The Director as Best Actor

Jay Roach thinks he’s a fraud.

Sure, he may have directed two of the most successful comedies of the 1990s--”Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery” and its sequel, “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me.” And now he’s gotten to work with no less an esteemed duo as Robert De Niro and Ben Stiller in “Meet the Parents,” which is getting terrific reviews in advance of its nationwide opening Friday.

But he doesn’t really know what the heck he’s doing, and all the success is just smoke and mirrors and luck--and one of these days he’s bound to be exposed.

At least that’s the feeling he can’t shake.

Sitting over lunch at a Universal Studios dining room, with former Universal Chairman Lew Wasserman in the background and a steady stream of executives and colleagues stopping by to say hello, the casually dressed Roach, 43, seems at ease, a natural fit in the world of major motion pictures.

It’s a ruse, he swears.

There’s a 1966 film, “Andrei Roublev” by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, that Roach loves. He describes in detail a scene in which a young boy is thrust into the job of making a new bell for a church after his father, the master bell-maker, dies. The boy cockily tells everyone he can do the job. But when the bell is raised and rung--without cracking--a monk finds the boy curled up in the mud, crying because he, in truth, had no idea what he was doing and was living a big lie.

That’s what directing is like to Roach, who confesses, “I have no idea how it works. I just this morning saw the completed last reel of my film for the first time, and I was weeping. I was going, ‘I can’t believe I survived this.’ I just had to pretend like it would work. After the film I said, ‘Oh, my God, this actually works! How did I do that?’ ”

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Perhaps it’s the anxiety and self-doubts that made Roach the perfect person to helm “Meet the Parents,” which he describes as “an anxiety dream.” It’s the story of a would-be son-in-law (Stiller) and his first stay with his potential bride’s folks. The over-protective, idiosyncratic father (De Niro) thinks no one is good enough for his little girl and runs the suitor through the ringer. The basic formula has been seen before--from the racially charged “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” to the boorish Pauly Shore vehicle “Son in Law.”

Here, Stiller’s Greg tries so hard to make a good impression that he ends up digging himself deeper into stupid lies, implausible stories and humiliating predicaments every frame. He’s a smoker and indifferent to cats in the militantly smoke-free house of someone who’s trained his cat to use the toilet. He’s a city boy who ends up improvising (badly) tales of farm life.

Getting in over your head and having to deal with it is a theme that runs through Roach’s films. Mike Myers’ Austin Powers character is a clueless buffoon who’s powered purely by ego. And in his other film, “Mystery, Alaska,” a ragtag bunch of local amateur hockey players takes on a team of pros that comes to town.

Those are concocted scenarios, though. For Roach, the situation in “Meet the Parents” is all too plausible.

“It became clear to me that the movie was more and more personal as I went along,” he says, offering up his own experience meeting the family of his wife, musician Susanna Hoffs of the just-reunited Bangles.

“I mean, I really was drawn to the script originally because Ithought it was hilarious. I did identify with the main character,” Roach says. “But I had no idea how close it was to my approach to life. I had a couple of long relationships before I met Sue, but they didn’t work out because I would start to overcompensate for things and cover for the overcompensations, and as soon as you cover for anything, then you’re vulnerable to exposure and then you worry about that.

“When I met Sue and found out her father was a psychoanalyst, it was terrifying. I was already convinced, had been convinced for years, that I was severely mentally ill and I’d been covering for it. And now to meet the father-in-law who’d see right through it?”

In truth, he quickly adds, Hoffs’ father proved to be “the coolest, nonjudgmental person,” and he and the musician have lived happily, with two young sons to show for it. And Hoffs’ mother, writer-director Tamar Hoffs, and Roach for a brief time made up what he says is likely the only mother-in-law/son-in-law writing team working together on a project. So he worried for nothing.

That experience was paralleled in the pre-production phase of “Meet the Parents” when Roach, who had been interested in making the movie--the screenplay is by Jim Herzfeld and John Hamburg--for several years, was trying to nail down the lead actors. The crucial moment came when he went to make his pitch to De Niro, who was just coming off the hit mob comedy “Analyze This.”

“I knew that Ben’s involvement was depending on getting Bob, and it became a very stressful morning,” says Roach. “I had to go to his hotel here in L.A. where he was filming ‘Rocky and Bullwinkle’ ’ had to use his alias to get to the room and everything. And he had that shaved military haircut for the role.

“I over-prepared for the meeting. I had a whole notebook of notes and story notes, because I knew that he and his producing partner, Jane Rosenthal, had some issues with the script. So I had every answer mapped out and carefully outlined. I knew I had to win his approval and I would probably go to any lengths to do so.

“And it caught me by surprise. The thing that he was most interested in was the easiest possible thing to prepare, which was to tell him about my life--what was interesting to me and what were my own disasters and dysfunctions.”

