a really great guy, a very positive guy. To his credit, I did that which I never felt was mean spirited and felt okay about showing it to him and he'd seen it somewhere. Then we did 'The Ben Stiller Show' and had a Cruise thing on there too, and a friend of mine was in 'The Firm' at the time and so I showed it to him down there and he loved it. He was great. I probably wouldn't have loved it if I saw someone doing me. So I really give him credit for that and he was always open to it. He's just like that. Then we did this thing on the MTC awards like eight years ago and that was really fun. We had a good time doing that, where I was doing a stuntman and since then we've stayed in touch and have talked about stuff over the years and then I showed him the script and he really was intrigued by the idea of this movie. I give him credit for this character. He really came up with this idea and then sort of spurred me and Justin [Theroux] to work on this guy, on this character and it helped me in the story because I needed to explain what was happening back in the world while these guys were out in the jungle. So it ended up being one of these weird and organic things that just developed.
Steve Coogan was talking and mentioned that you put a lot of self-deprecating moments in the film for yourself. Can you talk about that?
Stiller: I think the whole movie is all of us doing that, for sure. That's the whole point of the film. It's all of it. The whole vibe of the movie is us saying, 'Look at how ridiculous this world is.' It's the nature of being an actor and being in big movies and the infrastructure around it and the way that people get protected and the way that people sort of build fences around themselves and sort of out of necessity, but it's a very tough world to navigate, I think, to maintain your sort of equilibrium in it. So we wanted to sort of just have fun about it because I think that actors really have a great sense of humor about themselves and just say, 'Look, this is ridiculous. It's not important.' There are a lot of other movies that have done it, but I've just always found that kind of humor, going back to like 'SCTV' and all that behind the scene stuff, just personally I find that funny and enjoy it. So I thought that this was the movie to do that in and hopefully people will connect with the characters. That was sort of the challenge, I think, making this so it wasn't too much inside. But I'm probably not the right person to judge that. I sort of went from my gut and then when we started to screen the movie just to see how much people could connect with the characters, how much of a jerk could Speedman be where you'd still care about him or how far could he go. Downey's character, strangely, was never an issue. I think he's such a persona and a character so well defined that people were always onboard with that.
Do you think you're going to be somewhere where celebrities are and have someone tell you, 'Robert was doing me'?
Stiller: Oh, sure, of course. Honestly, that's like the least of my worries. I really feel like actors aren't like that. They really enjoy making fun of themselves because if you're in it you know how ridiculous it is. It's like a bloodless crime. You're not necessarily going to hurt anyone. It was always important to me though that the focus was on the actors and that it was clear that it's not – Robert's character isn't us trying to do a guy in black face. That's wrong. We're trying to do an actor who wrong-headedly thinks that he can play a Black guy in a movie and get away with it. That's wrong and it's going too far. So that was really important to me, that we always kept the focus on that.
Were there any times where you thought you were going too far and pulled back? Was there anything that you originally conceived that didn't make it?
Stiller: Sure, yeah. There were aspects of my character that I was talking about in the beginning that I put on the DVD, on the extended cut because at that point who cares if we're likable or not. But that was one of the things, my character's trying to adopt a baby and there's a joke where he's like, 'I feel like all the good ones are taken.' It ways always funny out of context, but in the movie it just felt a little bit too much, like people were like, 'Ugh. I don't want to watch that guy for the rest of the movie.' So I cut that from the movie, but then ended up putting it on the DVD. So that kind of thing. It was really looking at the whole movie and thinking about how to get people onboard for the ride of the movie. That was always the framework.
Did you give a lot of thought to the idea of the retarded young man?
Stiller: Yes, for sure. Again, it was the same focus through the lens of what would an actor do to try and win an award that would be wrong-headed and playing Simple Jack was an obvious attempt at legitimacy. Obviously, out of context that could seem wrong, but I felt like within the context of the movie, we've seen this happen in life and we all know that any time an actor goes out and does that, which is really putting yourself out there, it's a very tough thing to pull off.
