Days of 'Thunder'

Stiller's movie is, of course, filled with in-jokes and movie quotations (look for "Close Encounters of the Third Kind"). But it doesn't have an insular, inside-baseball feel because, as nutty as it gets, it actually works as an action movie itself. Shot by John Toll ("Legends of the Fall"), "Thunder" has the production values of the movies it's sending up. (It's rumored to have a budget near $150 million.) In "Zoolander" the fashionista satire didn't quite mesh with the "Manchurian Candidate" plot about assassinating the prime minister of Malaysia. Here, thanks to the inventive, tight script by Stiller, Justin Theroux and Etan Cohen, you find yourself caring about the survival of these ridiculous but oddly endearing thespians. The comic momentum doesn't flag, the gunfire and explosions balanced by inspired riffs. One of the best is Downey/Lazarus's memorable discourse to Stiller/Speedman on how to win an Oscar playing handicapped characters—you can't do the "full retard," as Speedman did in "Simple Jack," but only the "half-retard," as Dustin Hoffman did in "Rain Man." And Cruise's blisteringly raunchy cameo (the character was his own invention) may be just the imagealtering career move he needs.

The joke within the joke within the joke is that the making of the comedy "Tropic Thunder" has spawned its own share of war stories. "We called it Ben Stiller's Comedy Death Camp," says Downey, who actually loved working with Stiller but suggests that not everyone on the crew survived the director's take-no-prisoners perfectionism. Acting may be a team sport for Stiller, but not directing. "His process is sublime," Downey marvels. "The first two days we were shooting the scene within the scene where Osiris gets his head shot off. We did that setup 107,000 times! I thought to myself, we're never gonna get off that shot!"

Sitting down for an interview, simply dressed in jeans and a blue shirt over a dark blue T shirt, Stiller seems like a down-to-earth, relaxed guy—until you notice that for the entire two and a half hours he never once leans back on the couch he's sitting on. He's gun-shy about talking about his personal life, going off the record even with innocuous personal stories. (Years ago he got burned when Esquire, taking a joking aside seriously, labeled him a manic-depressive, a fake factoid that has followed him ever since.) When he talks about the making of "Tropic Thunder," it sounds as if he is recalling a pleasant seaside vacation: "My favorite time in life is when working on a film," he says.

His actors wouldn't necessarily agree. "He's incredibly knowledgeable and incredibly driven—almost sociopathic," says Downey. "But his divining rod is always pointing to the same thing: have we given literally every ounce of energy and thought to every frame of the movie? It really is the closest thing to what it must have been like to work with Chaplin," says Downey—who memorably played Chaplin.

"Can Downey get his head any farther up Ben's a––?" roars Jack Black when he hears about the Chaplin remark. "I'll say he's Albert Einstein!" But Black concurs with Downey's assessment of Stiller's obsessive work ethic ("It's that OCD eye") and his generosity. "It's hard not to give yourself sweet spots when you're directing yourself," Black says, thinking of some actor-directors who will shortchange the other cast members so that they can focus on their own performances. "He'd defer to the others. I have a bit of the perfectionist in me, too, and he'd let me linger until I felt I nailed the scene. He's good to his peeps."

It may be Stiller's destiny as a filmmaker to make movies about the movie business. Three of the projects he's developing, including one about Oscar Levant and a movie of the classic Hollywood novel "What Makes Sammy Run?", return to his favorite, bred-in-the-bone subject. And in his own life, this second-generation funnyman has recently come full circle. Though he and his family—wife Christine Taylor (who costarred with him in "Dodgeball" and "Zoolander") and their two kids—live most of the time in L.A., he's just bought an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the same building as his parents: the building he grew up in. "It just seems like my family has come together in the past 10 years. It was a pretty hectic household growing up, just because of the nature of what my parents did. There was a lot of craziness—that's just actors and acting. But about a year ago we brought the whole family to New York and surprised my dad for his 80th birthday. We all went down to the playground on Riverside Park. It was this moment of feeling it all come around, seeing my son playing in the sandbox that I played in. So I think it's a great thing for the family that we're all in a place that we want to do this. But we'll see. We'll stick our toe in the water and see how it goes." And if it doesn't go well, don't be surprised if one day he turns it into a comedy.

© 2008