{"id":94963,"date":"2025-10-21T15:11:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-21T15:11:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/94963\/"},"modified":"2025-10-21T15:11:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-21T15:11:08","slug":"to-have-a-real-relationship-with-my-children-now-i-feel-very-fortunate-because-it-took-me-a-while-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/94963\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018To have a real relationship with my children now, I feel very fortunate … because it took me a while\u2019 \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ben Stiller has long since stopped analysing what draws him to projects. Why bother? For most of his nearly four-decade career as an actor and film-maker, he has topped the box office or slyly captured the zeitgeist, devising \u2013 with a stuck zipper, a lip pout or Robert De Niro<\/a> as a father-in-law \u2013 some of pop culture\u2019s stickiest cinematic moments.<\/p>\n

So when he first started filming in his parents\u2019 apartment a few weeks after the death of his father, Jerry Stiller, in 2020, he wasn\u2019t sure why, exactly. \u201cIt was just this instinct,\u201d he says. Partly, it was about preservation; the five-bedroom on the Upper West Side of New York City was his childhood home, and it was due to be sold. Until the last possible moment, he shot video tours of the memento-filled, and then emptied corners where he and his older sister, Amy Stiller, grew up, doing bits and homework, bickering and celebrating, with Jerry and their mother, Anne Meara, who died in 2015.<\/p>\n

Then, too, he wanted to memorialise Jerry and Anne \u2013 or Stiller and Meara, as they were better known in their performance heyday. A comedic duo whose banter catapulted them from the club circuit to household fame in the Ed Sullivan era, they were also a bridge from a midcentury Borscht Belt comedy style to one developed for the TV screen. For an audience of 30 million viewers, they played up their real-life identities as a husband and wife mismatched in culture and religion \u2013 in the years when interfaith unions were still rare. At home, they worked relentlessly on their routines, honing the razor timing that their son, who will turn 60 in November, absorbed and seeded through his own work.<\/p>\n

Ben Stiller quickly realised he should make a documentary about them. The film, Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost, which opened in US theatres on Friday and streams from October 24th on Apple TV<\/a>, dips into their comic lineage, a legacy that Ben Stiller has transformed as the star of billion-dollar blockbuster series like Night at the Museum and Meet the Parents (he\u2019s filming its fourth instalment) and as director and co-writer of satires like Tropic Thunder<\/a> and Zoolander<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also part family history, or therapy, as Stiller and his kin drill into what it was like growing up backstage or on sets, with sometimes absentee parents. But the subtext (and often enough, text) of the documentary is more elemental: It\u2019s about what it means to lead an artistic life \u2013 a profoundly ambitious, often workaholic one \u2013 and be part of a family. It\u2019s a tension that Stiller has only recently fully confronted. And he did it while filming, with his children.<\/p>\n

The moment when his teenage son starkly tells him, on screen, that he didn\u2019t feel fatherhood was Stiller\u2019s top priority is a rug-pull of epic proportions.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a film-maker, I was like, \u2018Okay, this is a good moment for the movie,\u2019\u201d Stiller said after the documentary\u2019s premiere at the New York Film Festival. \u201cAs a person, I was like, \u2018That sucks.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The project is almost painfully personal \u2013 \u201cterritory that I haven\u2019t really travelled in before,\u201d Stiller says in an interview in Manhattan. The documentary took five years to complete, as he at first avoided delving into some of the more vulnerable details and later wondered what his parents might have made of it when he did. He wasn\u2019t sure what the reception for the film would be. But \u201cit doesn\u2019t really matter,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s something I needed to make.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Stiller has traversed comedy and darker stuff, his movies and shows have stealthily shaped culture for a generation, from Reality Bites, his Gen X-delineating 1994 directorial debut, to Severance, the Emmy-winning Apple TV series that he currently produces and often directs. (He is overseeing the show\u2019s third season, though he will be too busy with other projects to direct.)<\/p>\n

