While it’s about skewering Hollywood, the main people meant to be lampooned in Ben Stiller’s “Tropic Thunder” are actors that take themselves waaay too seriously.
The grand irony here being Ben Stiller himself. Take a look at almost any article published about Stiller and ‘Thunder’ and you’ll find an obsessive guy who found the movie to be no laughing matter: in other words he took himself waaaay too damn seriously, seemingly as an actor and director.
EW says the film “mercilessly ridicules the self-important aspects of acting,” and in the same article they note that Stiller pushed the actors onset to no end.
Robert Downey Jr. said: “But it worked. I believed in your vision! Ben would be over there setting up a shot, and he’d be sipping his Smartwater and they’d bring over these 35-pound weights and he’d be lifting them while he was watching the monitor. His arms would get so big, and he’d be looking really formidable. I’ve never seen you like that.”
Ok, looking at the playback while lifting weights, Kirk Lazurus much?
Stiller even agrees. “You’re right, I would look back on the footage [of myself directing] and I’d go, like, ‘This was a little excessive.’ “
In another interview with ComingSoon, RDJ is even more candid and made Stiller sound pretty fierce and potentially difficult to work with. “Even just the first day of shooting, everybody went home and said, “[Stiller’s] a monster. This is going to be absolutely impossible.” And then we realized as we were going along that what he is is he’s a leader. In other words, he probably could have shot this movie. He probably could have costume designed and production designed the movie. He probably could have done the transportation.”
RDJ makes Stiller sounds kind of crazy if not at least super dedicated. “He had this relentless pursuit which I think is half the reason the movie turned out as well as it did.” Do a few Google searches for interviews, Black and RDJ basically say the same thing over and over again; Stiller was a fruitcake of intensity. Sure, you’d have to be to direct and take on an epic monster like ‘Thunder,’ but given the subject matter, it is rather ironically delicious.
And check the press notes the Stiller’s pathological use of the word “commitment.” Jack Black was so “committed” to the role, he went full-on. RDJ just went to the fence and was so “committed” to the role. The word is used relentlessly and you can picture Stiller saying it in the same way he’s satirizing the seriousness of his character. It’s almost too meta to take.
Meanwhile, retards from the Special Olympics keep trying to protest and boycott the film because of its “Simple Jack” character – a mentally challenged film within the film character that’s onscreen for all of two minutes and all of this is simply giving “Tropic Thunder” more and more press. Good luck with that and remember, “never go full-on retard.”