“But I like the crazy scary storm-it sells the shark even more. “Well, less vapor than this,” Stiller told Williams. Like Mitty, he dreamed of being someone different. Jeff Mann said, “Ben’s always going to say, ‘Let’s find the best, most expensive examples that anyone has ever done, and use them as a template.’ It’s like, dude, this is a moment, in a comedy-it doesn’t have to be the stormiest storm ever.” But Stiller wanted “Mitty” to be much more than a standard studio comedy he hoped to make a film so original that it would transform his image. Prep is often the most stressful period in a production, the moment when the fantasy of what the movie could be meets the limitations of budget, time, and talent-and Stiller is tenacious in his defense of the most sumptuous version of a film. With shooting set to begin in three months, Twentieth Century Fox still hadn’t given the film a green light Stiller and Fox remained nearly four million dollars apart. Or, if you add the waves digitally, it’s forty thousand dollars a shot, and a two-million-dollar hit to our movie.” The budget was a concern. Kurt Williams, the visual-effects producer, observed, “You’re going to have to move a lot of water in a tank to get that. Stiller’s wife, the actress Christine Taylor, says that when they met, during an audition for a TV pilot he was directing, “I was almost uncomfortable with how much eye contact he was making, because in Hollywood everyone’s very polite and no one ever looks at you.” His green eyes bore into you, hoping to be understood but expecting otherwise. Onscreen, Stiller’s face is an unmade bed of comic distress, but his daily aspect, in a black Ralph Lauren T-shirt, black Simon Miller jeans, and black Nikes, is ascetic and pensive. This vibe: sunset, storm, God-rays of light from the sky?” He often puts his wishes as questions, radio signals beamed out in a search for intelligent life. “But slightly less, only because we need to see the shark. He stared at the eight men around the conference table, four of whom wore heavy, black-framed glasses like his own. His production designer and friend, Jeff Mann, is the loquacious Penn to Stiller’s gnomic Teller eying the mountain of water, he deadpanned, “Those are some important motherfucking radio parts.” Stiller cued up an episode of “The Deadliest Catch” on a flat-screen TV and paused the action on some hellacious waves from an Arctic storm. Stiller was starring in a comedy, “The Watch,” that was filming nearby, and, when you’re a director who also happens to be a movie star, everyone comes to you. The prep meeting took place on a Saturday afternoon in January, in a conference room at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Atlanta. And it’s here, once he jumps in the water with the radio parts, that the real-life adventures begin. ![]() He flies to Greenland in search of the nomadic photographer who took the shot. Only when Ted’s about to fire him because he can’t find a negative, one slated for the cover of Life’ s final issue-the movie is set in a nineteen-sixties-ish present day in which the magazine is still publishing-does Walter act. He gets lost in elaborate fantasies where his crush on a colleague, Cheryl, comes to glorious fruition, and where he confounds his nasty new boss, Ted. When we meet Stiller’s version of Walter, he’s a nebbish who runs the photo library at Life but lacks a life of his own. ![]() James Thurber’s 1939 short story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” follows a mild-tempered man who, as he accompanies his wife on her weekly shopping trip in Waterbury, Connecticut, imagines himself as a brilliant surgeon, a steely naval commander, and a daring bomber pilot it made “Walter Mitty” a byword for a passive dreamer who longs for escape. But when the director gathered the film’s producers and technicians for their first pre-production, or “prep,” meeting, he emphasized that the scene was the fulcrum of the film, and that without sufficiently realistic surf it wouldn’t be momentous. If realized on film, the moment would be signature Stiller: the put-upon Everyman striving for dignity as the mayhem escalates. It’s a shark, naturally, and Walter must pummel it with his bare hands. Can you get a bead on some more information? W ALTER ( calling out): How do you-I just see a fin. They often protect swimmers from predators.Ĭ APTAIN ( cont’d): If that’s a shark, strike it. Porpoises are mammals with rare intelligence and sympathy. C APTAIN: If that is a porpoise, befriend it.
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