NEW YORK — Ben Stiller hadn’t been planning to make a documentary about his parents, the beloved comedic actors Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, but in May 2020, a week after Jerry’s death, at 92, he just picked up a camera, just as he’d been practically raised to do as a kid.
His sister Amy was going to sell the Upper West Side apartment where they’d grown up, and he wanted to film it one last time. “It was such a big thing to let go,” Ben told a packed audience Sunday afternoon at the New York Film Festival premiere of the movie that resulted, “Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost.”
Plus, it was covid. They’d filled a whole Broadway theater for his mother’s service when she’d died five years earlier, at 85. But they wouldn’t be able to do a public celebration for Jerry, who’d become globally famous in his mid-60s when he joined “Seinfeld” in its fifth season and turned the part of Frank Costanza — dad to Jason Alexander’s George — into the hot-tempered icon we think of today. That’s when Ben, the director of “Tropic Thunder,” “Zoolander” and “Reality Bites,” decided to make a movie about them.
What started out as an “American Masters”-type story of their careers — they were one of the most successful male-female comedy duos of all time — eventually morphed into an extended family therapy session, over the course of the five years it took Stiller to finish the film.
As he excavated new insights about his parents, Stiller said he began to realize all the ways he’d subjected his own kids to what he himself had gone through, and, in some ways, made even bigger mistakes. He even started to repair his fractured relationship with his wife, actress Christine Taylor, whom he’d married in 2000 after meeting on the set of a TV pilot, before they separated in 2017. During covid, just as Ben began working on the documentary, they decided to live together with their two children, Ella, now 23, and Quinlin “Quinn,” now 20. By 2022, they’d announced they were back together.
“It’s a little personal, but it’s also, I think, in a way, about everybody, too,” Ben said in his NYFF introduction, thanking his parents, and saying he just hoped they’d be okay with the film. “If the projector doesn’t break, I think we’re all good.” (The film will be in select theaters Oct. 17 and begins streaming on Apple TV+ on Oct. 24.)
His parents’ act wove in their real-life marital squabbles and dynamics, creating a unique pressure on his own marriage: He and Christine had also performed together in 2001’s “Zoolander,” 2004’s “Dodgeball” and 2016’s “Zoolander 2.”
“When we separated my feeling was like, ‘Oh, I’m failing at this,’ and look at my parents. They have this incredible 50-plus year marriage and I can’t live up to that,” Ben tells Christine in the documentary.
What he hadn’t really considered until he started making the movie was the kind of toll his parents’ unique and very public codependency had on their relationship — which would explain the many hours they spent in individual and couples therapy, and the separate bedrooms they kept at the end.
The film begins with Ben and Amy in their parents’ apartment, laughing and stumbling over how to dissect those two extraordinary lives while also dissecting their own. As part of their grieving process, the siblings sifted through troves of archival material that Jerry and Anne left behind, from love letters to recordings of their many sketches as an odd couple — she was a slender redheaded Irish Catholic and he was a slightly shorter Brooklyn Jew — performing for tens of millions of people Sunday nights on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in the 1960s. Jerry, in particular, recorded cassette tapes of his every thought and every conversation with Anne and the kids.
Making the documentary gave Ben a purpose when he really needed one. “My career had been going along for a long time, but things actually weren’t great in my personal life,” Stiller says in the film. “I just felt out of balance and unhappy and kind of disconnected from my family, from my kids and just kind of a little bit lost.”
He tried to understand what drove his parents. His father grew up working-class, with a father who’d given up his own dreams of being an actor to drive a taxi and bus in order to survive the 1930s. Anne’s mother had taken her own life when she was young, after a long battle with depression. Much of her childhood had been spent trying to make her mother laugh. “I think her mother was one step behind the audience,” Ben says in the documentary.
They’d met and fallen in love as struggling actors in New York and Jerry convinced Anne, who wanted to do more serious theater work, to become a comedy duo with him because there was so little work out there at the time. Then they got locked into the act, while wanting different things. Their kids sometimes got lost in the mix of their ambitions.
“I started to think about my parents and all the stress and tension I remember seeing as a kid and the pressure when they were working together and how they stayed together through it,” Ben says in the documentary. “I think I wanted to somehow understand how they did it.”
Every time Ben showed a cut of the documentary to people he knew, though, they’d tell him it felt like something was missing in terms of his personal perspective. “And that took a while to get to,” he said at the NYFF premiere, “because I really didn’t think I wanted to be in the movie at all.”
It actually took two or three years for his editors and producers to convince him that the story was really about his famous parents’ influence on their famous son, and how all families are a mess in their own unique way. “I was pushing myself out of it because I didn’t want it to be something about me, and I realized I had to kind of go the opposite way,” Stiller said.
Sometimes, the introspection got to be too much. Stiller had a system wherein his editor Adam Kurnitz would listen to the many hours of audiotape and flag the best bits for him. “There were times when I didn’t want to deal with this movie at all, especially in the beginning,” he said at NYFF.
“Adam was relaying stuff to me, because sometimes they’re just too emotional and you go down this rabbit hole of looking at footage, and it takes you somewhere. Somedays… it would be like, ‘Okay, we’re just making a movie,’ and then other days it would be like, ‘Oh my god, I’m, like, crying.'”
The most revealing parts, though, might be the interviews Stiller conducts with Christine, Ella and Quinn.
“I literally can’t ever remember you being around when I was growing up,” Ella tells her dad in an interview he said was conducted when she was a teenager at the beginning of the filmmaking process. She also calls him out for cutting her cameo in his critically panned 2013 directorial effort, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.”
“It was the worst mistake I’ve ever made,” Stiller tells her, laughing.
Quinn, in a more recent interview, tells his dad that his obsession with work would “put a damper on the fun part of vacation,” and that he had the sense from Stiller that “being a father would come last to these things.” Specifically, Ben says he didn’t quite register how disappointed Quinn was when he told him he’d be gone for three months shooting “Night at the Museum 3.”
His kids loved those movies, he thought at the time, but it’s only now that he realizes that wasn’t what really mattered to them. He’d thought he was doing so much better than his parents because he’d come home on weekends, but he was really just putting them through the same things he went through as a kid.
Christine recalls, laughing, how Anne would always tell her to take care of herself, seeming to sense that Ben took after Jerry in always putting his work first. “She had my back — and you were her son!”
By the time he interviewed Christine and Quinn, about eight months from finishing the movie, “We were in a place in our relationship … where we kind of evolved,” he said at the premiere.
They decided as a family to get as personal as they did, Stiller said, “because there’s something there that people can relate to.”
At the end of the screening, moderator Dennis Lim asked Stiller what his kids thought of the movie.
“Quinn, what did you think?” Stiller shouted into the theater.
“Terrible!” a voice replied, to an eruption of laughter. “No, I loved it.”
Stiller, cracking up, admitted that the most fascinating part of filming was hearing his kids’ feedback on his parenting. “I had no idea what that interview with Quinn was going to be, and that he was going to say that stuff to me,” Stiller said. “As a filmmaker I was like, ‘Okay, this is a good moment for the movie.'”
The crowd erupted in laughter. Then Stiller jumped in, with perfect comic timing.
