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Ben Stiller Bytes
An Interview with Ben Stiller
(Page 2)
MM: How much of your character, Michael’s, pre-occupation with communications was ad-libbed by you?
BS: Some of the stuff was ad-libbed, and some of it we’d improvise in rehearsal. Helen kind of had a real ear for this character based on what we had talked about. That scene, when I’m in the phone booth talking to her on the cellular—I was talking to Helen on the other end of the phone because it was a real cellular phone and I had them hook us up. So, it was funny because she would like—well, when I say “I love you,” I don’t know if you heard it, that was like an accident that happened and Helen said “you have to keep that in.” So that was kind of our working relationship; working back and forth kind of stuff.
[We picked Houston] because Helen was from there and she wrote the script to take place in Houston. So we shot the scenes we could in Houston and ended up filming most of it in LA and just filming the exteriors in Houston because of the money. I also think it being set in Houston is interesting in a couple of different ways. One, Houston is a city that in the early eighties was really prospering. The oil business was really happening there; then they built all these buildings and now a lot of them are empty. In a way it’s kind of symbolic to what the nineties are as a result of the eighties. So it was interesting to me that they [the characters] are living their lives against that backdrop.
MM: You slam every major TV show, every product possible. This is an independent feature, so how much of a part does product placement play in terms of budget, what happens to it, etc?
BS: There is product placement in the movie, but I don’t have any problem with it because it never happened where they said “OK, you can put our product in but you have to change your script.” I didn’t have a problem with it because any way we could help the movie monetarily that didn’t impinge on the credibility of the film or my own integrity was fine with me. And I wanted as much money as I could possibly have to make the movie the right way. It’s very important I think to the movie to have these real products that you can identify with; The Gap, and Big Gulp, things like that are really important. Pizza Hut I wanted to get. I wanted to make sure we had Pizza Hut because that was making a statement about “tie-ins” and it was meant to be crass. I don’t know that the Pizza Hut people knew that, but they went along with it. I guess the bottom line to them is they had Pizza Hut in the movie, they had no idea what we were really doing.
Diet Coke was written into the script; Helen lives on Diet Coke and smokes cigarettes so we wanted to have it in there because it was real. A movie like this depends on that because of identification, kind of as reference points.
I remember one of the college screenings we did, a test screening. At the pot smoking scenes people were like “you have to keep that in there because it’s very real.” It is, for a lot of people, it is very real.
MM: Where else do you want to go with your film career? Do you want to stay with directing, do you want to do acting in somebody else’s work? What do you want to do?
BS: For me, directing is the most important thing. It’s what I want to be able to do. I want to be able to direct different kinds of movies,, different genres. I love comedies, I’d like to go back and do comedy on television, maybe. On cable, or specials where I could spend more time on one hour of television as opposed to going crazy and trying to put out a series. And I’d love to act in other people’s projects if the work is there. But for me directing is really the focus—directing movies.
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This story was published in the March 1994 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
Ben Stiller bytes/An Interview with Ben Stiller
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