There's Nothing Funny About Ben Stiller.
by Neil Strauss, Sunday Independent, April 11, 2010
Ben Stiller is uncomfortable in social settings, finds LA depressing, is full of regret about his relationships and his career, and would rather be at his son's karate class if he wasn't addicted to work. And despite the fact that he makes the biggest, smartest comedies in Hollywood, he tells Neil Strauss, he doesn't think he's very funny.
It is nearly impossible to have a discussion about the past 20 years of comedy film-making without a mention of Ben Stiller. As far back as his first shorts parodying Tom Cruise and LL Cool J and his influential sketch series, The Ben Stiller Show, he built a reputation for spotting comedy talent early, and worked with everyone from Judd Apatow to David Cross, Andy Dick, Janeane Garofalo, Jack Black and Owen Wilson. His directorial debut, Reality Bites, captured the zeitgeist of the slacker alt-rock generation at its peak. In 2004 alone, he starred in six comedies. Over the course of his career, he has laid claim to some of the most oft-referenced comedy scenes of his era, from the hair gel in There's Something About Mary to the Blue Steel of Zoolander, while crossing the funnyman chasm to also become a bona fide lead in everything from romances to dramas to family movies.
Born into a showbiz family -- his parents are the comedy team of Anne Meara and Jerry Stiller -- he appears to have one of the most charmed lives in entertainment, until you meet him. In person, there's nothing very funny about Stiller. Wandering through the Man Ray exhibit at the International Center of Photography in Manhattan, he is slumped in a black overcoat, his hair unkempt and a wiry grey goatee spotting his face. There's a dark weight that seems to burden him, whether due to a hectic schedule or the curse of thinking too much. He describes himself as "socially uncomfortable" by nature, and friends say that they find him quiet and guarded when out of his comfort zone on set.
"LA is depressing," he says as he orders a Caesar salad at the museum cafe, his tone matter-of-fact. "I was in Century City at night once, and it was such a ghost town, it made me want to slit my wrists."
It's almost as though Stiller, 44, is still in character for his latest movie, Greenberg, a Noah Baumbach-directed character study of a neurotic, unemployed 40-year-old still harbouring the pipe dream that he can reform his indie-rock band and win back his high-school sweetheart. A romantic comedy so black that it's a drama, Greenberg is perhaps the first film since Stiller played a junkie TV writer in 1998's Permanent Midnight where he succeeds in making the audience forget that he is actually Ben Stiller. Those who have worked with him describe him as a driven perfectionist. But as he sits down at the cafe, he explains that, thanks in part to his family -- wife and occasional co-star Christine Taylor and their children, Ella, seven, and Quinlin, four -- he has turned a corner and is learning to slow down and let go.
Neil Strauss: Do you see Greenberg as a bookend to Reality Bites, where 15 years later it's not so cool to still be a slacker, and no one gets your cultural references anymore?
Ben Stiller: People have said that. I never thought that when we were doing it, except maybe in the party scene at the end. Instead of using extras, Noah had the girls who were in the movie invite their friends. We were totally intimidated by these kids who were supercool and superhip. I was not like that at 20. So it was three days where Noah and I, in between shots, would say to each other, 'This is like the movie right now. We're Greenberg.'
NS: In what way?
BS: I wasn't so confident. I didn't have my shit together. There's an air about them that is like, 'Wow, they really seem to fucking own the place.' And I guess they do, because they're young and have it all ahead of them. So it was like, 'How does my own experience of being older and my own regrets about things that haven't come together in my life the way I wanted them to inform that point of view of Greenberg?'
NS: So what kind of regrets do you have?
BS: There are movies that I was supposed to direct that didn't happen that I still think about all the time. 'If I'd done that movie, what direction would my career have gone in?' I don't blame myself, though maybe I could go back and look at the ways I sabotaged it at the time. And I've been in relationships where I've screwed things up, where somebody was too there for me -- too available -- and it scared me.
NS: And you took them for granted?
BS: Yeah, and I made mistakes in the relationship that ended it. With that movie I didn't direct, it came at a time when I was in a relationship that I'd self-sabotaged and was trying to get back into. At that moment, I was more focused on the relationship than doing the movie. So maybe I didn't fight as hard as I should have.
