Emmanuel Itier: How many times have you worked with your son?

Jerry Stiller: Well, it´s something that someday we´ll tell the truth about what it was really like. Right now, we say what the public wants to hear: “Oh, it was such a wonderful thing.” People like to hear happy stories about kids and their fathers. What was beautiful about working with Ben on this film was it brought us closer, because there was so much we got to know about each other as actors, as performers–stuff that maybe patched up a lot of things that didn´t happen when we were growing up together, me being dad and him being son. And being a performer myself, with my wife and I working (and we have a daughter, Amy), and both those kids didn´t see us enough sometimes, or know us enough because we were so busy working. Even to this day, I always think of my own parents–that I never knew my own father. I never knew my own mother. Why? Why are we all so angry at our parents who are never there for us? Well, my father was working 12 hours a day on a bus. Now Ben comes up to me at this point and says, “I know how much you and mom were doing.” So there is a certain willingness to forgive or understand that when you are doing work as performers, your time is so constricted to that work. But here we were working now and working as actors together, and he understood how much goes into making something work. Does that answer your question, in a long way? I don´t think these guys had the same thing in their lives. How do you relate to your dad, who was a guy who works?

EI: What about your hair in the movie?

JS: My hair was the color I chose to have, kind of a reddish color of Tang (orange drink mix). A comedian once called me a Tang-colored actor in two sitcoms, where I played exactly the same in both sitcoms. And the thing that made it work was the color of my hair. And in the sitcom with the Seinfeld thing, every time I arrived, which is what they call a recurring character, my hair was a different color. I came back once and it was dark brown, dark green. They never bothered to do anything to my hair, but because I was recurring, it could have been three months–anything could have happened. I tried to match my hair with my wife, Estelle Harris´s hair, whose was Tang colored.

EI: Working with your son, have you given him romantic advice?

JS: I don´t dare do anything like that. They could give me a few pointers if it came down to it. We were no different than a lot of families, I would say. We never talked about it. Who talks about it? You see it in the movies. Go watch Andy Hardy and Judge Hardy in Mickey Rooney movies. And Andy is in love with a woman a foot taller than him and Judge Hardy says, “You know that´s never going to work out.” But did his father ever tell him other than no? You just learn by osmosis, or you listen or you feel vibrations. That’s how, I think, you learn about it. Ben had a much different lifestyle than I ever had as a kid growing up. And I wouldn´t have wanted him to have mine. Mine was dead-end everywhere I went with every woman, and it was all unhappy and miserable. And I ended up with my wife, which pulled me out of the dregs. She understood what I was.

EI: What did you learn from working with Ben?

JS: I learned that I trust my son as an actor in scenes in which we played together, even though there were moments when there were long pauses, even though when I saw it on screen I realized those were moments that something was going on between myself and him, and the audience was getting it. It had to do with trust, not trying to micromanage the scene and say, “Oh how would I do this” or “Why isn´t he saying what he should say? Why isn´t he doing it this way?” And he did the same with me. I work differently from him. I kind of prepare myself a little bit before I start a scene, and he will be dealing with something else that is abstract, that has nothing to do with the scene at all. But once they say “Action,” we are working together. So it´s giving it up to the other person, which every actor who knows his onions says. If you give it up to the other actor, it´s called generosity on stage and you don´t always have it. In this movie, where we were playing us three guys, we had a lot to go with each other, a lot of generosity between us. So there was so much coming in, some of the lines that were coming out from Danny were not in the script, but they were funny and they made the scene work with Rob. This thing about the hair, more people talk about that hair than anything in the movie, so it becomes something that may not have been in the script, and suddenly it´s in the script. It´s because you trust in something. It´s very hard to do.

EI: The scenes with you and him were really super. The rapport you had and things that went on, it was very easy, very simple. What is your next project?

JS: I´m going to do evenings in front of an audience that I do about my life and people I love in the business. One thing I get a chance to do, that I would never do in a movie, is my impression of the Nicholas Brothers tap dancing to Inka Dinka Doo. And somehow or another, it kind of holds an audience for a few minutes. I would do it for you now, but if you can´t see it…

EI: Would your wife be in it with you?

JS: She never does Inka Dinka Doo. She does, how did you guess? I´m trying to find the part in me. I call it the essential Jerry Stiller, and all my life in this comedy act, I open my mouth and she comes in and gets the laughs. And I´ve been sitting in the wings emotionally all these years and I´ve been on hold, and she comes in and saves my ass, if you can you use that. But I said, “Don´t come with me on these dates. I want to see if it works by myself.” And she invariably shows up. At the end of the evening, they laugh because of her. Even if they don´t know she´s coming on, just her being in the audience changes the mood of the evening. Maybe I´m asking for disaster not having her there, failing, but I´ve got to find out where I can do this myself. She´s been the core of my life in every way. She´s made everything happen. So we´ll see. And I´m not going to do Inka Dinka Doo.

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