Ben Stiller Says ‘Tropic Thunder’ Was in Response to Actors Taking Themselves So Seriously in War Movies

The genesis of Tropic Thunder was in response to the era of films like Empire of the Sun made after the Vietnam War. In a recent interview with Josh Horowitz on the Sad Happy Confused podcast, Stiller said he got the idea for Tropic Thunder because at the time he was writing it, a lot of actors were taking themselves very seriously because they wanted to play war heroes on screen. “It was the era of like Platoon and Hamburger Hill, and every actor my age at that time was auditioning for all those movies and going off to the boot camps to do the you know the actor boot camp for the movie where they act like soldiers for two weeks,” Stiller explained.

Author: Opheli Garcia Lawler

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