By The Huffington Post News Editors
Ben Stiller and Jay Roach have known each other since first working together on “Meet the Parents” in 2000, and those 13 years of friendship made the pair’s conversation at the Tribeca Film Festival on Sunday afternoon just that: a conversation. As part of the Tribeca Talks: Directors’ Series, Stiller and Roach, both directors, discussed all matter of moviemaking and seemed to come to one unavoidable conclusion.
“It’s really hard to get most movies made,” Stiller said about the current state of the industry. “Especially independent films, and even just regular, mid-range budgeted dramas. The genre movies and sequels are obviously what becomes the thing.”
Which is what makes Stiller’s newest film such an anomaly. The 47-year-old directs and stars in the upcoming 20th Century Fox film “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” an adaptation of the James Thurber short story of the same name. That work, which was originally published in The New Yorker in 1939, was previously turned into a musical with Danny Kaye in 1947; as Stiller noted on Sunday, however, his version will eschew singing and dancing. “I don’t sing and dance,” Stiller deadpanned.