In my reading of your career, around 2010, a real change happens. You started doing fewer of the big, broad comedies and instead made films like “Greenberg,” “While We’re Young” and “The Meyerowitz Stories.” You did “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” and “Brad’s Status.” These are all about middle-aged guys working through the big questions. Was doing those a result of a conscious decision to start doing a different kind of film? Yeah. Around that time I moved back to New York. I’d been living in L.A. for 20 years, and I wanted to try to spend more time at home and try to work closer to home. But for me, really where it changed in terms of my outlook was after “Zoolander 2.” It was the feeling of like, everybody wants this and I’m going to do it, and I had fun doing it, and then nobody wanted it! I was like, But you said you wanted it! And, really, was it that bad? That was where I was like, I have to make a choice. I want to do these other things and not go off if somebody’s offering “Zoolander 3.” But “Zoolander 2” gave me the gift of nobody offering me “Zoolander 3.” [Laughs.] Also, my marriage wasn’t in a great place. There was a lot going on.
You mentioned that your marriage was in a bad place. You and your wife, Christine Taylor, separated for a while and then reconciled. I saw her on Drew Barrymore’s talk show, and she brought up the idea of the separation and reconciliation being a result of what she called adult “growth spurts.” What was your growth spurt during that time? When we separated, it was just having space to see what our relationship was, what my life felt like when we weren’t in that relationship, how much I loved our family unit. It was like three or four years that we weren’t together but we always were connected. In my mind, I never didn’t want us to be together. I don’t know where Christine was, you’d have to ask her, but Covid put us all together in the same house.
An act of God. Yeah. It was almost a year of living in the same house before we were actually together. But I’m so grateful for it, and I think not that many people do come back together when they separate. There’s nothing like that, when you come back. You have so much more appreciation for what you have, because we know we could not have it.
My understanding is that you’re working on a documentary about your parents, Anne Meara and Jerry Stiller, the comedy team. If people don’t know the team, they certainly know that your father played George Costanza’s dad on “Seinfeld.” Yeah.
What has working on the documentary revealed to you about your understanding of your parents? I’m realizing it’s all kind of reflecting back on my own issues that I have with them. I feel so fortunate that I have all this footage of my parents and our family from these Super-8 movies that my dad took and then I took, and recordings my dad made. Just hours and hours, talking with my mother as they were writing sketches or coming up with ideas. Or sometimes he’d record us just because he wanted to have our voices. I was thinking about it this morning: how much I love my father but also that tension of not wanting to be my father, but everybody loves my father. And as a son, I would love to be loved as my father was because he was a lovely person. But then there’s also the thing of, But I’m me.