NS: You often say you don't think you're funny in person. But do you think you're funny onscreen?
BS: Oh! Good question. Occasionally. I really don't make a practice of watching stuff that I've done, because it's just too strange and narcissistic, and it doesn't feel right. But when you're working on something that you're in and you're directing it, you obviously have to watch yourself a lot. So I'll see things, and more often than not I'm disappointed.
NS: What about after the process?
BS: Every once in a while you'll be flipping through the channels, and you'll see something, and if it's more than five years old, then it becomes sort of an oddity where you go, 'Wow, that actually happened? What were we thinking back then?'
NS: You're often hiding under a wig or moustache or sunglasses in your comedies. Even in If Lucy Fell, you're basically the only actor in a crazy wig.
BS: Yes. I remember I was going through a break-up, and I wanted to just fill time as much as possible. So they asked, 'Oh, do you want to get dreadlocks?' And I thought, 'That will take up eight hours of my life.' So that was the motivation.
NS: What do you think the difference is between parody and satire?
BS: Parody, for me, is a reductive term, and it can be simplistic. Satire is commenting in some way, and parody is just making fun of things. On The Ben Stiller Show we did a lot of parodies. Something like Tropic Thunder is a bit more satirical. You do parody more when you're starting out, because you're influenced by the things you're attracted to and want to learn more about. But then hopefully you develop past that.
NS: Judging by the parodies from The Ben Stiller Show, you were attracted to heroic characters like Bono, Tom Cruise and Bruce Springsteen.
BS: Yes, yes. I love those guys.
NS: Growing up, did you want to be more of an action hero than a comedian?
BS: If anything, I wanted to be like an Al Pacino, Robert De Niro guy, because I loved those movies growing up. But that just wasn't in the cards. Then when I was 19, I started watching SCTV [Second City Television, a Canadian sketch comedy television programme]. That really affected me, and so did watching Albert Brooks movies. So I started exploring that, and it was very derivative for a long time, which is part of the process of figuring out what your voice is.
NS: What was the turning point when your work went from parody to satire?
BS: I just got tired of waiting for somebody to do something that I could then work off of. Reality Bites gave me a different experience. After that, parody was not something I wanted to do. A lot of times, movies and TV shows are influenced by genres. Zoolander was going off of a Manchurian Candidate template. We wanted to take a genre plot that we could hang the comedy on.
NS: I heard that you're doing a sequel to Zoolander.
BS: Zoolander, to me, is a unique sort of thing, because when it came out, it didn't really have any box office, but it's taken on this life of its own since.
NS: It doesn't feel like it's too pure to touch and possibly ruin its legacy?
BS: I do feel the challenge of having to live up to the original. It's been 10 years, and it would be crazy to revisit it and think about what would have happened to the characters in that time. Also, the first one was sort of a stressful shoot, because the studio didn't really get the movie.
NS: They kept second-guessing you?
BS: Yeah, they all were like, 'What are you doing?' I was directing and acting, and I walked away from it thinking I never wanted to do something like that again.
NS: Didn't that happen to you after The Cable Guy wasn't a huge hit?
BS: I remember I got a new agent, and the first thing my agent said to me was, 'OK, you just have to do nothing for, like, six months.' They put me in movie jail.
NS: Did being criticised for that movie turn you off from directing for a while?
BS: I don't think that I consciously shied away from directing after The Cable Guy. It just happened. I'd just done Flirting With Disaster around that time, too, then There's Something About Mary came out as a result of that, and I had these opportunities as an actor that I hadn't had before. Until then, I thought I was a director.
But I stopped reading pretty much everything written about me around the time of Zoolander. I had no idea that people could write things about you where they didn't call you up and tell you. I didn't think that anybody would even care or that I was somebody worth reading about.
NS: People say you're one of the hardest-working people they know, that work is an addiction for you.
BS: The first part of getting rid of an addiction is acknowledging that you have it, and I acknowledge that I enjoy working. Anyone that's kicked heroin will tell you they enjoyed it until they realised it was screwing up their life. I haven't hit bottom yet, but I've gotten to a place where I realised it's out of balance, and I've adjusted. Last summer, I took five months off after Greenberg and went away with my family, and it was great. Nobody ever talks about that. The area of my life that I have no question about is my commitment to my family. And that's the implication when people ask, 'Oh, why do you work so much?'
