Feature by Brad Balfour
Among the many films seen at New York Film Festival 63, Ben Stiller’s recollection of his parents — “Stiller & Meara: Nothing is Lost” — was a touching tribute to them. Long before Ben or his sister Amy were a twinkle in their parents’ eyes, the duo of Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara were a major comedy team touring America and making many appearances on national TV, in clubs and on stages throughout the country from 1960s on. They were a couple that caught the zeitgeist of the moment — a tall red-haired Irish woman married to the shorter, fuzzy-headed Jewish boy. They got together and very much represented the conflicts of the day.
Meara was often the comic voice and Jerry became her straighter foil. They shaped a comic vision viewed through their unique lens and turned it into their own universe. Even though she had thought of herself more as a serious actress; and he was the one who constantly struggled to prove himself, they became a success together. Eventually they did branch out onto Broadway and in various TV series.
They had two children, Ben and Amy, and stayed together for over 60 years while struggling with various ups and downs. Meara had her struggles with alcohol while nurturing two kids who eventually went into the business of performing as well. Son Ben became a star in his own right, first comically and then as a serious actor.
A few years after his parents were gone, Ben and his sister had to eventually sell their storied Upper West side apartment. Once they confronted the vast archives situated there — dad Stiller was quite a collector, filmmaker and recordist (you might say hoarder) — they realized there was a ton of material to make a serious documentary about their parents and the families they gave life to.
In this edited transcript of a conversation held after a screening of the film at the Metrograph recently, Ben Stiller ruminates about the evolution of this doc. He explains how, in reviewing their history, and through this collection of material which affected him, his sister, wife Christine Taylor and their kids it all became this documentary. Titled “Stiller & Meara: Nothing is Lost,” the doc that he and others crafted premiered in select theaters on October 17, 2025. And since October 24th, it’s been streaming globally on Apple TV+.
Q: You’ve had so much experience doing narrative series and films, but documentaries are a totally a new situation. When you’re doing a narrative series or film, you know pretty much when you start what the arc is going to be and where the ending is. Is this the movie you thought you were going to make on Day One?
Ben Stiller: No, it’s nowhere near. I had no idea what it was going to be other than knowing it would be about my parents. That was it. I knew that I wanted to make something about their lives and their relationship. Then it was just like this process of starting to film and sift through all of that material, discovering the material as we did that. But, never in a million years did I think that I would be in it so much. Or that Christine would be in it as much or my kids as well. But I was not thinking it would be what it ended up being in terms of the story, with a lot about our whole family.
Q: As a filmmaker, how was that experience for you? Was it like letting it unfold through the discovery process?
Ben Stiller: It was a weird, long experience. For many years, I wasn’t quite sure what it was going to be and what it was going to turn into. I started it back in 2020. For a long time, it was an amorphous series of sequences. Then [it was] working with Adam Kernitz, who is a great editor, amazing editor and Jeff Richman, who is also an amazing editor and producer on the movie. Those guys –– Edward, Liz, Morgan –– would start to talk about what themes were emerging. But really, for a long time, it was just sort of a lot of scenes.
It was very daunting. I never went through this process before — and I love documentaries. I’m such a fan and I know how much work they are from the outside. Just as someone who appreciates movies, I knew that the open-ended process of making a documentary is necessary to really allow the story to evolve. I’ve seen filmmakers talk about that. But for this one, I was trying to figure out what we were allowed to evolve. If you’re making a documentary about somebody doing something or some endeavor, then the story goes on. But this was like a retrospective. Nothing new was happening other than my sister and I going through the apartment and trying to figure out how it was going to go and how she was going to sell it.
It was really having to, at a certain point, be willing to think about things about my parents –– feelings I had for my parents and questions I had about them. Personally, that took a while to really get into. I think I didn’t want to do that at first. I wanted to probably make it more, just not as much. I don’t know why but I didn’t want to go inward in terms of my feelings about them as much.
Q: But aren’t you glad that you did?
Ben Stiller: Yeah, I’m really glad that it started to evolve into something that had these themes of the cyclical nature of parenting and of raising your children and the things your parents taught you. Those things are the experiences that you take with you. There are the things you want to change — in your relationships and creativity. Those themes started to come through.
I realized the movie is not going to be this cut-and-dry biopic about the history of my parents. That became interesting to think about. We explored different emotions or feelings and questions that are not just about how they met in 1953 or whatever — “and then this happened and that happened.” So the evolving language was an interesting process. That got exciting to see that you can tell the story that way.
We started to show it to people as we were screening every month or two as the movie was evolving. The feedback I was getting from people was that, “It’s interesting because it makes me think about my own family.” The family and relationship themes and the parenting stuff went beyond the story of our specific family which was something I wasn’t expecting. I was really happy to see that it was resonating on that level. That encouraged me to be willing to put more personal stuff into it. At the beginning of the process I never, in a million years, thought that we would get into any of that stuff.