Have you heard from Sean Penn yet?
Stiller: No, but you know what, here's the thing, we're talking about actors having a sense of humor about themselves, I gave Sean the script to read so that he knew about it. He was totally cool with it and to the point where at the end of the movie, if you'll notice at The Academy Awards, one of the pictures of the Academy Nominees is Sean Penn, blind, doing a character. That was Sean actually posing for that picture. He did that for the movie.
How much adlibbing was there? Steve Coogan said you were yelling cut and he didn't know if it was Ben calling cut or your character.
Stiller: Yeah, that scene was ridiculously confusing just because I was directing it and I had my hands tied behind my back because I had fake hands. You need your hands to direct, I realized and I'm yelling cut and my character is yelling cut. So it's just very confusing and that was the most frustrating thing. There was a lot of improvisation. Everyone in the movie improvises and is good at it so that's why we shot so much film and there was a lot to choose from in that way, but then of course when you get to editing the movie you have to keep the story moving forward.
Is anyone going to be able to watch the opening scene of 'Private Ryan' again after watching this?
Stiller: I've watched it, many, many times while we were working on the movie. To me the great thing about working on this movie and getting ready to do it was getting to watch all these films again because I love these movies. They're such good films and to watch that stuff you're like, 'Okay, we're going to watch the helicopter scene from "Apocalypse Now" to work and get some ideas.' You start watching it and then of course we end up forty five minutes later just watching 'Apocalypse Now'. It was the same thing with 'Private Ryan'. We're like, 'Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. Oh, Jesus. That's horrible.' You just get caught up in the movies because they're good. So a lot of these prep sessions were just us watching movies and then the moment of like, 'God. Is there anything funny in this? There's nothing funny in this. This isn't funny. What are we doing?'
Can you talk about 'Night At The Museum II', what fans can expect?
Stiller: We're shooting it now. We're in the middle of it now. I'm enjoying it a lot because it's a lot less lonely for me than the first one because I get to run around the museum – well, first of all we're in The Smithsonian so there's a bunch of different museums. We get to in the Air and Space museum and go into the National Art Gallery and go into paintings and photographs. Amy Adams plays the statue of Amelia Earhart so she's running around the museum the whole time and so it's a lot less lonely. A lot of the time I was dealing with CG things that weren't there and we have this incredible cast joining. It's Ricky Gervais, Steve Coogan, Owen [Wilson] is back and also this time around we've got Christopher Guest who's just amazing. I can't believe I'm in a movie with Christopher Guest. He's playing Ivan the Terrible and Hank Azaria is playing an Egyptian bad guy. We actually have a bad guy in the movie. So it's good and has really been fun. We're about two thirds of the way through shooting.
It's been seven years since 'Zoolander' do you have anything else that you're thinking about directing even though your knee deep in this too?
Stiller: Yeah. There are a couple of other projects that I've been working on for a while. There's one in particular that I want to do. I think it'll be sooner than seven years before I direct again, yes. I really enjoy the process so much.
More comedy or drama?
Stiller: Well, it's not a big comedy, but it's sort of like a little bit darker, but funny too and smaller. It's not this big.
Any story that you'd like to tell us? What it's about?
Stiller: No. It's not really a secret. It's this movie called 'Civil War Land in Bad Decline' and it's based on a short story by George Saunders. It's a great short story about a guy who works in a Civil War Theme Park. It's kind of dark and kind of goes to a different place, but I love it. So we've been developing that for as long as 'Tropic' and I'm excited about it.
What about the 'Tropic Thunder' sequel?
Stiller: No. Definitely not. I promise. I don't think so.
Look for our Robert Downey Jr. interview on Tropic Thunder in the coming days!
Tropic Thunder shoots into theaters on August 13th.
Become the fortunate son when you e-mail: george@latinoreview.com