NS: They didn't say it as a judgement. But maybe your perspective comes from being raised by parents who were entertainers and not around a lot.
BS: It's all valid stuff. I grew up with parents who needed to work to take care of their family -- and also enjoyed working too. They were great parents and also weren't perfect parents. I'm all of those things too. I don't think you can reduce it down.
NS: One of the writers on The Ben Stiller Show said there was a joke among the writers that if they wanted to make sure their sketch would be used, they included a scene with you taking off your shirt. Have you ever heard that?
BS: Oh, my God. No. Jesus Christ! I have no response to that, but they were probably right [laughs]. That's great.
NS: Someone else you worked with described you as competitive and afraid of failure.
BS: I've obviously failed at that. I don't know if fear of failure is necessarily a bad thing. On the other hand, the ultimate fear of failure would be paralysis and not doing anything. If that's there, which it definitely is, I don't want that to be what stops me from trying something.
NS: 'Micromanager' was another word that came up a lot.
BS: That's one of the hard things. I'm working on it. I've attempted to micromanage many things. Producing is hard that way, because once you hire somebody to direct the movie, you have to have confidence in them to do that job. And I feel like I'm in a place where I know that's not bringing me happiness. Maybe it's because I'm getting older and I'm too tired to do it all.
NS: Have you changed the way you work?
BS: Five or six years ago, I figured out I can't work that much anymore, with kids and wanting to have a life. I'm willing to not know what I'm doing next, and kind of enjoying that, too. I used to think you could say, 'I'm going to do X movie, then Y movie, then Z movie.'
And what I learned is that you can do X movie, and then it changes how you feel in your life about whether or not you want to do Y movie. I just went on this trip to Africa, and in two weeks it changed my perspective on what I'm doing for the next six months. That's what happens in life, if you're open.
NS: So how many movies are you locked into doing right now?
BS: Zero. It's a great place to be. Do I wish I knew what I was doing for the next three months? Yes, because that's the way my mind works. But if I can accept it, I can enjoy the time.
NS: You've worked early on with most of the great comedic talents of the past two decades. Is there something you look for when scouting young comedians?
BS: It seems kind of obvious, but just somebody who makes you laugh, like Zach Galifianakis or Will Ferrell. Actors who have a real sensibility specific to who they are. A harder thing to find is funny comedy directors. If you can do that, there's a lot of job openings in Hollywood.
NS: Do you feel like there are fewer great comedies being made now because of the focus on making epic 3-D films to get people into theaters?
BS: I'm not a good person to ask about that. Comedies are not what I seek out. I'm more interested in seeing dramas or something that's cinematic or a great documentary. I liked In the Loop, and a lot of those British guys like Steve Coogan and Ricky Gervais. There's a subtlety to the humour, and there's a lack of need for it to have any sort of broad appeal other than just letting people be people and letting the uncomfortable spaces in between exist.
NS: You described yourself as uncomfortable in social settings. Do you think you were attracted to comedy because positive laughter is one of the most sincere forms of approval?
BS: Yeah, maybe. But I've never been the guy who goes and gets laughs at a party. That hasn't been my modus operandi. So far I've successfully not thought about the fact that you're recording every word I'm saying and trying to analyse it.
NS: Earlier when you said, 'I find Los Angeles so depressing,' I could tell you instantly regretted it.
BS: Yeah, yeah. That's like almost everything I say. All I ever think about is how this is going to totally get misconstrued.
NS: Do you think you're happier now than you have been in the past?
BS: I guess I'm realising that I don't have control over anything, and that's a very freeing feeling. I remember being at a point in my life where I got bored. Now there's always a book I want to read or a movie I want to see or a place where I want to go. And I genuinely enjoy watching my son's karate class. As cliche as it sounds, a half-hour of watching your four-year-old do karate, it's insane how enjoyable that is. I'm standing there, and I have to acknowledge that nothing beats that. If everything else I'm working on doesn't come together, I can have more time for that.
