Ben Stiller names his four favourite movies
Ben Stiller is hard to pin down. Although he’s known for his broad comedic turns in movies like Zoolander and Meet the Parents, he’s also an accomplished director and producer who chooses a wide range of decidedly non-comedic material. He made his feature directorial debut in 1994 with the romantic comedy Reality Bites and has helmed five features since, to varying degrees of success. Tropic Thunder and Zoolander were high points, while The Cable Guy and Zoolander 2 were somewhere near rock bottom.
Stiller has had even greater success in television, producing and directing the critically acclaimed limited series Escape from Dannemora in 2018 and the wildly successful Severance beginning in 2022. He didn’t appear as an actor in either of these shows, demonstrating that he’s well and truly broken free of being perceived first and foremost as a performer, let alone a comedian.
Given the range of movies and television that Stiller has been involved in, it would be difficult to make any predictions about which movies he likes to watch. If you’d only ever seen his work from the 1990s and early 2000s, you’d probably put your money on comedy, but if you’d only seen his work from the past five years, you’d probably go for cerebral drama.
Speaking to Letterboxd earlier this month, Stiller removed the guesswork. When asked to name his four favourite movies, he said, “I always have to say Jaws for me. Real Life, by Albert Brooks, which I think just got a Criterion Collection release. Dog Day Afternoon, for sure… and The Conversation. Yeah. Coppola. Gene Hackman.”
Jaws speaks for itself. No one needs an excuse to put Spielberg’s groundbreaking classic on their list. 1979’s Real Life is a much more unusual pick. It was Brooks’ directorial debut, and it followed a fictionalised version of himself as he attempted to win an Oscar and a Nobel Prize for filming a suburban family for a supposedly revolutionary documentary.
The film is a direct satire of a 12-part television documentary of the period called An American Family, which followed a similar concept. In the film, the fictionalised Brooks quickly makes the documentary about himself and begins tampering with the authenticity of the family’s life. When it was released, Real Life was met with sharply divided reviews. Some hailed it as an ingenious send-up of American show business, while others, including Roger Ebert, panned it for being unable to sustain its premise for more than 10 minutes.
As for Stiller’s other picks, they fit into similar territory as Jaws. Both Dog Day Afternoon and The Conversation are undeniable classics and even deserve to be labelled with that irritating and overused adjective, “important”. Released in 1975 and 1975, respectively, they touched on timely themes of authoritarianism, media, surveillance, and the pervasive pessimism of the Vietnam and post-Watergate era.
