The Overachiever

Last summer belonged to Ben Stiller. His leading role in the comedy blockbuster “There’s Something About Mary” sprang him from Hollywood’s doghouse--where he’d been sentenced for directing Jim Carrey’s legendary first flop, “The Cable Guy”--and transformed him into a bona fide star. “I’m not saying show biz isn’t great,” Stiller says, lacing his observations with equal parts wariness and bravado. “But when you’re in a movie that makes $120 million, it’s just different.”

The son of comedy veterans Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, Ben Stiller has been making a name for himself ever since he landed a coveted berth on “Saturday Night Live” 12 years ago. “Ben’s been around the corner a couple of times,” says his father. “I gave him a Fuji Super 8 camera when he was a kid and he made a couple of movies, including a parody of ‘Airport ‘75,’ which I had been in. The kid’s no dope. He’s seen it all.”

And that’s not just a father bragging. Stiller is a versatile, if quixotic, talent: an Emmy award-winning writer (“The Ben Stiller Show”), an ambitious if uneven director (“Reality Bites”) and a darkly comic actor drawn to small, intense films (“Flirting With Disaster” and “Permanent Midnight”). “He’s not an overnight success,” says Janeane Garofalo, who co-starred in 1992’s “The Ben Stiller Show” and who, with Stiller, co-wrote “Feel This Book,” a satire of self-help works published this summer.

Yet, for all his precociousness, Stiller, 33, has demonstrated a restlessness uncommon in Hollywood. He’s skipped from one achievement to the next, from Broadway actor to “SNL” performer, from comedy writer to film director, with hardly a look backward. Once hailed as the leader of a new generation of cynical, subversive comedians, Stiller has become another star of mainstream comedies.

While he continues to try and bring Budd Schulberg’s classic Hollywood novel, “What Makes Sammy Run?” to the screen, and has announced he will direct “The Making of the President, 1789,” a period comedy about George Washington, acting seems to be the thing. Stiller headlines Universal’s “Mystery Men” (which was slated to open July 30), a “Batman”-like action comedy based on the “Dark Horse” comic, co-starring Garofalo, Greg Kinnear and Hank Azaria. “I think you have to take advantage of what’s going on in the moment, and for me, acting is happening,” Stiller says during a recent visit to Los Angeles from his home in New York. Over a plate of tuna sashimi and many, many diet Cokes, Stiller talked about his changing career, his “friendship” with Calista Flockhart and what it’s like to go mainstream. *

Q: What’s life been like since “There’s Something About Mary”?

A: I never had the experience of being in a movie that so many people found funny. I get much more money now, and I get recognized more. You just have to remember it’s only because the movie made money and not because I’m any more talented or better looking, even though there are more girls now. You know what I mean?

Q: Is that why you haven’t directed since “Cable Guy”?

A: It’s not like no one is offering me directing jobs [laughing]. You can check the Hollywood Reporter. I’ve just turned them down. I just directed a [TV] pilot for Fox that I produced that didn’t get picked up. It’s called “Heat Vision and Jack,” and it stars Jack Flagg [HBO’s “Mr. Show”] as an astronaut on the run from Ron Silver, who works for NASA. It’s kind of a “Fugitive” meets “Knight Rider” thing, but Fox didn’t want to take a shot.

Q.: Why is the George Washington comedy the first film you’re going to direct since “Cable Guy”?

A: It’s a development deal. There isn’t even a script yet so it’s premature to talk about it.

Q: You got offered the chance to direct “Mystery Men.” Why are you turning down most directing jobs?

A: I was in the middle of “There’s Something About Mary” when that came up, and I said, “You know, the next movie I direct I don’t want to be just some $70-million movie.” I mean it will cost what it will cost, but I want to write it.

Q: Like “What Makes Sammy Run?”

A: If I had my choice, I’d be doing that now, but I can’t get anybody to pay for it, and I don’t know why. I feel good about the script. Jerry [Stahl] and I wrote it, and it’s the prototypical Hollywood story, but right now it’s nowhere. Meanwhile, my acting career has taken off, so I’m pursuing that.

Q: Is that why you’re starring in “Mystery Men,” another big-budget comedy?

A: After I decided not to direct it, they got this really great cast with Janeane [Garofalo] and Hank [Azaria], so I said, “OK I’ll be in it.” It’s based on this really underground comic book, and we’re these underdog superheroes who don’t get any respect. Then we have this chance to save the city, so it’s like a “Diner” vibe in a “Batman” world.

Q: Why are you playing Mr. Furious?

A: I was going to play the Blue Raja, the guy who uses silverware as a weapon, but we’ve all seen that [deadpan]. No, he’s more like the nerdy guy, which I could do, but I’m not that interested in doing that again. Unless you’re Harrison Ford, who doesn’t put everyone through the exercise of watching him quote, unquote, stretch. The minute you start doing the same thing in comedy, people go, “Oh, I’ve seen that.”