Q: It’s fascinating, too, because there’s a universal quality to it. A lot of people here have gone through the cleaning out of the parents’ house ritual. Your parents get older and you have to start taking care of things a little bit differently. That’s universal. What’s not is finding out that your father had tape-recorded as much as he did. It’s so fascinating — what an amazing thing for you and your sister to have. What was it like for you when you started finding out that there was all of this stuff? Did you know as a kid that he was constantly recording you?
Ben Stiller: Yeah, I knew. He would always get the tape recorder out with my kids when they were little. I kind of remember him recording us. I remember him taking pictures of us all the time and having the whole movie camera out. I didn’t know that my mom and he would improvise into the tape recorder. I didn’t realize there was all that tape that was saved and that there were all these recordings that had these moments in between real conversations. So that part of it was definitely a discovery.
Of course, I knew that he was always taking pictures of us. That was just part of our lives really. But my dad was also very introspective in that way. He was always interested in examining what was going on in both my parents’ present day lives and also in their past. He would always write about his childhood. The tape, the audio recordings of my dad and his father talking. Or just because he went in the car with his dad and drove around with him to the old neighborhood and tape recorded his father. He wanted to do that before he died. I think he wanted to make sure he got that.
Q: We also learned from your grandfather that the gene of wanting to be in show business has been running through your family tree.
Ben Stiller: Yeah. Like hearing that about my grandfather saying, “Yeah, I want to be an actor.” I never heard that. That was crazy. Because I knew how discouraging he was to my dad. Both my dad’s parents were not encouraging of him being an actor or being in show business at all. So to really hear, “Oh yeah, sure. He had this dream.” I knew that he played the saxophone. He was married like four times. Lived to be 100. Nobody knows exactly how old. He didn’t have a birth certificate. But he lived a long time. He never talked. My grandfather never talked about anything.
There wasn’t a really close relationship there. We’d see him every once in a while. He was always fun and sweet. But there wasn’t a lot of it. It wasn’t like “grandpa” and like we’d see him every holiday. It wasn’t like that. He just never talked about anything. So to hear those recordings and hearing him talk about what he wanted to do, his aspirations. That’s only because my dad made the effort to do that and saved all that material.
Also, all those videotapes –– the scenes from the Mike Douglas show or even some of those other interviews –– are just on three quarter inch cassettes that my dad recorded at home. We had this machine that he would [use to] record when they were on TV. When they’d do something, he’d make sure that they recorded it.
We went back at the end of the editing process and wanted to clear the clips or try to get better resolution ones – but first generation clips of a lot of these shows just didn’t exist. They weren’t saving all the Mike Douglas episodes from 1974. The only reason that those even are around is because my dad saved them.
Then there was a scene that we had early on in one of the cuts, because a lot of them were VHS cassettes that my dad would use to tape them on TV. There was a VHS we found of my parents being interviewed on some show. then all of a sudden it was like snow and glitchy. Then all of a sudden it was the Land Sharks bit from “Saturday Night Live.”
Q: Was it you or your sister?
Ben Stiller: No it was me. It was me in 1977 or whatever was going on. It didn’t matter to me that it was my parents recording of their stupid show. I was going to record Saturday Night Live.
Q: Land Sharks was very good .
Ben Stiller: That’s a classic — it surely was. With the movie, I did think about what to leave in, what to take out and what my parents would feel about the movie. I do think that my dad would have wanted something to be done with all this stuff. He was always trying to do that with all the stuff that he saved. He was always, I think, trying to make sense of his past and trying to process his childhood, too.
Q: Do you think that’s part of why he was doing it?
Ben Stiller: I think so. He had an awareness of wanting to have those things saved in the memory. He would write stories about him and his younger brother, Marty. He was not really in the dock too much. But they set off a fire alarm in East New York. Broke them when they were four years old and the fire department came. How frightening and scary. How much trouble they got in with their mom. Things like that. Very deep childhood memories that he was always trying to connect with.
Q: Are you getting more into the habit of archiving things now?
Ben Stiller: I definitely started to do that in the last few years. Actually, before that too. Just for that reason. Because of my parents’ stuff. I guess also cleaning out the apartment, too. But just wanting to have it all somewhere. And then just saving our own stuff, too. I don’t know. It’s good to save.
Q: You’ve just discovered this. You find these things and learn stuff about your parents. You’re donating a lot of the materials that we saw in the film to the National Comedy Center, right? What did you yourself want to keep from the apartment?
Ben Stiller: We kept that scuba mask. Not that the National Comedy Center wanted a scuba mask. But things like that. I definitely wanted to keep personal stuff. I think some of their sketches and stuff that they wrote, and typed out on carbon paper and things like that. There’s a lot of those that we gave to them. But those letters. That was amazing. That was just stuff that was on my mom’s board.
