Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. My guest Ben Stiller has made a very personal documentary about his parents and what it was like to be their son.
Chapter 2: What personal documentary did Ben Stiller create about his parents?
Ben's father, Jerry Stiller, co-starred on Seinfeld playing Frank Costanza, George's father. Ben's mother, Ann Mira, was an actress. Together, Ben's parents were known as the comedy duo Stiller and Mira. They were so popular in the 60s and 70s, they were on The Ed Sullivan Show more than 30 times. Sometimes, Ben went with them to their appearances on TV talk shows and in nightclubs.
In 2020, five years after Mira's death, Jerry Stiller died. While Ben was going through his father's possessions, he was stunned to discover, stashed away, many cassette and reel-to-reel audio recordings Jerry Stiller had made.
Chapter 3: How did Jerry Stiller's role in Seinfeld impact his career?
They documented his life and his relationship with Anne, including recordings of conversations with Anne in which they had disagreements about their marriage and their act. Some of those conversations are included in the documentary, along with video clips of their sketches from their TV appearances. The documentary Stiller and Mara, Nothing is Lost, is streaming on Apple TV.
Ben Stiller has been famous for years as an actor, starring in such films as Zoolander, Meet the Parents, Night at the Museum, and their sequels, as well as Dodgeball, Tropic Thunder, and The Royal Tenenbaums. In the last few years, he's been doing more and more directing and producing.
Now he's the executive producer and primary director of the popular Emmy award-winning Apple TV series, Severance. Let's start with a clip from the new documentary, Stiller and Mira, Nothing is Lost.
This is an excerpt of one of the audio recordings of Ben's parents, rehearsing a sketch about how the couple they're portraying hate each other, not realizing that Ben's sister, who was then a child, is overhearing them, thinking the argument is real. At the end of this recording, we'll hear Ben and his sister Amy looking back at that time.
We have a sketch which we call Hate. I say to Anne, I hate you. She says, you hate me, I hate you. And one day Amy, who's six, came into the room and she heard us saying this to each other. And we looked at her for a moment and we didn't know what to say. So we said, Amy, mommy, daddy, rehearse. Mommy, daddy, rehearse. And Amy looked at us and she started to smile.
Well, about two weeks later, we were fighting. And Amy walked in and she said, Mommy and Daddy rehearsed?
No, Mommy and Daddy fight.
Get out of here. It gets to be a little complicated sometimes. I hated you before I met you. I hated you before you were born.
To me, that's like one of the things that I think about is just how that became sort of like, yeah, that's the laugh, that's the funny joke. But what is the reality of that story, though?
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Chapter 4: What audio recordings did Ben find that inspired the documentary?
That's why we're going to figure it out.
So those last two voices were Ben Stiller and his sister Amy. Ben Stiller, welcome back to Fresh Air. This is a really probing, emotionally deep movie. I really, really liked it. So the clip that we open with is your sister not being able to tell sometimes what was a real fight and what was a rehearsal for a sketch. Did you experience anything like that?
Yeah, nice to be with you, Terry, yeah. In this apartment that we lived in, they had a living room. We called it the big living room. It wasn't that big, but that they would use as their office when we were younger. And then I think when I was like 13 or 14, they got an office on 57th Street. But most of the time they'd been in this office in the apartment working.
So we would just hear them, you know, doing their thing in there. And sometimes their voices would be raised. And yeah, sometimes there were arguments that happened. And it was kind of just like part of our lives. It was like, yeah, mom and dad are doing their thing in there. And as a kid, I don't think you question these things. It's just like what your parents do.
So a lot of people know your father, Jerry Stiller, from Seinfeld, playing George's father, Frank Costanza. But they don't necessarily know Stiller and Mira routines. So I want to play one of their better-known ones that I think is really funny. And this goes back to the really early days of computer dating. And I think at this point, you didn't have your own computer anymore.
This is the period where you'd send in your information and they'd put it through a computer at the company and then send you back a match. Am I right in thinking that?
I think so. I don't know how it worked, but it definitely was pre-personal computers. Yeah, yeah. This was in the 60s. Yeah, okay. But I think the idea of a computer being able to match people up, that was the new thing that was happening.
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Chapter 5: How did Ben Stiller's upbringing influence his career choices?