Q: So playing Mr. Furious is a stretch for you?

A: In the original script, he was just angry all the time, but I thought that would be boring, so one of the changes I made is that he has the least power. Like if we’re a band, I’m the guy who started the band but who’s also the least talented.

Q: You rewrote your part?

A: Oh, [pauses] yeah [laughing]. I mean, the script was good, but you had Hank Azaria, who is a good writer, and me and Janeane, and we had to make our parts our own.

Q: Do you miss writing, like what you did on “The Ben Stiller Show”?

A: Sketch comedy is collaborative, so it’s not really about the writing. On the show, I wrote a couple of sketches on my own, but the vast majority were written by others and rewritten by me and others, so it’s not the same as writing a screenplay, like what I’ve done with Jerry or the book I did with Janeane.

Q: Why did you write a book? [“Feel This Book”]

A: We were asked if we wanted to do a funny “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus” self-help book and we said we didn’t want to do that. But I said we would if we could just do our own thing in that self-help mode.

Q: Who is the book for?

A: People who get the joke and are sick of every seven-highly-effective-spiritual-ways-to-make-chicken-soup books.

I hope you don’t mind my eating like this, I’m just really hungry.

[To the waitress] Can I get another diet Coke? I’m a diet Coke maniac.

Q: It sounds like a satire.

A: I’m happy to be accused of being a satirist.

Q: Are you really? Don’t you think Hollywood is too earnest for satire?

A: Hollywood is earnest? I think that’s giving Hollywood too much credit. Hollywood is very reactionary and simple-minded. If you do something that makes money, they give you more money. If you don’t make money, it’s harder to get more money.

Q: I guess that explains the cancellation of your TV series, which was pretty satirical, after only one season.

A: Sketch comedy is all based on the quality of the specific sketches, and that’s really hard to keep up, and since my stuff was more parody oriented, that was even harder.

Q: Nevertheless, you won an Emmy, and you and Janeane were anointed as the new “smart set” of comedians by the New York Times Magazine.

A: That writer was just looking for a hook. He kept saying to us, “What’s the hook?” and Janeane and I were like, “We don’t know, you’re the guy trying to write the article.”

Q: So you’re not the new king of comedy?

A: [Picking up the tape recorder] No, no, no! Correct that. Please, who would ever see themselves that way?

Q: Well, lots of your early fans did. Do you feel you’ve let them down or have sold out by becoming an actor-for-hire in mainstream comedies?

A: I don’t like categories like that. I feel I operate very much inside and outside. I like acting and directing, and hope to get to a point where I am doing both and also writing more.

Q: So what’s stopping you?

A: There is a certain staidness in Hollywood, an older Hollywood that kind of doesn’t want to give in to the new trends. Take someone like Jim Carrey. When he did “Ace Ventura,” he had no backing in Hollywood: not the studio, not publicists, not magazines, that whole machine that created Matthew McConaughey in that incredible way. With Jim, Hollywood had to catch up to America, which said, “This is the guy we want to see.” It’s the same thing with Adam Sandler. America speaks and then Hollywood breaks out the checkbook. I’m not saying that’s me, but anyone who breaks conventions or doesn’t play the game, there’s real resistance to them at first. When they appeal to a lot of people, studios have to take notice.

Q: Does your generation, the Gen-Xers, to use a term that you’ve disparaged, have a different sensibility, a different sense of humor?

A: Yeah, sure, but there are things that I think are funny that most of America doesn’t get.

Q: Like what?

A: I think “SCTV” is one of the funniest things ever done, and most people don’t even know what it is. I also think Bill Murray is one of the funniest people around, and most people agree. So what’s the difference there? I don’t know, and I hate discussions about what is or is not funny.

Q: That sounds pretty definitive.

A: No, what I’m saying is that old adage that comedy dies on the operating table. Like I know I’m in trouble if I’m in a notes meeting or a development meeting and you get into a discussion with the producer or the executive on what is or isn’t funny. You’re dead because you’ll never convince them. In the end, the audience will either laugh or not. I would love it if everyone thought everything I wrote and directed and acted was funny, but it’s not who I am. I’m used to being in that category where I think it’s funny but most people don’t and that’s why “Mary” was so interesting.

Q: Did that film’s success make you rethink your career, that you could become one of the $20-million guys like Jim Carrey or Adam Sandler?

A: Adam is doing a very specific thing, and I don’t think anyone can do what Jim does. No, I’m very different from Adam and Jim, very different.

Q: So who are you like?

A: Albert Brooks, although I haven’t had his career yet. He’s a serious guy, and his films, his comedy albums, his whole attitude about performing really influenced me when I was growing up. His short films on “Saturday Night Live” were brilliant, really innovative, conceptual stuff. Also his dad was in radio and he wanted to make films, and I come from a family of performers and I wanted to make films, too.

