Ben Stiller On Ageing In Hollywood, ‘While We’re Young’, And ‘Zoolander 2’

Young people don’t believe they will actually get old. It happens in increments. It takes many years. We even count those years, and still, when it finally hits you, ageing feels less like a slow dissolve and more like an early Goddard jump cut.

One day you’re you. The next day, well, you’re old.

That jarring realisation is the foundation of While We’re Young, the new film from director Noah Baumbach (Frances Ha, The Squid And The Whale, Greenberg), starring Ben Stiller as Josh, a finicky, forty-something documentary filmmaker well into his eighth year working on the follow-up to his well-received debut. Josh is married to film producer Cornelia (Naomi Watts), and the couple’s unexpected friendship with stunningly hip twenty-something couple, Jamie (Adam Driver) and Darby (Amanda Seyfried), triggers the older couple’s sudden awareness of their own middle age.

Jamie is a budding documentarian who stokes Josh’s ego by claiming to be a fan of his first film. Darby, a (what else?) artisanal ice-cream maker, takes Cornelia to hip-hop dance classes.

Baumbach had 90 minutes to tell this tragicomic New York tale. I have only five to discuss it with Stiller its New York press junket. There are two things l should tell you about Ben Stiller. The first is that he appears so serious in real life that I immediately mentally discard all my “jokey” questions. The second is that the screen does not do justice to the intensity of his brilliant blue gaze. It’s unnerving. Blue Steel may not have been so far off the mark.

“Just speaking from my experience when I was young: my head is down and I’m kind of looking forward and just going and not really even thinking about the future, just doing what I want to be doing and then all of a sudden you kind of look up and you go, ‘Oh wait a minute, I’m here.’’

“Here,” of course, is the wrong side of 40.

It’s not only our physical bodies that change with age. Josh’s professional paralysis as he agonises over every frame of his six-hour long film contrasts sharply with the casual, take-it-as-it-comes exuberance of his young protégée.

But the real comic material that many on the older side of 40 will identify with is Josh and Cornelia’s unabashed envy — not just of their new friends’ youth, but their self-assuredness. Young people these days just seem so damn with it.

“The younger people in this movie seem to have much more of a sense of themselves at a young age than we did,” agrees Stiller, “and that’s a little unsettling to Josh.”

Despite the premise, with the film duly mining many of the idiosyncrasies of ageing — the dreaded onset of arthritis; pulling back muscles during moderately challenging activities; experimenting with hats — to great comic effect, this is not, Stiller insists (and I agree), one for the oldies.

“The younger couple seem to be emblematic of what’s happening right now, today; this generation of people who’ve grown up with social media and digital technology at their fingertips,” he says, “so I feel like it’s really a nice sort of battle-of-the-generations set-up in the movie.”

Baumbach, himself 45, recently said that he is still “stunned” to realise he’s not 25 anymore. This is reflected in his masterstroke of casting Adam Horovitz as Josh’s best friend; a greying, frazzled house-husband. Horovitz, of course, is better known to many as Ad-Rock.

What better way to capture this changing of the guard, and the pitiable but stubborn belief of every generation that getting old is never really going to happen to them, but to strap a demanding infant to a Beastie Boy’s chest, and have him wonder where the hell his own youth went?

“You’re watching the culture change, and you’re watching these new generations come up,” Stiller says. “It’s something you never think about until it happens to you.”

Of course, one thing that happens to primarily comedic actors and directors (Stiller is both) as they get older is that they gravitate towards more Oscar-baity drama. I wonder if Stiller could be joining these ranks. “I feel very fortunate I’ve been able to do both [acting and directing], and I think it’s just a matter of what I want to focus on,” he replies, a tad evasively. “And if I want to focus on directing more that’ll be what I’ll be doing.”

Which brings me to the business end. The long-awaited Zoolander 2 takes place some 15 years after the first beloved classic. This make Derek Zoolander himself a (gulp) middle-aged male model; given the fashion world’s penchant for self-satire, is there anything left to parody?

“Zoolander 2 is about getting bigger than the choices made in fashion,” Stiller responds. “For me, it’s about the characters in the movie, and sort of exploring those characters that we know, and not trying to be too topical, because it’s very hard to do that.”

I’m still not entirely convinced Stiller isn’t set to be the next Eastwood or Hanks. “So, could Zoolander 2 be your last hurrah in comedy?” I ask.

Stiller grins: “Or, it could be a drama.” You heard it here first.

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While We’re Young will be released around Australia on Thursday April 16.

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Ruby Hamad is freelance writer. A regular columnist for Daily Life, her work has also appeared in The Guardian, The Age, The Drum, Crikey and more.