So this borrows from your parents' actual marriage because your father is Jewish, your mother was Irish and Catholic, although she later converted to Judaism. So in this sketch, the computer dating service has set them up together. And your father's name in the sketch is Hershey Horowitz, and your mother's name in the sketch is Mary Elizabeth Doyle.
Where you from?
Me? I'm from Flatbush. Oh, really?
That's where I'm from.
You're kidding.
East 42nd Street.
I live on East 42nd Street. Oh, that's amazing. That's my blog. Really? Hey, this computer really works. Yeah. Gee, that's fun. Hey, you know Richie Flanagan?
Richie Flanagan?
Yeah, tall, skinny kid.
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Chapter 6: What were the dynamics of Ben's parents' marriage and work relationship?
There's a scene in the movie that's a real standout scene. You're talking to your son who's kind of interviewing you during part of the film so that you can tell stories and be telling them to someone. Not only someone, to your own son. And so you're telling him about how weird it was for you when you were having a conversation with...
your father and a fan would come up and interrupt the conversation and your father would pay attention to the fan.
Right. Yeah, I was talking to my son about how, yeah, growing up with my parents, they would get recognized. And on the street, my mom usually wouldn't want to talk to people for a long time or she'd say hi, but she wanted to just go on and just keep doing her thing. And my dad would talk to people forever. Like if someone wanted to talk to him, he would...
He would, you know, get into conversations about their family, and it would just go on and on. He used to drive my mother crazy. And as kids, we would feel that, you know, when you're little, you feel that your parents' attention being taken away from you. So I was talking about that with Quinn, my son, and he interrupts me.
We'll play what he has to say. Okay, so here's Quinn.
Well, that's actually hilarious because just a few weeks ago, we were all out at a restaurant and I had been stressed about college stuff. And then the people there wanted to get like a picture with you. And I just remember I was so frustrated, like the world just has to stop to get this picture. You know what I mean?
So Ben Stiller, what was it like when your son told you that?
I was surprised yet not surprised. I was surprised that he actually brought that up in that moment and that The example he was using was so recent, but in that moment I was like, okay, this is actually probably a really good moment for the movie. But I also, as a person, was feeling like, oh, this is really, gosh.
And all I could say in the moment was like, oh, yeah, I guess I have a lot of my dad in me, or more of my dad in me than my mom. It's just that realization that, and it wasn't a new realization for me, but, you know, that thing of like you really try to do better than your parents, but it's very hard to not make some of the same mistakes that they make.
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Chapter 7: How did Ben's parents balance their professional and personal lives?
assimilate them or suppress them. And then years and years later, they can still be there. And I think that's part of what the show is about is that there's a question like, does love transcend severance? Or, you know, does emotion transcend severance?
I think it's impossible not to have, you know, when you have these feelings and experiences and trauma and all those things inside of you, you know, you can just suppress them for so long, but they're going to come out in some way. And I think That idea is really a big part of what the show is about, too.
You are a producer, a director, an actor. You just finished a documentary about your parents. So you're dealing with working with other actors, investigating your own family history, running a production company. How do you deal with all the stress of that and the responsibility? That's a lot.
Yeah, I mean, it's been a busy time. For me, I know the places that I feel comfortable and relaxed and, you know, like the kind of safe haven. And that to me has become going home and being able to like turn it off and figure out how to do that finally. I think I've figured that out at least to a certain extent. that I can get home and really enjoy being with my family.
My kids are both out of the house now, but when they're around, it's great. But with Christine, just hanging out together and watching Real Housewives of Beverly Hills with my daughter or something like that, or kind of just finding those moments to kind of unplug You know, I've found that that really, really helps.
And then, you know, the other thing is just enjoying the work and the projects that I'm working on that I'm only working on things I really care about and I really want to be doing.
Well, it's just been a pleasure talking with you. So thank you so much for coming back to our show.
It's great to talk with you, Terry. Thank you.
Ben Stiller's documentary about his parents, Stiller and Mira, Nothing is Lost, is streaming on Apple TV. He's also the executive producer and primary director of the Apple TV series Severance. Tomorrow on Fresh Air, we'll talk about FBI Director Kash Patel with Mark Fisher, who profiles him in The New Yorker.
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