Source: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/theres-nothing-funny-about-ben-stiller-2133582.html
Ben Stiller is uncomfortable in social settings, finds LA depressing, is full of regret about his relationships and his career, and would rather be at his son's karate class if he wasn't addicted to work. And despite the fact that he makes the biggest, smartest comedies in Hollywood, he tells Neil Strauss, he doesn't think he's very funny.
It is nearly impossible to have a discussion about the past 20 years of comedy film-making without a mention of Ben Stiller. As far back as his first shorts parodying Tom Cruise and LL Cool J and his influential sketch series, The Ben Stiller Show, he built a reputation for spotting comedy talent early, and worked with everyone from Judd Apatow to David Cross, Andy Dick, Janeane Garofalo, Jack Black and Owen Wilson. His directorial debut, Reality Bites, captured the zeitgeist of the slacker alt-rock generation at its peak. In 2004 alone, he starred in six comedies. Over the course of his career, he has laid claim to some of the most oft-referenced comedy scenes of his era, from the hair gel in There's Something About Mary to the Blue Steel of Zoolander, while crossing the funnyman chasm to also become a bona fide lead in everything from romances to dramas to family movies.
Born into a showbiz family -- his parents are the comedy team of Anne Meara and Jerry Stiller -- he appears to have one of the most charmed lives in entertainment, until you meet him. In person, there's nothing very funny about Stiller. Wandering through the Man Ray exhibit at the International Center of Photography in Manhattan, he is slumped in a black overcoat, his hair unkempt and a wiry grey goatee spotting his face. There's a dark weight that seems to burden him, whether due to a hectic schedule or the curse of thinking too much. He describes himself as "socially uncomfortable" by nature, and friends say that they find him quiet and guarded when out of his comfort zone on set.
"LA is depressing," he says as he orders a Caesar salad at the museum cafe, his tone matter-of-fact. "I was in Century City at night once, and it was such a ghost town, it made me want to slit my wrists."
It's almost as though Stiller, 44, is still in character for his latest movie, Greenberg, a Noah Baumbach-directed character study of a neurotic, unemployed 40-year-old still harbouring the pipe dream that he can reform his indie-rock band and win back his high-school sweetheart. A romantic comedy so black that it's a drama, Greenberg is perhaps the first film since Stiller played a junkie TV writer in 1998's Permanent Midnight where he succeeds in making the audience forget that he is actually Ben Stiller. Those who have worked with him describe him as a driven perfectionist. But as he sits down at the cafe, he explains that, thanks in part to his family -- wife and occasional co-star Christine Taylor and their children, Ella, seven, and Quinlin, four -- he has turned a corner and is learning to slow down and let go.
Neil Strauss: Do you see Greenberg as a bookend to Reality Bites, where 15 years later it's not so cool to still be a slacker, and no one gets your cultural references anymore?
Ben Stiller: People have said that. I never thought that when we were doing it, except maybe in the party scene at the end. Instead of using extras, Noah had the girls who were in the movie invite their friends. We were totally intimidated by these kids who were supercool and superhip. I was not like that at 20. So it was three days where Noah and I, in between shots, would say to each other, 'This is like the movie right now. We're Greenberg.'
NS: In what way?
BS: I wasn't so confident. I didn't have my shit together. There's an air about them that is like, 'Wow, they really seem to fucking own the place.' And I guess they do, because they're young and have it all ahead of them. So it was like, 'How does my own experience of being older and my own regrets about things that haven't come together in my life the way I wanted them to inform that point of view of Greenberg?'
NS: So what kind of regrets do you have?
BS: There are movies that I was supposed to direct that didn't happen that I still think about all the time. 'If I'd done that movie, what direction would my career have gone in?' I don't blame myself, though maybe I could go back and look at the ways I sabotaged it at the time. And I've been in relationships where I've screwed things up, where somebody was too there for me -- too available -- and it scared me.
NS: And you took them for granted?
BS: Yeah, and I made mistakes in the relationship that ended it. With that movie I didn't direct, it came at a time when I was in a relationship that I'd self-sabotaged and was trying to get back into. At that moment, I was more focused on the relationship than doing the movie. So maybe I didn't fight as hard as I should have.