\"BenBen Stiller in New York. Photopgraph: Thea Traff\/New York Times <\/p>\n

His friend Chris Rock<\/a>, a costar in the animated Madagascar series, who has known Stiller since the 1990s, calls him \u201cmy hero\u201d \u2013 \u201che\u2019s one of the greatest comic actors to ever live\u201d \u2013 and as a film-maker, an inspiration: \u201cI\u2019m trying to get wherever he\u2019s at. It\u2019s so far ahead, I can\u2019t even see it.\u201d<\/p>\n

As career chapters, Reality Bites and \u201ceverance are stylistically worlds apart. He says Severance appealed to him because it is a sci-fi thriller \u2013 about a corporation whose employees sign on to split themselves into \u201cinnies\u201d (at the office) and \u201couties\u201d (at home) \u2013 contained in a workplace sitcom.<\/p>\n

How should we value a job? And how do the people who surround us fit into that? That\u2019s a theme Stiller has returned to again and again. Even the Meet the Parents juggernaut rests partly on whether De Niro\u2019s stoic, Silent Generation type views nursing as a suitable profession for a man, Stiller\u2019s character. His most successful satires, like Zoolander, about the fashion world, send up industries with wildly skewed systems of worth.<\/p>\n

And in Reality Bites, when Winona Ryder\u2019s character weighs how to build her nascent film-making career and whom to choose as her boyfriend, she raises the same question Stiller is asking as he tells the story of his parents, who by most respects succeeded: How do you build a productive life as an artist, and a partner?<\/p>\n

Stiller\u2019s parents were married for 61 years. Their union survived the tribulations of show business, their different creative drives, and her drinking and the way it destabilised the family. Stiller worried about including that in the documentary, but, he says, \u201cshe talked about it a lot, and she evolved\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey were pretty great parents,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\"AnneAnne Meara and Jerry Stiller with their children Ben, center, and Amy. Photograph: Apple TV+ <\/p>\n

The devotion in their relationship, its endurance, was a lesson he absorbed late. \u201cThe career stuff falls away,\u201d he says. \u201cYou get older, and you\u2019re left with the real stuff in your life. And for them, they were there for each other. And that\u2019s what I want, at the end of the day.\u201d<\/p>\n

That personal reckoning came for Stiller in the last decade, a few years after he was successfully treated for aggressive prostate cancer<\/a>. In 2017, he announced a separation from his wife, actor Christine Taylor. But during the pandemic, they reconciled after they began living together again in New York so he could see their son, Quinlin Stiller, now 20 and a college student, and their daughter, Ella Stiller, who is 23 and a Juilliard-trained actor. (Rock: \u201cA marriage getting back together is harder to do than a $600 million movie.\u201d)<\/p>\n

And Stiller realised \u2013 with his children\u2019s prodding \u2013 that as much as he\u2019d vowed to be around more than his parents, he was often not fully present. Putting it in the film is a level of candour almost unheard-of for Hollywood powerhouses, but, he says, \u201cI admit it because it\u2019s true.\u201d<\/p>\n

He chokes up. \u201cTo actually have, now, a real relationship with them, I feel very fortunate,\u201d he says, \u201cbecause it took me a while to really understand the work that you have to put in to make that happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

When he\u2019s on screen, Stiller \u2013 often as a put-upon Everyman \u2013 guides his audience through big life questions with a relatable fallibility. \u201cHe makes making a mistake look good,\u201d says Adam Scott, a star of Severance<\/a> and a costar in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty<\/a> (2013), Stiller\u2019s underappreciated passion project. \u201cLike, I hope my mistakes land as well as his.\u201d<\/p>\n

Partly that\u2019s because they\u2019re often built for laughs. When they began making Severance, Scott says, he and Stiller were both reeling from a parent\u2019s death. The show is partly about grief and loss, he says. But without Stiller\u2019s sense of humour, \u201cit would be a tough watch,\u201d Scott adds. \u201cAnd the things that he finds funny about it \u2013 about the world, about the characters \u2013 is really different from anyone else.\u201d<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think either of us could have imagined having a regular life<\/p>\n