Q: You can’t give that to the Comedy Center. They got spicy in their early letters.
Ben Stiller: Yeah. It was so weird. A lot of people say, “Oh, this movie is about … I see how much it’s about love.” And I think their commitment to each other in a long-term relationship. When I think of my parents, I don’t think of them in any way as young and passionate. I just never thought of that. They weren’t like…. I do remember them taking care of each other at times. But it wasn’t like a super romantic relationship, right? My experience growing up with it, It was just my parents. They were doing their thing. And they were working.
It was all the ups and downs of the tension. But that’s what’s interesting to me. I guess, ultimately, the love in a relationship is something that is for a couple when you’re in a long-term relationship. It’s like finding. How do you do that? How do you find that passion or tenderness? They went through so many ups and downs that they did get to that later in their life. Like I say in the movie. I think that was a very real thing. My memories of them being close and passionate or loving with each other are more like later, when they were older.
Q: How old were you? When did you realize that they weren’t just mom and dad. They were also this other thing called Stiller and Meara.
Ben Stiller: I can’t separate it out, honestly. As a child, it was always part of who they were. it was kind of shiny and bright and exciting what they got to do. I always remember that. Just that they got to do it in lights there, backstage, and there were nightclubs. That excitement was always something that I remember thinking, “Oh, this is really fun.” And just thinking it was more interesting to me than going to school and doing homework. Things like that. I think my sister and I both had that feeling.
Q: Much of the film is also about getting to see New York City, the way it was in that time period. Did that jog a lot of nostalgia for you in your childhood, what the Upper West Side was like?
Ben Stiller: Yeah. I’m living, you get to my age. You start to think about this stuff. I don’t think the movie I just did. Whenever I go back –– ‘cause I don’t live in the Upper West Side, anymore. My daughter lives up there. I’ll walk around –– like she makes fun of me, my daughter. I’ll go, “Oh that building … that used to be ….” And she’s like “I know you told me that last time they knocked down all the buildings.” “That’s where Vita Nova pizzeria was. I used to go.” But you know I got that feeling of nostalgia for sure. Even last night, I did a Q&A at the JCC where my dad used to go swimming. And there was a funny story about my dad forgetting to wear his bathing trunks at the JCC pool.
Q: Is that something that’s allowed?
Ben Stiller: I think if you’re Jerry Stiller…. I was walking around the neighborhood and thinking. Like I walked down 84th street, my old block, and it was just interesting to me. I started to think, “Oh when we were filming the shots for the documentary five years ago outside …” I started getting nostalgic for that. We’re just like, it’s more like thinking about this place. That block for me is always going to be like ground zero for my home, that home, 84th Street, Riverside Drive. So to watch it change over the years, it stayed the same, but it’s always constantly interesting to me.
Q: It’s New York, it’s New York.
Ben Stiller: Yeah, but also the way New York changes. it is crazy to watch the changes. I do find myself wanting to hold on to the old buildings.
Q: As a director, so much of it is having a critical eye, being able to step back from the material, and make a lot of decisions. How different was it processed for you, having not only to assemble a film, but also to balance a lot of emotions and feelings?
Ben: It would’ve been impossible to really do it without having people that I trusted as collaborators. So with Adam, it was interesting, because I don’t know Adam at all from before Adam Kernitz. I met him on this project, so to see his perception of our family was really interesting to me. And helpful, as just an outside eye. And Jeff Richman, who I worked with as an editor for the past –– I don’t know –– like eight years now. So we worked together a lot.
I really trust his eyes too. And so he knows me more. But still, it was the discussions about like, how does this feel? Does this feel too indulgent? Does this feel like too … you know. I really didn’t resist being in it for a long time. And then I realized I just had to let go of that, because this is a subjective movie that I’m making about my parents. And then, as the theme started to emerge about the effect that your parents have on you, then I felt also that I had to be honest about my own stuff. As honest as I could be, as open as I could be about my own relationship, if I was going to put my parents’ relationship under a magnifying glass like that.
Q: That seems fair.
Ben Stiller: It felt like it was fair, and then it actually became more like what the movie was, one of things the movie was about.
Q: The parallels that you see in the patterns in the film are fascinating. Did you at all have trepidation about having your wife and children be a part of this?
Ben Stiller: Yeah, definitely. At the beginning of making the movie, Christine and I weren’t really in it. We weren’t together, we were separated. So we weren’t really even talking about the movie. And it would have been impossible, really, to do any of those interviews at the beginning of making the movie. Like I said, I wasn’t even thinking about the movie in terms of that until later. So as our relationship evolved, then it became a very organic process as I started to show them cuts of the movie and get feedback from them also. Then I felt like, Oh, as this theme started to emerge of the cyclical nature of our relationships and what’s handed down. I felt like it was really important to talk to my kids.