NS: You often say you don't think you're funny in person. But do you think you're funny onscreen?
BS: Oh! Good question. Occasionally. I really don't make a practice of watching stuff that I've done, because it's just too strange and narcissistic, and it doesn't feel right. But when you're working on something that you're in and you're directing it, you obviously have to watch yourself a lot. So I'll see things, and more often than not I'm disappointed.
NS: What about after the process?
BS: Every once in a while you'll be flipping through the channels, and you'll see something, and if it's more than five years old, then it becomes sort of an oddity where you go, 'Wow, that actually happened? What were we thinking back then?'
NS: You're often hiding under a wig or moustache or sunglasses in your comedies. Even in If Lucy Fell, you're basically the only actor in a crazy wig.
BS: Yes. I remember I was going through a break-up, and I wanted to just fill time as much as possible. So they asked, 'Oh, do you want to get dreadlocks?' And I thought, 'That will take up eight hours of my life.' So that was the motivation.
NS: What do you think the difference is between parody and satire?
BS: Parody, for me, is a reductive term, and it can be simplistic. Satire is commenting in some way, and parody is just making fun of things. On The Ben Stiller Show we did a lot of parodies. Something like Tropic Thunder is a bit more satirical. You do parody more when you're starting out, because you're influenced by the things you're attracted to and want to learn more about. But then hopefully you develop past that.
NS: Judging by the parodies from The Ben Stiller Show, you were attracted to heroic characters like Bono, Tom Cruise and Bruce Springsteen.
BS: Yes, yes. I love those guys.
NS: Growing up, did you want to be more of an action hero than a comedian?
BS: If anything, I wanted to be like an Al Pacino, Robert De Niro guy, because I loved those movies growing up. But that just wasn't in the cards. Then when I was 19, I started watching SCTV [Second City Television, a Canadian sketch comedy television programme]. That really affected me, and so did watching Albert Brooks movies. So I started exploring that, and it was very derivative for a long time, which is part of the process of figuring out what your voice is.
NS: What was the turning point when your work went from parody to satire?
BS: I just got tired of waiting for somebody to do something that I could then work off of. Reality Bites gave me a different experience. After that, parody was not something I wanted to do. A lot of times, movies and TV shows are influenced by genres. Zoolander was going off of a Manchurian Candidate template. We wanted to take a genre plot that we could hang the comedy on.
NS: I heard that you're doing a sequel to Zoolander.
BS: Zoolander, to me, is a unique sort of thing, because when it came out, it didn't really have any box office, but it's taken on this life of its own since.
NS: It doesn't feel like it's too pure to touch and possibly ruin its legacy?
BS: I do feel the challenge of having to live up to the original. It's been 10 years, and it would be crazy to revisit it and think about what would have happened to the characters in that time. Also, the first one was sort of a stressful shoot, because the studio didn't really get the movie.
NS: They kept second-guessing you?
BS: Yeah, they all were like, 'What are you doing?' I was directing and acting, and I walked away from it thinking I never wanted to do something like that again.
NS: Didn't that happen to you after The Cable Guy wasn't a huge hit?
BS: I remember I got a new agent, and the first thing my agent said to me was, 'OK, you just have to do nothing for, like, six months.' They put me in movie jail.
NS: Did being criticised for that movie turn you off from directing for a while?
BS: I don't think that I consciously shied away from directing after The Cable Guy. It just happened. I'd just done Flirting With Disaster around that time, too, then There's Something About Mary came out as a result of that, and I had these opportunities as an actor that I hadn't had before. Until then, I thought I was a director.
But I stopped reading pretty much everything written about me around the time of Zoolander. I had no idea that people could write things about you where they didn't call you up and tell you. I didn't think that anybody would even care or that I was somebody worth reading about.
NS: People say you're one of the hardest-working people they know, that work is an addiction for you.
BS: The first part of getting rid of an addiction is acknowledging that you have it, and I acknowledge that I enjoy working. Anyone that's kicked heroin will tell you they enjoyed it until they realised it was screwing up their life. I haven't hit bottom yet, but I've gotten to a place where I realised it's out of balance, and I've adjusted. Last summer, I took five months off after Greenberg and went away with my family, and it was great. Nobody ever talks about that. The area of my life that I have no question about is my commitment to my family. And that's the implication when people ask, 'Oh, why do you work so much?'
