Ben Stiller, king of the TV send-ups, has taken up directing and now walks among those he's become famous for ridiculing.
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"How do you guys at Movieline get away with it?" Ben Stiller asks me the moment I sit down to interview him. "You say anything you want about everyone in show business, and people give interviews to you anyway!"
I'd anticipated that the 28-year-old Stiller, whose quicksilver mind has been behind some of the most knowing, hilarious movie parodies in TV history, initially on "Saturday Night Live" and later on his two TV series (both were called "The Ben Stiller Show"), would be fast and funny. I hadn't foreseen that he'd try to interview me.
"Look who's talking," I say to him. "You've done send-ups of the biggest people in the business. What's it like when you run into the people you've parodied?"
"It depends," replies Stiller. "Tom Cruise was really, really nice to me when I met him."
This is hard--okay, impossible--to believe, for Stiller has repeatedly nailed Cruise, including the unforgettable TV sketch in which he portrayed Cruise as a desperate show biz has-been reduced to doing a one-man show in which he recreates (badly) scenes from his film career. The image of Stiller, as Cruise, doing that Risky Business dance in sequin-bedecked undies is hard to reconcile with the news that Cruise was "nice" upon meeting Stiller. And since Stiller's fiancee, Jeanne Tripplehorn, co-starred with Cruise in The Firm, it wasn't a matter of running into the megastar just once.
"Why do you think Cruise was nice to you?"
"Well," Stiller says with a grin, "perhaps it was because he hadn't actually seen the skits. He'd heard about them, though."
"Didn't he ask to see them?"
"As a matter of fact, he did. But, strangely enough, the whole time Jeanne was shooting The Firm with him, I could never find a copy to send him," Stiller says, laughing. "He was so nice to me, I felt like a heel."
"Here's another strange thing," Stiller volunteers. "When Jeanne called me to tell me that she'd got the role in The Firm, which was directed by Sydney Pollack, I was on the set [of "The Ben Stiller Show"]. We were in the middle of shooting our parody of Husbands and Wives, and I was dressed in full Frankenstein monster makeup, playing Sydney Pollack."
"Why do I get the feeling you never told Pollack this story?"
"I forgot," says Stiller.
"But surely you heard from Oliver Stone after playing him on TV?" I'm referring to what may have been Stiller's finest hour, when he wore monstrous makeup to resemble Stone and guided viewers through "Oliver Stoneland," a megalomaniacal theme park with rides based on his films.
"Well, I didn't hear from Stone," Stiller says, "but one of the assistants over at Ixtlan [Stone's production company] told me that Stone watched a tape of that sketch one day with his staff. Then he went back to work in his office, but, the story goes, when he realized that his staff was watching the tape again, and then a third time, Stone was not amused at all."
Stiller has just turned director with Reality Bites, which stars Winona Ryder and Ethan Hawke. Since he can't ask Stone for advice, I ask him whether he picked up useful tips about directing from any of the many filmmakers whose films he's acted in. Like, for instance, Steven Spielberg, for whom Stiller played a soldier who chats about chocolate bars with Christian Bale in Empire of the Sun.
"You're talking to someone who grew up watching Jaws 20 trillion times," he says. "So it was really exciting to be able to talk with one of the people whose work was one of the reasons I wanted to get into the business. It was like being a science student being able to talk to--" he searches for the right words "--a really smart scientist."
What about John Erman, for whom Stiller did a role in Stella? "His support of the actors was something that really rubbed off on me." How about the auteur of Fresh Horses, David Anspaugh? "He gave me a lot of freedom." When I can't recall the name of Stiller's Next of Kin director, at first neither can he: "John Er...Ir...Irvin? Jesus Christ," he says, laughing, "I don't remember him giving me one direction!" His Hot Pursuit director fares even less well: "You don't want to know," says Stiller.
"What was the worst part about directing Reality Bites?" I ask.
"You know what sucks?" Stiller replies. "The focus groups. Seeing your movie broken down into numbers takes the heart out of what you're doing--it becomes percentages. As a filmmaker who wants to operate in the studio system, I found myself wanting to improve those numbers. [But] after a certain point, a filmmaker shouldn't be pushed to get the score up like an SAT test. All of a sudden it was like I was back in high school saying, 'No, wait, I know I can get a better score on this test!'"
Yet to come, of course, is the real test--seeing how the paying audience responds to Reality Bites. I ask Stiller, "If it turns out you're not going to have a long career as a Hollywood director, what would your next career move be?"
"If the Hollywood feature career doesn't happen," Stiller says, "then it'll be the small independent feature career." After a beat, he adds, "Or the guy who's been trying for six years to get his next movie made. Or maybe directing some Super 8 videos for bands."
"If you have a long, glorious career, how will you handle it when some young
whippersnapper comes along and makes mean, smart, funny parodies of your films?"
"I'd probably feel incredibly offended," Stiller admits. "I'm sure I'd say, 'Do I really make movies like that? Do I really look like that?' I'd probably obsess over it, and freak out, and never talk to the guy! Because, I'll tell you, I was always the guy who could dish it out in school--and then it was tough to take it."
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Edward Margulies