By Jae-Ha Kim
Chicago Sun-Times
March 31, 1996
Writer-director David O. Russell looks a lot like Ben Stiller, who stars in Russell’s latest picture, “Flirting With Disaster.” The physical similarity hasn’t been lost on the director of the critically acclaimed “Spanking the Monkey.”
“I wouldn’t say that that’s why Ben got the part,” Russell said earlier this month during a lunch interview at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel downtown. “But yes, it’s come to my attention that there is a likeness between the two of us.”
The comedy (in its opening weekend in Chicago) deals with a young scientist (Stiller) who has a beautiful wife (Patricia Arquette) and an infant son. He also has a set of adoptive parents (Mary Tyler Moore and George Segal) who love him as much as they smother him. He has reached a period in his life when he wants to find his biological parents. With the help of a beautiful but semi-incompetent counselor-in-training from an adoption agency (Tea Leoni), he goes on a nationwide search to find his real mom and dad (Alan Alda and Lily Tomlin), who turn out to be a nice couple who manufacture illegal drugs in their home.
It’s no coincidence that Russell, 37, started writing the script when his own son was 1 year old, and that his real-life adopted sister was searching for her birth parents.
“It was a very schizophrenic experience for her,” Russell said of his sister. “One minute she thought she found them and felt like she had found the holy grail, and the next minute she was freaking out. And marriage is kind of like that, too. You think it’s a holy grail, and it can be a lot of fun at times, but it’s also a complicated, messy thing, and sometimes you start to think that maybe another woman could be the answer to your problems. I chose to make fun of all that in this movie. That’s basically my formula for comedy: You take the most embarrassing, foolish part of yourself and multiply it by 10 times.”
A self-described cinematic late bloomer, Russell didn’t get into the business until nine years ago. Born and reared in New York City, Russell majored in English and political science at Amherst College. Though he had always been a creative writer, he opted to work as a union organizer and teach literacy after graduating in 1981.
He wrote and directed the short film “Bingo Inferno,” which played at the 1987 Sundance Film Festival. That was followed by “Hairway to the Stars,” but it was “Spanking the Monkey” – a hilariously disturbing look at the incestuous relationship between a mother and her teenage son – that became his entree into Hollywood. Made on a budget of $80,000, that movie won the audience award for best picture in 1994 at Sundance.
“At the time `Spanking the Monkey’ was being distributed, I was like, `Let’s seize the moment and write something now,’ ” Russell said, gingerly buttering a reporter’s tape recorder just for the heck of it. “(My sister) was going through this whole comedy of errors with her search for her birth parents, and I just couldn’t resist.”
Though “Flirting” afforded him a substantially larger budget than $80,000, Russell said he spent most of his down time on the set in his car or in one of his stars’ trailers.
“They all had trailers, but I didn’t,” he recalled, laughing. “So I would go knocking and say, `Hi, Patricia. Can I come in?’ They were all really nice about it.”
During filming, Arquette asked Russell his opinion about marriage. “I was telling her all this serious advice and to follow her heart and all that because I thought it was someone like Brad Pitt,” he said. “And then she said, `Well, what if he’s not rich and famous? What if he’s a pipe fitter?’ So then I felt positive she was in love with a plumber. Then one day she came back a married woman — to Nicolas Cage.”
Ideally, Russell had asked Moore to reunite with Dick Van Dyke to play Stiller’s birth parents, but Moore declined.
“What can you do?” he asked. “She’s Mary Tyler Moore.”
