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In-Laws & Disorder

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STILLER I go to the MTV awards and I feel old. MTV's demographic is now literally 12-year-olds.

EW A lot of kids watching Meet the Parents may get the impression that Bob is in his 60s. There are a lot of grandfatherly touches--the gray hair at the temples, and those half glasses. You look over them like a librarian.

DE NIRO [Turns to Roach] Was that in one of the scripts?

ROACH I don't think so--I think you came up with that.

DE NIRO I liked the meticulousness of little glasses that would unfold, of how he'd put those on. It seemed right.

ROACH Bob and I talked a lot about making sure that at the beginning of the movie, he project an image of being as fatherly and warm on the outside as possible, so we could strip that away little by little. And we also wanted to put an almost grandfatherly touch on top of that. Because to me, Bob always looks very fit and physically strong. So he had those bifocals. And it was his idea to do that very elaborate unfolding.

EW Ben's wardrobe in the film is an exercise in extended humiliation, since his character loses his suitcase and has to borrow stuff.

ROACH My favorite moment is his walking in at breakfast in the father-in-law's monogrammed pajamas, not knowing the entire family has arrived, and his hair is all screwed up. He looks like a little kid; he's totally vulnerable.

EW Jay, I've read that you had similar life experiences.

ROACH My wife's father is a psychiatrist. The kind of person you imagine has X-ray vision, and anything you're doing to cover your own dysfunction, he's going to pick it right up. Don't get me wrong, I love my father-in-law, nicest guy in the world. Not like Bob's character. [Everyone laughs.] But the situation I understood. The script also made me think a lot about my own father, because I grew up in a house of secrecy. My father worked for the Defense Department. There were cover stories. Your neighbors would be checked out.

EW The movie has a lot of psychologically discomfiting humor but only one true gross-out gag--the flying sewage scene. What was that stuff?

ROACH Well, there are long conferences you have to have with the special-effects [technicians] when you need a substance like this for a lot of takes. It was some kind of cellulose mixed with mud and water, sprayed out of a hose.

STILLER And they come in, "Okay! We got yer mud mix here!" All proud of it.

ROACH They've got the viscosity down, and they're telling me how many pounds per square inch per second can spray out of the nozzle, and I'm thinking "Oh, my God, this is going to be the most scientifically elaborate poo-poo joke in the history of the movies." But in a way it was a big experiment. That screaming and yelling from Blythe [Danner] and Bob is all real, because we weren't sure how hard the spray was going to be.

EW Jay, do movies like There's Something About Mary make you feel emboldened to do things like this scene?

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