It was Mick Jagger’s idea.The other one was Simple Plan, based on a novel by Scott Smith. It’s a great book – really stark, not a comedy – about a guy who finds $4 million in a plane crash and decides to keep it.
BEN STILLERWhen I was growing up, This is Spinal Tap [1984] was the ultimate comedy, and it was the kind of thing I wanted to do. But you get to a point with parody where you can’t go much further because ultimately it’s feeding off of somebody else’s creativity.
More Ben Stiller Quotes
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Zoolander was more of my own sensibility.
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I know that I’m better as an actor when I’m working with a good actor. I think anytime you’re working with a better actor, it makes you a better actor.
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I would like to do more dramas when I find a good role that will allow me to politely upset people’s expectations of me as a comic actor.
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I think you never want to have to go into the scene having to improvise; you want to make sure its working on the page. But I do like to have the ability to try stuff just in the moment, to give it some sort of spontaneity.
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It’s weird that people expect me to be funny. I find it a real burden when I’m expected to be humorous on talk shows.
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I wanted to be funny for people who didn’t care about fashion at all, to just to kind of exist as a silly character.
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Jim Carrey, a comic genius, has a harder time overcoming the public’s desire for him to be funny simply because he’s so good at it.
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I’m always willing to endure humiliation on behalf of my characters.
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I don’t devalue comedy as compared to drama. Not one bit.
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A eugoogoolizer…one who speaks at funerals…Or did you think I was too stupid to know what a eugoogooly was?
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As a kid I had dreams about being successful, thinking it would be cool. Then, when I was in my 20s, I really thought I had it much more figured out than I do now.
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I have a lot of nervous energy. Work is my best way of channelling that into something productive unless I want to wind up assaulting the postman or gardener.
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I actually started working on Madagascar before my daughter was born.
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I don’t think it’s ever easy to be funny. I find it easy to amuse myself with a certain sort of cynical dark humor that tends toward the meaner side, like my character in Happy Gilmore. Those kinds of characters come easily to me.
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I think this whole celebrity world is weird anyway. Weird and funny and kind of pathetic and yet so right for parody.
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There’s an old saying in Hollywood: It’s not the length of your film, it’s how you use it.
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People like to define you through what they’ve seen you do. There are aspects of my personality, I guess, that come through on-screen, but I don’t sit around thinking, ‘I’ve been a bumbling suitor all my life.’
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I had two projects that fell apart during preproduction. The first one was this movie that Judd Apatow and I had written about two guys following the Rolling Stones. It was going to be half concert film, half pseudo-documentary.
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The cliches are that it’s the most generic Starsky and Hutch plot you can find.
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I was staying on [writer/director/actor] Eric Schaeffer’s couch in New York, and he said, “I’ve got this movie [If Lucy Fell]. Can you do five days on it?”
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It’s what I wanted to do with my life. Not necessarily just direct Jim Carrey movies, but to direct and act and write and create and along the way discover what it is that I’m about.
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My parents used to throw great New Year’s Eve parties. They invited such an eclectic mix of showbiz people. All those cool people were always hanging out at our apartment.
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Very quickly after meeting Dustin, the whole image I had of him was shattered.
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I love New York. I was sad, depressed and incredibly moved by our fellow countrymen and what they’ve done. I wanted to give people a chance to see something funny, have a distraction.
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And I was like, “Yeah, anything. Twenty-four hours times five is 120 hours. Oh, great, I’ll fill 120 hours of my life with something.” So I did that and it was fun, and then I did Flirting with Disaster.
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It’s great to work with the people who make you laugh and who are funnier than I am.
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