Focal Point:

His Life Story

So Roach told him of his childhood in Albuquerque, N.M., where his father worked in the defense industry in a security-clearance position that he wasn’t allowed to talk about (something that relates to De Niro’s character’s true nature), his student years at Stanford and then USC’s School of Cinema-Television and the other aspects of his life.

“He was interested in my take on the story,” Roach says. “But he was much more interested in hearing about my father and my relationship to Sue and why this movie made any sense to me at all.

“And he goes, ‘Oh, good. You’ll figure this out then. You’re smart.’ ”

Dazed, Roach left the hotel and went to his car.

“To have Robert De Niro say that, you know, you’re outside dancing in the parking lot,” he says. “But you’re also saying, ‘Oh my God! Now I have to do it!’ ”

It wasn’t that much different when Myers gave Roach his first feature directing job. The two were social friends, and Roach--a lover of Swingin’ ‘60s cinema and Monty Python madness--had been helping Myers hone the spy-spoof script, and actually drew up a list of potential directors for the picture. Unbeknownst to Roach, Myers put his name on the top of the list as his own first choice. In fact, knowing of the director’s tendencies to anxiety, Myers told Hoffs about his choice and the two kept it secret until the day before a meeting Myers had set up for Roach with Universal.

“I knew Jay could handle ‘Austin Powers’ because of his love for the genre and because he is a great storyteller in life,” says Myers.

But it was a hard sell.

“I remember the first meeting [with the studio execs] where they were very justifiably skeptical of me and suspicious of Mike’s motives,” Roach says. “I said, ‘Look, this is going to be a very funny movie, but I think if you layer in and tighten a sense of style, the style itself could be funny.’ There was some fear that the style might actually distract from the comedy, so I showed them [Woody Allen’s] ‘Sleeper’ and a lot of old, campy spy movies. I trained as a cameraman and I’d grown up on Woody Allen and Monty Python, as well as foreign films, and had a real determination to have it make some sort of statement with its look.”

Myers says that Roach’s instincts and sensibilities were essential.

“Jay is a brilliant collaborator,” he says. “Jay created a cool universe and allowed me to play in it. His input to the story and the look and tone of the movies was invaluable.”

The truth is, though, that no matter what Roach’s contributions were to the “Austin Powers” world, the films are largely seen as Mike Myers’ movies.

“That’s cool,” Roach says. “I don’t mind that. He sort of reached down and pulled me out of an obscure, long-term struggling existence of independent films and trying to make good of the promise of film school for 10 years. It’s like being in a band that someone else started. But I also get to do solo work, and that’s where ‘Mystery, Alaska’ and ‘Meet the Parents’ come in.”

Even with “Mystery, Alaska,” though, what attention it got (which wasn’t much) generally went to the writer, David E. Kelley, who had become a media darling as creator-writer of “The Practice” and “Ally McBeal.”

“I got not as much credit as Mike maybe on ‘Austin Powers,’ ” Roach says. “But I got not as much blame as David got on ‘Mystery, Alaska.’ For some reason, in all the reviews it seemed very personal about David.”

So is “Meet the Parents” his coming-out party--a “Meet Jay Roach” exercise, a chance to clearly put his stamp on a film?

“I’m not sure that I can even say what my stamp is,” Roach says. “I’ve always admired Woody Allen and other auteur directors. But I’vealso admired great directors like Sydney Pollack, Hal Ashby and Billy Wilder. You don’t really know what they do--not like a Truffaut film.”

Looking at the films Roach has in development for the future, it’s no easier to see any pattern--though there’s a current of absurdity and playfulness that runs through them. First up is a third “Austin Powers.”

And he’s working with English humorist Douglas Adams on a screenplay from Adam’s sci-fi satire “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” He’s also working on a long-discussed film based on the Mad magazine comic feature “Spy vs. Spy.”

Stiller says that Roach has rare talents as a director.

“The thing is these days there are so few people out there who are really smart and gifted at directing comedy that he’ll always be in demand,” says Stiller. “What’s great about him is he has a real desire to stretch and grow, but he’s not in any rush. He’s not going, ‘Now I have to go make ‘Reds’ or something.’

“I was so intimidated working with De Niro. I don’t know what I’d do as a director. But any actor, De Niro down to me, is looking for a good director to direct you. Jay understood that. He quickly developed a rapport and Bob respected him. He’d [Roach] tell me, ‘I can’t believe I’m telling Robert De Niro to say it faster,’ or whatever.”

But to Roach, when getting De Niro or Stiller to believe in him, he was still like the boy in the Russian movie.

“That’s my metaphor for my own anxiety, my own anguish,” he says. “I have to get over this.”