Last night Ben Stiller and Robert Downey Jr unveiled the new trailer and two scenes from their upcoming comedy Tropic Thunder – a film Empire is already saving space for on the Best Comedy of the Year podium – at Koi in the Planet Hollywood hotel. We then talked with Stiller about the movie, but more on that in a minute. First, the footage.
The trailer opens like Apocalypse Now, very dramatic and serious, but stops when we cut to Downey Jr holding Stiller's handless arm stumps. It then quickly degenerates into a scene where a bunch of whiny actors (Stiller, Downey Jr, Jack Black, Jay Baruchel and more) are complaining about their work conditions. Their director (Steve Coogan) gets fed up with them and considers dumping them in a war zone, which leads to the cast believing they’re still shooting a film when they are in fact in the midst of a war. It’s a lot funnier than we’re describing it.
They then showed a couple of scenes. The first sees our key players dumped into the jungle for real for the first time. Steve Coogan runs around like Werner Herzog, slapping Jack Black in the face, trying to generate some real emotion and anger. He explains about the hidden cameras, and then…well, it would be too much of a spoiler, but it’ll get a big laugh when you see it.
Second scene takes place after Stiller’s character has been captured and his co-stars are plotting to get him back – only they’ve no idea what they’re doing. Jack Black’s strapped to a tree, begging for heroin, and the others are questioning each other’s sexuality. Both scenes are very fast-paced and funny, although categorically not, as Stiller joked afterward, “A bit like Atonement, right?” Our comic appetite is certainly whetted for seeing the rest of this.
The next day we met up with Stiller, who directs as well as starring, at The Four Seasons for a chat about the film. The first question we had to ask was obviously whether he was in any way worried about what reaction would be to the images of Downey Jr made up as a black man (he plays an actor so into his method that he changes his race rather than re-write the part).
“I don’t mean to be flippant, but not at all,” he says. “When people see the movie – in the context of the film, he’s playing a method actor who’s gone to great lengths to play an African American. The movie is skewering actors and how they take themselves so seriously. Audiences that have seen it so far have totally embraced the character. ”
The idea for the movie is actually one Stiller has had for over two decades. “The idea came 20 years ago when I was doing Empire of the Sun,” he tells us. “I had a small part in that and at that time all my actor friends, myself included, were going on auditions for war movies like Platoon and Hamburger Hill. I met with Oliver Stone myself – I never read, just had a meeting. He said ‘You’re cute” and I knew it was over. Every actor that got a role was coming back saying ‘Man, it was like boot camp; it changed my life.’ I don’t know if it was bitterness because I didn’t get cast, but there seemed a certain amount of irony in them feeling they were having this experience of war when they really weren’t. I thought that could be funny to have the actors caught up in a real situation.”
So what took so long?
“Well, I started working on the script about 10 years ago, had drafts of it over the last 10 years, but it was only about two and a half years ago that we felt we had a draft that was really good. We did a read-through and after that… we still didn’t do anything for a while. We re-wrote some more… you know, it’s been a long process, but it’s been great to have that time to work on something.”
Tony Horkins