Ben Stiller's documentary Nothing Is Lost explores his parents’ legacy. Photo / Thea Traff, The New York Times
Ben Stiller's documentary Nothing Is Lost explores his parents’ legacy. Photo / Thea Traff, The New York Times
How to lead an artistic life and be part of a family is a tension he has only recently faced in life and now, onscreen, for a film about his comedian parents.
Ben Stiller has long since stopped analysing what draws him to projects. Why bother? For most of hisnearly four-decade career as an actor and film-maker, he has topped the box office or slyly captured the zeitgeist, devising – with a stuck zipper, a lip pout or Robert De Niro as a father-in-law – some of pop culture’s stickiest cinematic moments.
So when he first started filming in his parents’ apartment a few weeks after the death of his father, Jerry Stiller, in 2020, he wasn’t sure why, exactly. “It was just this instinct,” he said. Partly, it was about preservation; the five-bedroom on the Upper West Side of New York City was his childhood home, and it was due to be sold. Up until the last possible moment, he shot video tours of the memento-filled, and then emptied corners where he and his older sister, actor Amy Stiller, grew up, doing bits and homework, bickering and celebrating, with Jerry and their mother, Anne Meara, who died in 2015.
Then, too, he wanted to memorialise Jerry and Anne – or Stiller and Meara, as they were better known in their performance heyday. A comedic duo whose banter catapulted them from the club circuit to household fame in the Ed Sullivan era, they were also a bridge from a midcentury Borscht Belt comedy style to one developed for the TV screen. For an audience of 30 million viewers, they played up their real-life identities as a husband and wife mismatched in culture and religion – in the years when interfaith unions were still rare. At home, they worked relentlessly on their routines, honing the razor timing that their son, who will turn 60 in November, absorbed and seeded through his own work.
Ben Stiller quickly realised he should make a documentary about them. The film, Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost, available on Apple TV, dips into their comic lineage, a legacy that Ben Stiller has transformed as the star of billion-dollar blockbuster series like Night at the Museum and Meet the Parents (he’s filming its fourth instalment) and as director and co-writer of satires like Tropic Thunder and Zoolander.
Stiller said "instinct" made him start filming in his parents’ apartment a few weeks after the death of his father, Jerry Stiller. Photo / Thea Traff, The New York Times
It’s also part family history, or therapy, as Stiller and his kin drill into what it was like growing up backstage or on sets, with sometimes absentee parents. But the subtext (and often enough, text) of the documentary is more elemental: it’s about what it means to lead an artistic life – a profoundly ambitious, often workaholic one – and be part of a family. It’s a tension that Stiller has only recently fully confronted. And he did it while filming, with his children.
The moment when his teenage son starkly tells him, on screen, that he didn’t feel fatherhood was Stiller’s top priority is a rug-pull of epic proportions.
“As a filmmaker, I was like, ‘OK, this is a good moment for the movie,’” Stiller said after the documentary’s premiere at the New York Film Festival. “As a person, I was like, ‘That sucks.’”
The project is almost painfully personal – “territory that I haven’t really travelled in before,” Stiller said in an interview in Manhattan one recent Saturday evening. The documentary took five years to complete, as he at first avoided delving into some of the more vulnerable details and later wondered what his parents might have made of it when he did. He wasn’t sure, he admitted, what the reception for the film would be. But “it doesn’t really matter,” he added. “It’s something I needed to make.”
Stiller’s parents were married for 61 years. Their union survived the tribulations of show business, their different creative drives, and her drinking and the way it destabilised the family. Stiller worried about including that in the documentary, but, he said, “she talked about it a lot, and she evolved”.
“They were pretty great parents,” he said.
The devotion in their relationship, its endurance, was a lesson he absorbed late. “The career stuff falls away,” he said. “You get older, and you’re left with the real stuff in your life. And for them, they were there for each other. And that’s what I want, at the end of the day.”
Married American actors Jerry Stiller and Ann Meara with Ben and Amy Stiller in 1976. Photo / Getty Images
That personal reckoning came for Stiller in the last decade, a few years after he was successfully treated for aggressive prostate cancer. In 2017, he announced a separation from his wife, actor Christine Taylor. But during the pandemic, they reconciled after they began living together again in New York so he could see their son, Quinlin Stiller, now 20 and a college student, and their daughter, Ella Stiller, 23, a Juilliard-trained actor.
And Stiller realised – with his children’s prodding – that as much as he’d vowed to be around more than his parents, he was often not fully present. Putting it in the film is a level of candour almost unheard of for Hollywood powerhouses, but, he said, “I admit it because it’s true”.
He choked up. “To actually have, now, a real relationship with them, I feel very fortunate,” he said, “because it took me a while to really understand the work that you have to put in to make that happen.”
When their parents were away working, and Stiller and his sister were in the care of their longtime nanny, Hazel Hugh, they planned elaborate living-room productions: a number from Shenandoah or Jesus Christ Superstar, a little Shakespeare, a nightclub act. Mum and Dad’s return was opening night; the ovations were epic.
By the time Ben Stiller was 13, he had a camera – a gift from his father – and a subscription to American Cinematographer magazine.
Yet their parents’ absences weighed heavily, too. “I remember him talking about, ‘Sometimes the only time I would see my parents is when they were on The Ed Sullivan Show,’” said Ben Stiller’s friend Jerry Stahl, a novelist and screenwriter.
Stiller isn’t sure what viewers will make of the documentary about his parents. But “it doesn’t really matter. It’s something I needed to make.” Photo / Thea Traff, The New York Times
Stiller and Meara appeared on the variety show 36 times, always with new material. As a child, Ben Stiller said, he had only an inkling of what it meant for his parents to forge that kind of career. But in making the documentary, which uses archival footage of their performances, and hundreds of hours of audio and videotapes his father made of their work and family life, it struck him, he said: “Oh, my God, look what they were doing; look how hard that was.” Coming up with fresh sketches, as a couple, every five or six weeks, for a huge live television audience, was not, he added, something he could do. Add in the pressure, he said, of “having to raise two kids and having to make it work; their livelihood was dependent on that, because by doing well on that show, that would open up all the other doors for them”.
As a director, Stiller had a reputation for being – to put it charitably – intense, a perfectionist known for marathon script revision sessions and round-the-clock calls to fine-tune the most minute details.
It’s a work ethic that was passed down. “My mother’s bar for what was good or what was hacky was something I really took in,” Stiller said.
Ben Stiller is still exacting as a film-maker, doing take after take. But he is more cognisant of how his demands land. A few years ago, “I was not as aware of the impact that I would have on people,” he said. “I learned through experiences – and from people letting me know.” The perspective of age helped, too.
For almost all of his career, Stiller said, “I found safety in the work.” He is still happiest, he said, when he is in the groove with his many projects. But he has chilled out, in the words of several friends and colleagues. “He’s come around now,” Stahl said. “Family is a priority.”
Surveying his parents’ life reshuffled how he thinks about his own – in ways that surprised him and will probably end up on screen. “It’s actually, creatively, what I want to be doing,” Stiller said. “It’s made me want to delve more into those memories because I feel like that is stuff that is really worth exploring, to figure out, in myself.”