\u201cThe most Ben Stiller\u201d scene of the series, he says, is in the season two finale, when the loyalist manager Milchick is having a canned conversation with an animatronic version of the company\u2019s founder, Keir. \u201cBut the timing is really off,\u201d Scott says, \u201cand the head makes a particular noise when it turns.\u201d Stiller was directing \u2013 and controlling Keir\u2019s movements.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think that he really thinks the Abraham Lincoln robot at Disneyland is very funny,\u201d Scott says. \u201cI have never seen him happier. He was positively giddy on set that day.\u201d<\/p>\n

That Stiller transformed comedy is a given. His influential sketch programme, The Ben Stiller Show, which earned an Emmy for best writing in 1993 \u2013 after it was cancelled one season in \u2013 elevated Bob Odenkirk, a writer at the time, to an on-camera presence and gave Judd Apatow his first real job. The programme\u2019s stylistically faithful parodies became a comic blueprint, and Apatow later credited Stiller for his own improv-heavy directing style. Even The Cable Guy, Stiller\u2019s critically reviled directorial follow-up to Reality Bites, has been reassessed: it helped introduce cringe comedy.<\/p>\n

Although his wife ribs him for it, Stiller is fond of saying he doesn\u2019t think of himself as a comedian. \u201cIf someone says, like, \u2018Your dad or you, who\u2019s funny?\u2019 My dad\u2019s funnier,\u201d he says, bringing up the comparison himself as we sit in an empty cafe in Chelsea Piers. He is dressed in all black, his face serious, angular. Making him smile or laugh feels like a little victory.<\/p>\n

Jerry Stiller, his son says, was \u201cgenuinely funny\u201d \u2013 though throughout his life, he laboured over every line. Even when the elder Stiller became a viewer favourite, in his late 60s, as George Costanza\u2019s pugnacious father on Seinfeld, his scripts \u201chad meticulous annotations in the margins\u201d, says Journey Gunderson, executive director of the US National Comedy Center, where Ben Stiller donated his parents\u2019 papers. \u201cHe was never just coming in, delivering what was written.\u201d<\/p>\n

By contrast, Meara, who started in theatre, had an easier flow to a punchline, her son says in the documentary. But she gravitated toward drama and became a playwright later in life. (She also appeared as Steve\u2019s mother in Sex and the City.) Like her, Stiller says, humour has \u201cnever been what\u2019s really driving me\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"BenBen Stiller in New York. Photopgraph: Thea Traff\/New York Times <\/p>\n

But yes, of course, he knows how to make things funny. It was foundational to his youth \u2013 voices, bits. (In one recurring improv, Ben was a mean acting teacher, and his father was the oldest student in class.) When their parents were away working, and Stiller and his sister were in the care of their long-time nanny, Hazel Hugh, they planned elaborate livingroom productions: a number from Shenandoah or Jesus Christ Superstar, a little Shakespeare, a nightclub act. Their parent\u2019s return was opening night; the ovations were epic. \u201cI don\u2019t think either of us could have imagined having a regular life,\u201d says Stiller\u2019s sister, Amy, an actor.<\/p>\n

By the time Ben Stiller was 13, he had a camera \u2013 a gift from his father \u2013 and a subscription to American Cinematographer magazine. \u201cHe did, like, these blood-and-gut films with the kids from the neighbourhood, with murder in the park,\u201d Amy says.<\/p>\n

Yet their parents\u2019 absences weighed heavily, too. \u201cI remember him talking about, \u2018Sometimes the only time I would see my parents is when they were on The Ed Sullivan Show,\u2019\u201d says Ben Stiller\u2019s friend Jerry Stahl, a novelist and screenwriter.<\/p>\n

Stiller and Meara appeared on the variety show 36 times, always with new material. As a child, Ben Stiller says, he had only an inkling of what it meant for his parents to forge that kind of career. But in making the documentary, which uses archival footage of their performances, and hundreds of hours of audio and videotapes his father made of their work and family life, it struck him, he says: \u201cOh, my God, look what they were doing; look how hard that was.\u201d Coming up with fresh sketches, as a couple, every five or six weeks, for a huge live television audience, was not, he adds, something he could do. Add in the pressure, he says, of \u201chaving to raise two kids and having to make it work; their livelihood was dependent on that, because by doing well on that show, that would open up all the other doors for them\u201d.<\/p>\n

