(New York, 59 years old) is one of those Nepo Babies that few know what it is. His father was, at 92), known, above all, for interpreting the stubborn but endearing Frank Constance in the successful comedy of the nineties. His mother was also actress Anne Meara (who died in 2015, at 85), part of the movie cast Awakens and series like Oz either . Before starting their solo races, both starred in a comic duo in The Ed Sullivan Show that made them popular in the sixties. For all this, in 2007 the couple was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Ben Stiller has never needed to talk about them to make himself known, but, after the death of both, he has decided to do so in a documentary directed by him. “They are not superstar. They are only artists who have married, they have children and try to do their best in both worlds,” their sister Amy defines them (Stiller and Meara: Nothing is lost), which premiered this Sunday, October 5 at the New York Film Festival.
The actor of o Night at the Museum He has documented on the tape the best moments of his parents in front of the camera, but also exposes the dark side they showed his older sister, Amy – also actress – and him. “Themes such as Anne’s alcoholism and Jerry’s obsession with work at the expense of his family receive a very detailed treatment,” he says. Ben Stiller’s new documentary for Apple TV+ [donde se estrenará el 24 de octubre] Your perspective on your parents will changeis the article of the specialized media entitled. And that is precisely what happened to the project director. “I just wanted to tell the story of their careers and lives, and, as I evolved, I realized that I had to have more … people would say it is interesting, but that some personal perspective was missing. And that took me a while, because I really did not want to participate in the movie,” the actor confessed on Sunday during the premiere.
Stiller ambient the film in the wide apartment of the Upper West Side of Manhattan where Anne and Jerry raised his family, and which Ben and Amy return after the death of his father to review, pack and discard the belongings of his parents before putting his old house on sale. “Jerry Stiller had a compulsive need to record and save everything [desde las primeras cartas de amor de la pareja hasta vídeos caseros de la familia]and seeing Ben Stiller assimilate him after the death of his father, there is something at the same time humanizing and surreal in seeing a famous actor to submit to the same heartbreaking ritual as all others, ”he highlights The Hollywood Reporter.
The documentary, which has the participation of the actor or the presenter, is also sprinkled with interviews that Stiller makes to his own children, she (23 years old) and Quinn (20), with whom he compares his personal experience as children born within a family of artists. As he explains in the film, the actor tried to avoid repeating the error of putting his work to his family, but during the filming of the film he has realized that he has not succeeded. “Quinn delicately tells his father that he feels that he and his sister were in the background after Ben’s work, just as Ben felt that he was with Jerry. He looks at the director’s face at that time says everything,” he says The Hollywood Reporter. “You think you know what your children think, but it is not so,” Stiller acknowledged in the presentation in New York.
The appearance of his wife and mother of his two children, actress Christine Taylor, with whom she shared cast in Zoolander. Stiller and Taylor married in 2000, but. “My career had been going for a long time, but in reality I was not going very well in my personal life,” admits about those years the interpreter of Her parents. “I felt unbalanced, unhappy and a little disconnected from my family, from my children, and a little lost,” he continues in the documentary, where he unites him with the history of his parents: “I started thinking about my parents and in all the stress and tension that I remember seeing as a child, in the pressure when they worked together and how they kept together despite it. I think I wanted to understand how they did it.” After Stiller and Taylor be seen together in public on several occasions, the couple of actors.
In the questions after the documentary projection, Stiller was asked if he believed that his parents would like the result of this work. “I don’t know … my mother yes, but my father probably not,” he replied. The Hollywood Reporter ensures in the subtitle of his criticism that “it could be the humanist documentary of the season.” “When we showed people, they said: ‘Oh, this reminds me a little of my own relationship with my parents’ … there is something there with what people can identify,” Stiller said.