Q: What was it like growing up with Stiller-and-Meara as parents?

A: They were constantly getting stopped on the street, and as a kid you notice quickly when attention is taken away from you. My sister, Amy, who does stand-up now, does a funny bit about us spending Hanukkah with Hazel, our Jamaican housekeeper, when our parents were away. It’s so funny how she lit the candles and said the blessing in this heavy Jamaican accent. She knew more about it than we did.

Q: Your mom is Irish and your dad is Jewish, but you were raised Jewish?

A: My mom converted, but technically I’m Irish and I’m Jewish. I’m just much more in touch with my Jewish side. But we’re not religious. My dad’s religion is show business. He’s very dedicated to it because he came from nothing. His father was a bus driver on the lower East Side, where they lived in a tenement, and his parents totally didn’t understand what he wanted to do, so he and I came from very different backgrounds that way. My mom started as an actress--she’s actually very good--and she didn’t like being a stand-up performer. My dad was the one who wanted to do that. He knows how to do stand-up on his own, but he never liked to work without her.

Q: Did they encourage you to get into the business?

A: They didn’t encourage or discourage it. They were like, “We’ll support you if you’re serious about it,” but otherwise they were very noncommittal.

Q: You went to UCLA to study filmmaking but dropped out after a few months. Why?

A: Because I was scared. I think I didn’t mature until later in life, and if I could do it all again I would just chill out. But I was very fixated on what I wanted to do, and I wasn’t that well-adjusted socially, which may be one of the things about growing up around parents in show biz.

I’ve seen this in other kids with famous parents. The world you’re exposed to is so much more interesting than going to school; you never, never bond with kids your own age. I hated going to school. I was much more interested in hanging out on the set or being with adults. Also, because my parents waited until they were successful to have kids, I didn’t see their struggle, just the parties at the house and going to movie studios, so I just wanted to get in there and start doing it.

Q: After dropping out of college you wound up starring in the Broadway revival of “House of Blue Leaves.”

A: Well, two years later I did. Before that, I auditioned constantly and took acting classes at the Warren Robertson Theater Workshop [laughing], which was famous for teaching a lot of models to act. So that was my first job and I had a hell of a time getting it.

Q: How did you get it with no acting credentials?

A: Because my mother knew the playwright. I had never asked my parents for help before, but the casting director didn’t like me. So I asked my mother to ask [playwright] John Guare if he would give me an audition, and they brought me in at the final callbacks. It was like, “OK, bring in the favor.”

Q: How did acting on Broadway lead to your making your first film?

A: I made a short video backstage, this fake documentary about [co-star] John Mahoney winning a Tony, called “Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man,” that showed him as an alcoholic making passes at the women who played the nuns in the play. I showed it at a party at my parents’ in 1986, and it was one of the first times I saw people laughing at something I’d made, and I thought, “This is good.” That led to my second film, “The Hustler of Money,” that got me on “Saturday Night Live” and spurred me into making my own stuff.

Q: Why did you quit “Saturday Night Live” after less than a year?

A: Because it’s very live oriented, very performance oriented. Dennis Miller was on, [Jon] Lovitz, Mike Myers, and I’m more interested in putting things together with lots of takes and trying to do short films like what Albert Brooks had done.

Q: But it led to “The Ben Stiller Show” and then directing “Reality Bites.”

A: You don’t understand how lucky you are just getting a show on the air, or to have your first movie be well-regarded. You have no idea. I mean, I felt glad, like, “This is great,” but until you have the other, you don’t really know.

Q: And then you had the “other” with “Cable Guy.”

A: I separate that film into two categories: the making of it and the reaction to it. Shooting that movie was as much fun as I ever had, but post-production was not pleasurable.

Q: Why?

A: Because the studio demanded a release date, which is something I would never agree to again. We were really riding the line with tone in that movie and it would have benefited from having more time. I doubt whether that would have made it more successful because it was a very experimental film, but I would have felt that it was the movie it should have been.

Q: Now, it’s mostly known as the film that brought down Mark Canton at Columbia Pictures.

A: Yeah, whatever. It was also the first time anybody got $20 million to star in a movie. Now, I’m glad the whole thing happened because, like I said, you never know the good unless you know the bad. I’m very lucky “Cable Guy” happened before “Mary,” because if it was the other way around, I’d think, “Show biz is great!” You know what I mean?

But I loved shooting “Cable Guy” and I would work with Jim again in a second.

Q: How does he feel about it?

A: You’d have to ask him [laughing]. He’s nice whenever I see him, and he was never anything but totally supportive when [it] hit the fan, never backed off for a minute, which was commendable.

Q: Do you think “Cable Guy’s” failure put a damper on your acting opportunities? The studio didn’t want you on “Something About Mary.”