They not only succeeded; they also upended some models. Most comedy duos are based on a hierarchy, with a clown and a straight man, says Gunderson of the National Comedy Center. But the Stiller and Meara team \u201cwas built on an equal push and pull. Both artists were capable of driving laughs and the momentum of the sketch\u201d.<\/p>\n

Their act redefined gender dynamics and cultural ones \u2013 by portraying their own interfaith marriage (Stiller was Jewish, and Meara was raised Catholic, though she later converted to Judaism), and by not making Jewishness the punchline, Gunderson says. \u201cThey put their lived reality on national television. They made it not only normal, but hilarious and warm. You can feel empathy in the routines.\u201d<\/p>\n

Christopher Walken, a star of Severance, met Stiller and Meara as a young performer in New York. \u201cWhen I saw the family together, you could tell they all really liked each other, enjoyed each other\u2019s company,\u201d he says. \u201cJerry and Anne would have this marvellous New Year\u2019s Eve party, and you\u2019d go and see all these actors. There\u2019d be a huge pile of coats on the bed. They knew everybody.\u201d<\/p>\n

He befriended Jerry Stiller \u2013 \u201ca beautiful guy, kind, generous\u201d \u2013 and was \u201ca little scared\u201d of Anne: \u201cI always had the feeling she knew what I was up to at all times. I was a little wild.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"BenBen Stiller in New York. Photopgraph: Thea Traff\/New York Times <\/p>\n

Walken also starred with Ben Stiller in his Broadway debut, the John Guare comedy The House of Blue Leaves, in 1986 and was impressed by him even then. \u201cIt\u2019s not just his ambition; it\u2019s his talent,\u201d Walken says. \u201cYou look at a young person, and you can see that they\u2019ve got everything it takes.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a director, Stiller had a reputation for being \u2013 to put it charitably \u2013 intense, a perfectionist known for marathon script revision sessions and round-the-clock calls to fine-tune the most minute details. \u201cHe really makes it hard for himself,\u201d says Stahl, whom Stiller portrayed, as a drug-addicted writer, in Permanent Midnight (1998). \u201cSo he\u2019ll do one project that seems miraculous and impossible, and then he\u2019ll find something harder.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a work ethic that was passed down. \u201cMy mother\u2019s bar for what was good or what was hacky was something I really took in,\u201d Stiller says. And in the documentary, there\u2019s footage of a preperformance Jerry Stiller, zeroing in. It was, says Scott, \u201ca mirror to Ben on set, when he is focusing in and trying to work something out\u201d.<\/p>\n

Ben Stiller is still exacting as a film-maker, doing take after take. But he is more cognisant of how his demands land. A few years ago, \u201cI was not as aware of the impact that I would have on people,\u201d he says. \u201cI learned through experiences \u2013 and from people letting me know.\u201d The perspective of age helped, too, \u201cand being humbled a little bit in life\u201d. (A dividing line was when Zoolander 2, released in 2016, flopped.)<\/p>\n

For almost all of his career, Stiller says, \u201cI found safety in the work\u201d. He is still happiest, he says, when he is in the groove with his many projects. But he has chilled out, in the words of several friends and colleagues. \u201cHe\u2019s come around now,\u201d Stahl says. \u201cFamily is a priority.\u201d<\/p>\n

Surveying his parents\u2019 life reshuffled how he thinks about his own \u2013 in ways that surprised him and will probably end up on screen. \u201cIt\u2019s actually, creatively, what I want to be doing,\u201d Stiller says. \u201cIt\u2019s made me want to delve more into those memories because I feel like that is stuff that is really worth exploring, to figure out, in myself.\u201d \u2013 This article originally appeared in the New York Times<\/a><\/p>\n

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