Ben Stiller Interview: 'Tom Cruise Wanted To Have Big Hands'

Ben Stiller is best known as one of the best comedy actors of recent times thanks to films such as Zoolander, Meet The Fockers and Dodgeball. Today, however, he’s here to talk about his new action-comedy movie Tropic Thunder, about a group of actors making a war movie.

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS!

Entertainmentwise: This is the first time you’ve directed a movie since 2001’s Zoolander. What was it about this story that made you want to take on that dual role?

Ben Stiller: I’ve actually been working on this since Zoolander in 2001, so just over the years I’ve been working on the script and trying to get it to the point where it’s ready to go. About three years ago, we got to a draft where I felt good about it, and we had a read-through, then got another read-through based on that, and then we went about trying to make it. So it was really just working on the script, there were a few stories I had been working on for a while and this was the first one where I felt we were ready to go.

EW: Tom Cruise has a hilarious role in the film. Was he keen to do that role, or did he take some persuading?

BS: He was totally into it. (His character) sort of evolved, we were doing the make up test and he said he wanted to have big hands in the movie, which I thought was just a strange idea at the time. But we talked about it, and he actually had these hands made, and thought it would work. And during another make-up test he started dancing, sort of like the gopher in Caddyshack, and I thought that’s really funny and he just kept doing that. So we filmed him dancing, went to the edit room and put some music to it, and based on that we wrote all of the dance sequences into the movie.

EW: Was it always your intention to satirise the war movie genre?

BS: Yeah, I mean when you’re doing a comedy and want to satirise those who take themselves too seriously, it’s the most serious genre. And if you tried to satirise something like a comedy it wouldn’t work that well. I also love war movie genre, I’m a fan of all those movies.

EW: Was it based on any terrible experiences you had making a movie?

BS: I had a small part in Empire of the Sun, it was one shot where Christian Bale, who was like ten years old then, was coming out of the weeds or something, and he’d gone to catch a pheasant. It was a really long shot, like a five minute shot, and I screwed my line up at the very end of the shot. I had one line in the whole movie and I screwed it up. So I went “oh, shit, sorry” and there was just silence. Steven Spielberg was behind the monitor and just started shouting “What? What?” and I said “sorry I screwed up my line we should stop”. He just looked at me and said, “you don’t get to cut! You never stop!” and he got really upset. So Steven Spielberg got mad at me! (laughs) He was like my idol so I realised then that you never yell cut. What’s really nice though is that he’s seen it and he likes it.

EW: Finally, was it always your intention to have Spider-man and Iron Man making out (in Robert Downey Jr’s fake trailer in the movie)?

BS: (laughs) No that totally just happened! Actually Tobey was a last minute replacement for that, he did us a big favour. It turned out to be one of those things where the replacement ends up being better than the first choice. Afterwards, when I realised it was Iron Man and Spider-man making out, that was just even better!”

Tropic Thunder is released on 19th September.