Ben Stiller didn’t want to insert himself into his documentary Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost.
The actor and director intended to make a movie about his parents, the revered comedic duo of Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, and at first felt “self-conscious” about his own presence. But when he started to show friends the film—which is set to premiere at the New York Film Festival before debuting in theaters Oct. 17 and on Apple TV+ Oct. 24—he heard a similar refrain: “I’m not really seeing that much of you in it.”
He realized he had a role to play.
“The thing that was missing was probably my perspective on my parents, but also my perspective on my own relationships as affected by growing up with them,” he said in a phone call while on a break from shooting the fourth Meet the Parents movie.
If he was exposing his parents, he also had to expose himself: “It became clear that it would feel weird or disingenuous to open up these private moments that my parents had and, as a filmmaker, not be looking at my own stuff, and including that in some way, because it felt like I would be judging them.”
As such, Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost is a complicated look at generations of Stillers. It functions, perhaps primarily, as a tribute to Jerry and Anne and their legacy. But through the inclusion of intimate recordings that Jerry made, it demonstrates how their comedic bickering on stage was mirrored by genuine tension in prior moments. Meanwhile, Stiller interviews his wife Christine Taylor, and their children, Ella and Quin, to understand what he inherited from his famous parents in terms of both his talent and personal shortcomings.
“I think the deeper that you go into learning about your parents, and not about them as parents but just as people, always gives you a different perspective on your own life. I really do feel like the experience of delving in gave me more empathy for them,” Stiller says.
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Following in his father’s footsteps
The backbone of the movie is the wealth of material that Jerry left behind when he died in 2020, five years after Meara in 2015. On screen, Stiller documents how he and his sister Amy were responsible for combing through family memorabilia as they cleaned up Jerry and Anne’s longtime apartment on the Upper West Side so it could be sold.
But behind the scenes, Stiller was listening to the more than 100 hours of recordings that his father had made. He describes the experience as a “strange thing, to get transported back into these moments in time.”
These tapes would start as a record of his and Anne’s rehearsal or writing process, but Jerry would leave them running even when the conversation devolved into real-life arguments, some of which we hear in the film.
Stiller, at first, was surprised to hear those moments of argument, but they also unlocked an angle on his parents’ narrative for him: He could chronicle the ups and downs of a creative partnership and how that bled into their personal relationship. From there, he ended up exploring how, despite his own frustration with his parents’ absence for periods in his youth, he too became an intense workaholic like his dad in ways that resonated with his own children.
Finding the root of the relationship
Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost offers a standard bio-doc look at how a Jewish boy and Catholic girl fell in love and became the most prominent American couple in comedy in the 1960s, with a slot on The Ed Sullivan Show. Amy and Stiller were born into their parents’ fame and were trotted out for talk show segments at young ages, immediately grandfathered into the act.
Along the way, Stiller traces how his mother longed to be a dramatic actress, eventually getting to explore her chops on the stage in plays like The House of Blue Leaves, and how his father had a late-in-life revival thanks to Seinfeld. But the film is also raw and sometimes dark, as the son grapples with Meara’s struggles with alcohol and how this longtime marriage, which lasted over 60 years, wasn’t always so rosy.
“I had to kind of guess or inuit what my parents might feel about this, knowing them. I think what I got to was this version of the movie that hopefully represented, in terms of the balance of it, what their relationship was always about, which, for me, was based in this deep love and caring for each other,” Stiller says.
Making the movie was a five-year process for Stiller, during which he and Taylor reunited after a period of separation. Ultimately, Taylor as well as her and Stiller’s children were very open to talking about their own sometimes complex feelings about Stiller’s own dedication to his work at the expense of his time at home. At the same time, Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost makes the case that show business is, inevitably, a family enterprise.
“When people see the movie, you can see how organic it was for my sister and I to be a part of this world,” Stiller says. (His sister would also grow up to become an actor, once appearing opposite her mother on King of Queens.) “It was our reality and it’s what we grew up in and we loved it when we were kids. The flip side was, it took our parents away from us, which any creative endeavor does. You have a creative parent, part of them is going to be dedicated to their creativity, if they’re a real artist. They can’t deny that.”
Now, Stiller’s own children are feeling that pull to follow in their parents’ and grandparents’ footsteps. Ella is a Juilliard graduate who is joining the upcoming season of The Comeback following a stint off-Broadway. Both younger Stillers had roles in Happy Gilmore 2. Stiller recognizes that the movie enters an ongoing conversation about nepotism in Hollywood, but he hopes it makes viewers understand what it means to come from a world of performers.
“For me, this really was like, hey, this is what our lives are, this is what it’s about,” Stiller says.
The post Ben Stiller Set Out to Make a Film About His Parents. He Didn’t Realize It Was About Himself, Too appeared first on TIME.
