Over five years in the making, Ben Stiller’s documentary about his parents Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, whose television appearances were a mainstay of 1960s and ’70s American culture, grew to encompass his own personal experience with family and parenting, with results that surprised him.
“I just wanted to tell the story of their careers and lives and as it evolved I realized it had to have more … People would say that’s interesting … but there is something missing in terms of the personal perspective of it. [And] that took a while, because I really didn’t think I wanted to be in the movie at all,” Stiller said as the Apple original film world premiered at the New York Film Festival Sunday.
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Moving back and forth in time the doc is anchored by copious audio, video and written archives preserved by Jerry Stiller from the couple’s early love letters to footage of their rising fame as a comedy duo on The Ed Sullivan Show with laugh-out-loud clips of Last Man and Woman Dating, Jonah and the Whale and other routines and copious clips of The Mike Douglas Show.
The duo exulted in success and strove to support a young family in a fickle industry. Different in temperaments and aspirations, they were often in conflict.
Meara passed away in 2015 and Jerry Stiller in 2020. Ben Stiller and his sister Amy started the doc shortly after, during Covid, reminiscing in their Upper West Side childhood apartment about their parents and their own experience as kids of a very busy and often distracted but loving showbiz couple. The doc is sprinkled with Stiller interviewing his own children Ella and Quinn and finding, to his surprise, that they feel much like he had, wishing he’d been more present. “You think you know what your kids are thinking, but you don’t,” he said.
“My kids grew over five years. The interview with Ella was done at the beginning, so I’m interviewing her when she’s still a teenager. She’s 23 now. The interview with Quinn was done about maybe seven or eight months ago, at the end of the process. So there was a different intention, even when I was talking to Ella, as opposed to when I was talking to Quinn, knowing that it was going more to these sort of themes of how … your children have the things you pass on, both good and bad.”
Asked in a post-screening Q&A if he thinks his parents would like the film, he said, “I don’t know,” but that his mom might, his dad probably wouldn’t. “If the projector doesn’t break” it means it’s okay, he joked.
“It’s very personal. It’s real. So it’s kind of a strange thing, I’ve never made a movie about my family … What we were talking about was our lives. And then it was figuring out how to make it into a movie that had some sort of a cohesion. And I really just wanted it to be something that people would want to watch, even if they maybe didn’t know about our folks.”
“I think everybody in the family felt it was okay to… put it out there because we were able to see the themes that came through, that when we would show it to people, they’d be like, ‘Oh, this kind of reminds me of my own relationship with my parents’ … There’s something there that people can relate to.”
Stiller said the NYFF has always felt “very warm and welcoming as a festival to me, and I know my parents loved it.” Stiller & Meara It’s a very Upper West Side, New York movie, and this is an Upper West Side, New York Film Festival that I’ve grown up with too. And so it’s just kind of surreal, actually, to be here at this moment in time to show this movie.”
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