Then as the theme of realizing how much my parents’ marriage affected my own perception of relationships and how I was looking at my own relationship, I felt that was worthwhile to be able to talk to Christine. And, she was like, “Yeah, definitely. We should do it,” which was great. And that’s why I felt like everybody in the family really came together in that way.
It’s not like I do my stuff and Christine does her stuff. And, unlike my parents, we don’t work together. We have worked together — we talk about that in the movie. But this was one of the first times, for our whole family to be a part of something. It was important to me that everybody had input and felt good about it because there was so much personal stuff, obviously.
Q: Did anyone have veto power?
Ben Stiller: If anybody, Quinn or Ella or Christine, had said, “I don’t feel comfortable having that in,” I wouldn’t have put it in. My parents didn’t, though.
Q: They would have really liked it. It’s been five years of doing this and living with it. Have you retroactively had different feelings about your parents as people and also as your mother and father?
Ben Stiller: It’s been such a great way to connect with them, honestly. It’s amazing to have a project like this. It’s like doing what I love doing and doing it about my parents, making a movie about them. Being able to connect with them by really delving into the stuff that I hadn’t seen before, and seeing them in different ways. I just like watching all the archival interviews with them. It’s really fascinating to me, the way they would talk about their relationship very candidly, and the way people on television used to talk more candidly in interview shows, or on talk shows. That just doesn’t really happen anymore.
Q: Having you and your sister out on stage at the Mike Douglas show — something like that doesn’t happen anymore.
Ben Stiller: Yeah, I hope not. It was so fun for us, and that was exciting for us at the time. It was very exciting to go down, get in the limousine, they sent us a limousine to take them, take my parents down to Philadelphia to do the Mike Douglas show and record five shows in a day.
Q: That’s how they did it?
Ben Stiller: They did five the whole week together, they’d be the co-hosts because they had other celebrities come on as co-hosts, and it was very fun for us. In retrospect, the violin thing was exciting at the time. Probably I was a little nervous, but, in retrospect, there’s no reason why I should have been nervous.
Q: How much did you send to the Comedy Museum, how many boxes? Were they shocked or surprised at the amount of stuff that they got? Did you make them aware of what they were going to get?
Ben Stiller: I don’t know about the Comedy Museum. They seemed very happy to get as much as they could get, which is great. It’s wonderful to have a place where these things can live and people can access them and also the way that they curate it in terms of the process of writing comedy and doing it. I’m really happy about that.
Q: How has the film resonated now, this far away from it? It is finally done and all that — in terms of your ideas about filmmaking?
Ben Stiller: In terms of this process, there’s nothing like it. I’ve never gone through anything like this experience of doing something so specifically personal and being able to talk about it with people, these kinds of things. It’s been really wonderful for me. I’m sure most people, when you make a documentary, would feel like the audience watching it is such an important part of any movie. But really the conversation that it has sparked … for the people who’ve seen the movie and people have reached out to me about the movie in terms of what it sparked for them personally. That to me is the most gratifying thing and also like the most exciting thing about it, too.
And yeah, it’s good to do. I love being able to make films and to work with really talented people. I feel like the experience that I was able to have on this was incredibly unique. I feel really lucky to have had the experience and the opportunity to do it. And then the opportunity to even just, it’s so challenging for documentaries to get released and to get seen, let alone to get made. I mean, and I was so lucky to have this, to have Apple wanting to buy it.
For the first three or four years, I self-financed — did it on my own. I had the ability to do that. But when, but just even feeling what that is when you think, “Okay, we have to do a shoot day because we want to go shoot Stephen Colbert. And we have to get an interview, one more interview with me. But like, what else do we need to talk about?” Those decisions are so important because if you feel it, how expensive it is to go to get a shoot day on a documentary.
I was on a panel a couple of days ago with the couple who did the Led Zeppelin documentary. They were talking about the prep and what they went through with no, you know, nobody having, paying anything. So you’re like, you’re on your own. And then to be lucky enough to have it then be, you know, put on a platform that people can see it. Because I think when, you know, these documentaries that are being made, there’s so many brilliant documentaries that are so about the audience connection. Because it’s what it evokes for you, because it’s real. So I feel really fortunate to have had the experience.
Q: Everybody has probably seen a little bit of themselves in the documentary. Did your dad know that you were working on it and did he have any input on this?
Ben Stiller: Of course, no. I decided to do this after my dad died but then I was like, “Oh, I wish I could interview my dad.” But he was sick for a few years and wouldn’t have been able to. The reason why I feel like it’s a film by [him], and I give him the last credit is because it’s his; He saved all this stuff, he filmed all this, and he wrote all this stuff down. He never said, “I want you to make a movie of this someday.” But he was documenting it all. He was incredibly curious. He was just always asking these questions. I think he was very much responsible for the movie.