NS: They didn't say it as a judgement. But maybe your perspective comes from being raised by parents who were entertainers and not around a lot.
BS: It's all valid stuff. I grew up with parents who needed to work to take care of their family -- and also enjoyed working too. They were great parents and also weren't perfect parents. I'm all of those things too. I don't think you can reduce it down.
NS: One of the writers on The Ben Stiller Show said there was a joke among the writers that if they wanted to make sure their sketch would be used, they included a scene with you taking off your shirt. Have you ever heard that?
BS: Oh, my God. No. Jesus Christ! I have no response to that, but they were probably right [laughs]. That's great.
NS: Someone else you worked with described you as competitive and afraid of failure.
BS: I've obviously failed at that. I don't know if fear of failure is necessarily a bad thing. On the other hand, the ultimate fear of failure would be paralysis and not doing anything. If that's there, which it definitely is, I don't want that to be what stops me from trying something.
NS: 'Micromanager' was another word that came up a lot.
BS: That's one of the hard things. I'm working on it. I've attempted to micromanage many things. Producing is hard that way, because once you hire somebody to direct the movie, you have to have confidence in them to do that job. And I feel like I'm in a place where I know that's not bringing me happiness. Maybe it's because I'm getting older and I'm too tired to do it all.
NS: Have you changed the way you work?
BS: Five or six years ago, I figured out I can't work that much anymore, with kids and wanting to have a life. I'm willing to not know what I'm doing next, and kind of enjoying that, too. I used to think you could say, 'I'm going to do X movie, then Y movie, then Z movie.'
And what I learned is that you can do X movie, and then it changes how you feel in your life about whether or not you want to do Y movie. I just went on this trip to Africa, and in two weeks it changed my perspective on what I'm doing for the next six months. That's what happens in life, if you're open.
NS: So how many movies are you locked into doing right now?
BS: Zero. It's a great place to be. Do I wish I knew what I was doing for the next three months? Yes, because that's the way my mind works. But if I can accept it, I can enjoy the time.
NS: You've worked early on with most of the great comedic talents of the past two decades. Is there something you look for when scouting young comedians?
BS: It seems kind of obvious, but just somebody who makes you laugh, like Zach Galifianakis or Will Ferrell. Actors who have a real sensibility specific to who they are. A harder thing to find is funny comedy directors. If you can do that, there's a lot of job openings in Hollywood.
NS: Do you feel like there are fewer great comedies being made now because of the focus on making epic 3-D films to get people into theaters?
BS: I'm not a good person to ask about that. Comedies are not what I seek out. I'm more interested in seeing dramas or something that's cinematic or a great documentary. I liked In the Loop, and a lot of those British guys like Steve Coogan and Ricky Gervais. There's a subtlety to the humour, and there's a lack of need for it to have any sort of broad appeal other than just letting people be people and letting the uncomfortable spaces in between exist.
NS: You described yourself as uncomfortable in social settings. Do you think you were attracted to comedy because positive laughter is one of the most sincere forms of approval?
BS: Yeah, maybe. But I've never been the guy who goes and gets laughs at a party. That hasn't been my modus operandi. So far I've successfully not thought about the fact that you're recording every word I'm saying and trying to analyse it.
NS: Earlier when you said, 'I find Los Angeles so depressing,' I could tell you instantly regretted it.
BS: Yeah, yeah. That's like almost everything I say. All I ever think about is how this is going to totally get misconstrued.
NS: Do you think you're happier now than you have been in the past?
BS: I guess I'm realising that I don't have control over anything, and that's a very freeing feeling. I remember being at a point in my life where I got bored. Now there's always a book I want to read or a movie I want to see or a place where I want to go. And I genuinely enjoy watching my son's karate class. As cliche as it sounds, a half-hour of watching your four-year-old do karate, it's insane how enjoyable that is. I'm standing there, and I have to acknowledge that nothing beats that. If everything else I'm working on doesn't come together, I can have more time for that.
Source: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/theres-nothing-funny-about-ben-stiller-2133582.html