Advertisement
Ben Stiller Bytes
An Interview with Ben Stiller
Reality Bites, the comedy-feature debut for 23-year-old screenwriter Helen Childress follows a close circle of twenty-something friends as they try their best to survive the sometimes harsh, and often odd, reality of life after college.
It’s also the feature directing debut for Ben Stiller, creator and host of “The Ben Stiller Show,” the short-lived but Emmy-winning television show on the FOX network. Stiller, the son of comedy team Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, brings his “Saturday Night Live” and MTV experience to the witty and offbeat Reality Bites. Ben Stiller was in Seattle to talk about his new move in early February, 1994.
Kathleen McInnis (MM): I found the movie hysterically funny. I was wondering how much of that was scripted? How much was in the Childress script and how much was you, or the actors?
Ben Stiller (BS): The script was extremely funny when I read it and that’s why I wanted to do it, because I thought it was really well written and the characters seemed real to me. A lot of the work that I did with Helen on the script was on my character and on the structure of the movie. Originally, it was much more about all the characters in the movie. Janeane [Garofalo]’s character, Vikki, and Steve [Zahn]’s character, Sammy, and Ethan [Hawke]’s character, Troy; all their stories were much more fleshed out. I felt like I couldn’t really bring all those stories together; couldn’t really tell them all fully, so I just wanted to make it more about [Winona Ryder’s character] Lelaina and her relationship with Troy.
[Producers] Michael Shamberg and Danny DeVito were partners; Michael had this idea to do a movie about people in their twenties about three years ago and he read a script of Helen’s that she had written on spec. Based on that, he met with her and she went back and wrote her first draft of the script. They went through a lot of different drafts, I think, for over a year. Then I came on, and Helen and I worked together for nine or ten months. By December of 1992 we had a draft we liked and all felt good about. Then it took a few more months to actually get it going. It’s been a long process.
I think a lot of people want to put this in a generational kind of “it’s only relevant to people in their twenties” thing. This whole—I don’t even like to say it—“generation X” bullshit. And I really wanted to make a movie that just emotionally works if you’ve ever been in your twenties, if you’ve ever gone through this time in your life when you’re trying to figure out how to get what you want and who you are. I think it’s the same no matter when it happens to you, the fifties, the seventies…
When people ask me what the movie’s about, it’s very easy to say the basic plot line, it’s not really that complicated. But for me, the movie is about a lot of different things.
In the original script, Michael [Stiller’s character] was in his mid thirties, an ad executive. I wanted to make him a guy closer to their own age, and who was kind of another aspect of the generation in terms of someone in their twenties who actually has a real job and seems to be doing well. On the outside, he’s okay, but he’s dealing with the same fears and the same problems—just dealing with them in different ways. I thought it was important to see that aspect of what’s going on.
The character was a little different when I read the script, and that’s one of the notes I had on the script when I first went through it. I thought he should be a more realistic character too, and not just the guy who is obviously the jerk who doesn’t understand [Lelaina]. As we talked about the character we improvised some scenes as Helen was re-writing, and it became one of these things.
1 of 3 |
Digg
StumbleUpon
Facebook
Del.icio.us
Reddit
YahooAdvertisement
COMMENTS | POST A COMMENT 
This story was sponsored by
This story was published in the March 1994 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
Ben Stiller bytes/An Interview with Ben Stiller
Order this issue | Subscribe to MM
Latest from the blog:
Video Views Pick: Wanted
The editors of VIDEO VIEWS magazine pick Wanted, based on the Mark Millar graphic novel, as the best new DVD this week. Featuring eight bonus featurettes and a cast that includes James McAvoy, Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman, home video watchers can't go wrong.
Posted 12.3.08 | Video Views Pick | No comments yet...
Other recent posts:
Film Independent Announces the 2009 Spirit Award Nominees
Episode Seven: Behind the Screams of James Gunn’s “Scream Queens”
Four Christmases Kicks Off the Holiday Season On Top
Posts people are talking about:
SITE DELIVERY OPTIONS
