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In-Laws & Disorder

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ROACH It killed my strategy. I wanted them to be nervous around each other. But they were busting each other up all the time. That kitchen scene with Owen [Wilson], I could barely shoot. They were incapable of doing that scene all the way through.

EW So what do you do, Jay, call a lunch break and sober everybody up?

ROACH The opposite. I always let giggle fits go on without saying "cut." Because, Ben, when you're just about to break up, your face goes into this thing, this ambiguous, hilarious expression. It's a secret movie director's trick: Let them crack each other up. There are takes in the film where if we held the shot just one frame longer, you would see them break up.

EW How much improvisation do you encourage?

ROACH It depends on the scene. The dinner scene was very tightly scripted. Ben riffed on a few of the prayer moments and cat-milking story things, so those we let run on. Then other scenes, like Ben's tirade on the airplane--I just knew, the more takes, the better.

EW What about Bob's feelings on improv?

ROACH I'd always heard, "Robert De Niro, oh, he's, he's very Method, he has his own very private way of working and you can't engage it." But Bob, you're so the opposite. Like the poem your character reads to his dead mother. You were so lighthearted! You played around all different ways with that scene. You did takes where you were just completely losing it, blubbering and bawling. We kept working it and finally arrived at a place sort of in between straight-faced and inconsolable.

STILLER Have you always improvised? In your early movies?

DE NIRO Some movies you improvise, some you don't. It just depends on the situation.

STILLER You just always made me feel like if there was an opportunity, it was completely okay to try something unplanned.

DE NIRO It's like musicians. You play off each other. It's very important who you work with. They have to have something they can give you, and you have to have something you give them, even if it's an awkwardness. Some kind of tension or rhythm. If you don't have that, the audience doesn't believe it.

ROACH I was lucky that Ben and Bob not only are good actors and good improv guys, but they think like directors. So they know, "Okay, I can throw this idea at you and we might be able to deal with it." But they also are aware of where the practical limits are. One of the great scenes that Ben helped with was the car chase. We couldn't afford a prolonged, full-on chase, so Ben had the idea of doing a suburban chase, where you weren't allowed to go very fast or very far between stoplights.

EW That scene really points up the age difference between Ben, who's 34, and Bob, who's 57. Did you two use generational differences to ratchet up the tension?

DE NIRO Yeah. I mean, look at what he wore to the MTV awards. It was some sort of camouflage shirt. [Laughs] And some pants thing. I said to him on stage, "Well, I left my disposable suit at home. Made out of paper."

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