Ben Stiller

I don't know if there was a connection.

I think the smoking was just she had to stop smoking for her health.

You know, her doctor said, you got to stop.

And that's something I guess I wish I had had more foresight and interviewed my mom for this documentary before she died.

passed away because i'm curious about what was the moment for her you know that she realized she needed to make a change um but she did you know get to a point where she just really wanted to deal with a lot of the issues that her whole life that she had been you know having to deal with in terms of you know i think her guilt about as a mom not being able to be there as much um

And, yeah, the drinking, too.

And so, you know, it was amazing to see what she did.

And she would go to meetings every day, and she would talk about that stuff.

I don't know what the impetus was or if it was connected to my dad's own success, but I think it was a personal choice for her.

And, you know, she was always trying to grow as a person and she loved to read.

She was a big reader.

She was very interested in alternate realities and quantum mechanics and, you know, time and space and all those things.

And she wrote about that stuff too in her plays.

Yeah.

Well, she passed away 10 years ago, and it was probably about two and a half years before she passed away.

Yeah, I think it's the worst thing that you can go through as a person.

And people have to deal with this.

We have a debilitating stroke where you literally can't really move at all.

But yet, you know, she was in there and she was not able to communicate.

And, I mean, it was very, very tough for everybody.