A: There’s always somebody else they want, you know? It’s not me, it’s Hollywood.

Q: Why did you go after “Something About Mary”? Did you know it would be such a huge hit?

A: Who expects a movie to be a blockbuster? But I had seen [Peter and Bobby Farrelly’s earlier film] “Dumb and Dumber” when I was really depressed and it made me laugh my ass off. So I thought that’s what “Mary” could be.

Q: How hard did you have to lobby for the role?

A: I didn’t lobby for it. I told [the Farrellys] I wanted to do it, and they had to go lobby Bill Mechanic [then president at 20th Century Fox].

[Stiller looks at the guy talking loudly at the next table.] I’m trying to talk to you without this guy winding up on the tape. [Listening] He designed a car chase.

Q: What?

A: That guy is a stunt coordinator and he’s telling them he designed a car chase. I can hear him. [Laughing] He looks like a stuntman. Could he be any blonder? Or tanner?

Q: Why does acting interest you after directing?

A: Acting in comedies is more than being an actor in an action movie. It’s more like a philosophy. You have to understand what you’re trying to do, but I don’t like talking about acting in interviews because it comes off sounding ridiculous.

Q: But you also act in dramas, which is the trend of the moment for comedians like Jim Carrey and Robin Williams, who seem to be trying to follow Tom Hanks.

A: I find it much tougher for dramatic actors to do comedy. If someone is funny, they’re funny. I like to watch Robin Williams act, not everything he does, but he’s a really soulful, good actor who is really funny, too.

Q: Do you think you’re a good actor or just a funny one?

A: I don’t know. I haven’t had that much experience on shooting quote, unquote, drama.

Q: You’ve starred in three of them, including “Permanent Midnight,” which was pretty dark.

A: I don’t look at it as a drama. Jerry Stahl is a funny guy. I was just trying to play him.

Q: You seem to identify strongly with him.

A: I never had a drug addiction problem, but I identified with his addictive personality and his whole self-loathing thing. But I’ve talked about this before in interviews and it’s a really bad thing to bring up because the interviewer goes, “Oh, are you self-loathing?” and you go, “No! Well, whatever.” So it’s not even smart to bring it up, but there was a major aspect of that in him and, for whatever reasons, I understood and identified with that.

Q: It was also your first time playing a leading man. Do you think we’re seeing a revival of the old Dustin Hoffman anti-hero hero?

A: You mean like the Al Pacino ethnic, what David O. Russell--you know who he is?--calls the big nose leading man? I don’t know. I’m not good with the trend stuff. That’s up to Hollywood. I think I know where I stand.

Q: Where do you think you’ll be standing in five years?

A: Where will I be and where would I like to be and in what area of my life? There’s a lot of different categories. [To the waitress] I’d love another diet Coke.

Q: OK, career-wise.

A: In five years, I hope I’m writing, directing and acting in things.

Q: That’s kind of broad.

A: On one level I’d like to be producing television because it allows you to reach an incredibly large audience bigger than movies, and if it works, you can really put something out there. But I’m interested in doing the stuff that I’m doing now.

Q: What about your personal life in five years? Any changes?

A: I’m not married, and I don’t have kids and I’d like to. I’m 33. I’ll be 34 before the year is over.

Q: You’re dating Calista Flockhart. Do you see her as the mother of your children?

A: I’m friends with Calista. But I don’t talk about that. She’s been through a lot with the press, and it’s a nightmare what she’s had to deal with, a nightmare.

Q: So she has said.

A: It is! I’m lucky I had 12 years of working, of acclimating. She went from being an out-of-work actress to that, and I don’t think she had any idea of what it was going to be like.

Q: Do you watch “Ally McBeal”?

A: I have watched it, but I detest sitcoms. I literally can’t watch one for more than five seconds, and I used to watch a lot of TV [growing up] in the early ‘70s--”The Partridge Family,” “The Brady Bunch,” “Bewitched.” Now I just watch movies, sports highlights, but I don’t have a TV in my bedroom, which is a big thing.

Q: So TV is really a thing of the past for you?

A: I know I won’t do this forever, be an actor-for-hire in comedies, but right now that window of opportunity is open, and unless you have no interest in it, you just can’t walk away from it. [Laughing] There was a sketch on “SCTV” with John Candy and Eugene Levy that was one of the funniest sketches they ever did about these two characters who did these 3-D movie take-offs on these cheesy exploitation films like “3-D House of Stewardesses,” which they did brilliantly.

[A stack of dishes crashes to the floor, followed by applause.] This is the noisiest restaurant I could have possibly picked, right? Like this is the worst possible tape recording. [Looking around and laughing] What I’m trying to get to is that in the sketch they also gave tips for acting, like “practical jokes are always big on the set because there’s so much downtime.” I guess what I’m trying to say is that acting in a comedy can be an extremely enjoyable process.