There are three hard and fast rules for making movie comedies.
First, you never make a war comedy during a war.
Second, you never make a comedy about Hollywood insiders.
And third, you never cast a white guy as a black guy.
Welcome to Ben Stiller’s new movie comedy “Tropic Thunder.”
Stiller not only directed, produced and co-wrote the film, which opens Wednesday, but stars in it as one of three neurotic, self-absorbed actors who head to Southeast Asia to film a “Rambo-like” war movie. During the filming, the trio gets caught up in a real war, only they think the action is part of the script.
Tugg Speedman (Stiller) is an action star on the decline who desperately needs a hit. Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black) is trying to expand his résumé behind the gross-out comedies that made him famous. And then there is Australian actor Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey, Jr.), a five-time Oscar-winner who gets so into character that he undergoes a surgical procedure to darken his skin so that he can play a black soldier.
Relaxing in his Los Angeles hotel suite last week, the 42-year-old Stiller – son of comedy legends Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, husband of actress Christine Taylor and father of two small children – talked about the long process to bring this “action comedy” to the big screen, whether he encountered any resistance from studio executives and why he wasn’t afraid to break the three basic rules of movie comedies.
ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER: Do films like “Meet the Parents” and “Night at the Museum” give you a “Get out of jail free” card when it comes to making movies in Hollywood?
BEN STILLER:It’s the nature of the business that if you’re in movies that are successful at the box office, it opens up opportunities.
OCR: That works for acting, but what about writing and directing films?
STILLER: I think it goes into other areas as well because people are more willing to give you a chance, although if you’re in it, too, that helps.
OCR: Was that true for “Tropic Thunder”?
STILLER:That was probably one of the reasons it got made.
OCR: Is there an actual meeting with executives in which you say ‘My movie is about Vietnam, but I’m in it?”
STILLER:Not on this one because the process started so long ago. It was about 10 years in development. I was the one who was holding things up because I didn’t think we had gotten the script right. Eventually, they liked the script a lot. But they still encouraged me to be in it.
OCR: Did you want to act in it?
STILLER: Not really. I wanted to direct it. Acting was secondary.
OCR: Would you have done it without acting in it?
STILLER: Oh, sure.
OCR: But they insisted?
STILLER: They didn’t insist, but I could see their reasoning.
OCR: Is it subtle, like ‘You don’t have to act in it, Ben, but then you only get $600 to make it?”
STILLER (LAUGHS): I think in big-budget movies, it does become a math equation to the studios. It helps for them to feel like they have some sort of insurance. Of course, that rarely has anything to do with reality, and they know that, but it makes them feel better.
OCR: During the entire process, did anyone point out that you were making a war movie during a war?
STILLER: When we started writing this, there was no war. No, maybe it does go back to after the first Gulf War. The truth is I started thinking about this movie in 1987.
OCR: But you were making it during this war?
STILLER:Yes, that’s true. I thought it might make our movie more or less relevant, but I wasn’t sure which. But I did believe that the war might change the way people look at our movie, although it’s not really about war as much as it’s about actors making a war movie.
OCR: Movies about actors scare studios almost as much as movies about war, don’t they?
STILLER: They don’t know how to market them. They worry that it’s too inside.
OCR: And Vietnam?
STILLER: This movie happens to be about actors making a movie about Vietnam, but it could just as easily have been a World War II movie they were making. Or the Gulf War. But for me, that Vietnam War movie genre, from “The Deer Hunter” and “Apocalypse Now” to “Full Metal Jacket” and “Platoon,” is unique to American movies and hasn’t been fully satirized.
OCR: So, you’ve got a movie about war during a war. It’s about the Vietnam War. It’s about actors. And you’ve cast a white actor to play a black man. You like living dangerously, don’t you?
STILLER: It’s possible that we didn’t think this thing through. Perhaps because I didn’t want to hear the answer that might have come if I had questioned the wisdom of doing that. But my gut feeling was that casting Robert as the black soldier was a good idea. Of course, I didn’t know if that would translate to a general audience, or an African-American audience.
OCR: You did understand that it was risky?
STILLER: Yes, but we put our heads down and concentrated on how to make it work. Obviously, not being black, I didn’t really know how African American audiences might feel about it, but at the end of the day, you can’t overthink it.
OCR: Do you think this movie is a tough sell?
STILLER: I don’t know. We wondered if people would care about these actors’ problems. The trick was to convince people that these actors have problems that are relatable to the audience.
OCR: How did you make them relatable?
STILLER:First, they’re human beings.
OCR: Can you get the audience to buy that one?
STILLER (LAUGHS): I hope so. But, seriously, I hope we’ve found something in these actors that the audience can identify or empathize with. Although they’re actors, they have problems that a lot of people face. It’s about emotions that all humans feel. And if we’ve made them entertaining to watch, the audience might be willing to make the journey with them.
OCR: Did you draw solely on your own experiences as an actor to mock the profession?
STILLER: No, I didn’t have to. Everyone in this movie has their own personal experiences to draw from, so it was easy.
OCR: How was the shoot?
STILLER: It was the most fun I’ve ever had making a movie.
OCR: Did you ever feel like Francis Ford Coppola and the legendary problems he encountered in the making of “Apocalypse Now”?
STILLER (LAUGHS): There was one time when we were shooting the end of the movie. We were overschedule and the studio was clamping down. Finally, they said they were coming out to the set (in Hawaii). I showed them some footage and they gave me some extra time. It was right then, in a compound that took an hour to get to, when I felt like we were deep into it. One of our helicopter pilots, who was one of the aerial assistants on “Apocalypse Now,” started telling us stories about the six weeks it took to film that raid on the village. Although our experience was nothing like what they went through, that was my Francis Ford Coppola moment.
Contact the writer: 714-796-5051, ext. 1110, or bkoltnow@ocregister.com
