Ben Stiller: Early Role Spawned 'Tropic Thunder'
Shooting solo: Tugg Speedman (Ben Stiller) goes commando in Tropic Thunder. Merie Weismiller Wallace/DreamWorks hide caption
A Spoof, Sure -- But Funny?
It's a movie about making a movie: Actor-director Ben Stiller says he first had the idea for the war-movie parody Tropic Thunder way back in 1987, when he played a small role as a prisoner of war in Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun.
The inspiration: "the fake boot camps" many of his actor friends went through as they prepared to shoot one war movie or another.
"It sort of became a staple," Stiller says. "They'd go off with some military adviser and have two weeks of camping out, getting shot at, learning how to shoot their guns and pretending to be soldiers.
"There seemed something ironic to me about the idea of actors ... [who'd] come back and talk about that experience and talk about how it changed their lives."
In Tropic Thunder, in theaters now, actors filming a Vietnam War epic in Southeast Asia get caught up in a real war with gun-toting drug smugglers.
Stiller stars in the spoof as Tugg Speedman, a fading action-franchise star (think a younger Sylvester Stallone) who's desperate for a box-office smash.
He also co-wrote, co-produced and directed the film, which pokes fun at Hollywood excess and the lengths to which some actors will go in search of authenticity.
Stiller talks with Renee Montagne about a real-life controversy surrounding his movie and elements of the film-within-the-film — from Robert Downey Jr.'s role as a white actor who goes to great lengths to play a black man, to the film's running joke about a cinematic flop in which Stiller's character played a mentally challenged man.
That last bit has inspired protests from disability-rights groups.
Says Stiller: "Obviously, our intent was never to make it offensive. To me, it was really important that it was clear that we were satirizing the actors in this movie, and the lengths that actors go to ... playing roles that they shouldn't play, or going further than they should in wrongheaded moves to gain credibility as an actor."
'Tropic Thunder': A Category 2 Comedy Disaster
A fictional war becomes all too real for big-screen man-divas Tugg Speedman (Ben Stiller) and Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr.). Merie Weismiller Wallace/DreamWorks hide caption
A fictional war becomes all too real for big-screen man-divas Tugg Speedman (Ben Stiller) and Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr.).
Merie Weismiller Wallace/DreamWorksTropic Thunder
- Director: Ben Stiller
- Genre: Comedy
- Running Time: 107 minutes
Rated R: 'F'-bombs — and real ones — litter this dud of a comedy.
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California "girlie men"? Vietnam vet John "Four Leaf" Tayback (Nick Nolte) has no tolerance for that sort. Merie Weismiller Wallace/DreamWorks hide caption
California "girlie men"? Vietnam vet John "Four Leaf" Tayback (Nick Nolte) has no tolerance for that sort.
Merie Weismiller Wallace/DreamWorksTrapped on the set of a big-ticket Hollywood adaptation of his Vietnam War memoir, John "Four Leaf" Tayback (a snarling Nick Nolte) is not a happy man: Somehow, less than five days into production, the project is already a month behind schedule. The gnarly soldier's solution: Take the "pansy-ass actors" into the jungle and abuse them until they cough up something like a convincing film.
This is the premise of Ben Stiller's Tropic Thunder, an expensive, star-studded action spoof of the traditional expensive, star-studded action flick.
If it's not exactly original, it is loud and cocky — and that's usually enough to power a would-be box-office heavy through a summertime opening weekend.
And anyway, that premise adds up to something like a pre-emptive strike: Tropic Thunder is making fun of an industry that makes movies like ... well, like Tropic Thunder. So if you think it's too bloody, too annoying, too nonsensical, well, good for you: That's exactly what it means to be.
It's nothing if not arch, with Stiller front and center as yet another version of his patented neurotic-loser character. His Tugg Speedman is a fading, franchised action hero: "Here we go again, again," Tugg announces in a coming-attractions come-on for the sixth iteration of Scorcher — one of several smart-ass "trailers" that open Tropic Thunder with something like a bang.
Tugg has failed to jump-start his career by playing what he refers to as a buck-toothed "retard" in Simple Jack (a patently offensive venture). Now, Tugg has signed on for Tayback's grunts-in-the-jungle movie, where he's competing for screen time with much-awarded Australian star Kirk Lazarus.
Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr.) is an actor's actor, and this time he's taken his neo-Method approach an extra step, surgically altering his complexion to play African-American sergeant Lincoln Osiris. Per stereotype, Lincoln hates The Man and deploys "colorful" slang.
(To ensure that this bit of patent offensiveness has a context, the Tayback epic also features an actual black actor, a raucous rapper hawking his energy drink — "Booty Sweat" — and aspiring to movie stardom. Broad reaction shots from Alpa Chino, played by Brandon T. Jackson, regularly remind you that the movie knows Downey/Lazarus/Osiris is a joke.)
Likewise, the desperate efforts of the project's third star to score some drugs — apparently any sort will do — help reinforce his easy-target status: egomaniacal comedian Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black) is fresh off a franchise in which he plays every member of the incessantly farting "Fatties" family. Oh, the hilarity.
For one reason or another, all the guys — including the blockbuster's beleaguered director (Steve Coogan) and the earnest newbie actor (Jay Baruchel) whose name "Tugger" can never remember — agree to Tayback's scheme, heading deep into the Southeast Asian jungle, where they hope to "get into character."
Instead, they run into the sort of outrageous trouble you'd expect, including a ferocious 12-year-old druglord, Tran (Brandon Soo Hoo), who just happens to adore Simple Jack. Sans cell phones or actual weapons, armed with only a shot list and rudimentary map, the actors must learn to be men.
While they get lost, the guys in L.A. — and the movie is all about guys, even more emphatically than Stiller's flat-footed fashion-biz satire Zoolander — anticipate big returns.
Tugg's fast-talking agent (Matthew McConaughey) thinks his most pressing contract issue is the fact that his man has no TiVo — until he and fat, bald, cigar-chomping producer Les Grossman (Tom Cruise) hear from Tran, demanding a ransom the studio won't pay. Les explains his cost-benefit analysis: "They'll kill him, and we will weep. In the press."
We get that the movie industry is heinous — in Tropic Thunder, we get that early and often. We also get that actors are not real men, that agents are girlie men, and that Les (via Cruise's much-hyped, but hardly revelatory performance) is a gross man.
What we don't get is how all this adds up to a movie much different from those Tropic Thunder means to send up.