It was not easy to have 12 takes of a man putting his sweaty belly into Ben's face 
John Hamburg renews acquaintances with Ben Stiller on Along Came Polly. The writer/director previously co-penned Meet The Parents and Zoolander, and is currently working on Parents sequel Meet The Fockers. The son of a New York talk show host, Along Came Polly is his second stint in the director's chair, following the 1998 pic Safe Men.
How did you get the idea for Along Came Polly?
The idea first came from a vacation I took with my girlfriend to the Caribbean, and a naked Frenchman walked by us on the beach. That started a whole idea. I started thinking: What could be the worst thing that could happen to me on this vacation? OK, this naked French guy could come along and steal my girlfriend. It didn't happen, thank God, but that was the beginning.
Ben Stiller has to endure a lot of embarrassing predicaments in the movie. Are there scenes here that come from your own life?
Watch John's answer to the question here
Just when you think a situation is at its most embarrassing, you somehow make it worse. Do you have a fatalistic streak?
No, I'm very optimistic. I think we go through this torture, but at the end of the day, you know it's going to be OK. You know, as bad as the situation is, when you're at a wedding and you can't dance and your girlfriend wants to dance, it's like you know that's going to be bad for a few minutes, but it's going to end up being OK.
You've worked with Ben three times now, so presumably you developed a shorthand together...
Watch John's answer to the question here
You've written and directed this film, so how keen were you to let the actors improvise?
I'm not that precious about it. I think my experience working as a writer on other directors' movies has made me... you know, I don't make you stick to every word on the page. It's really whatever works. If a scene is working as written, that's great. If it's not working as well, or if you want to try to improvise, and you've got actors as good as Ben and Jennifer and Philip Seymour Hoffman, you can improvise. A bit of the basketball scene, we did some improvisation; also some of the scenes with Ben and Jennifer at different restaurants.
Ben Stiller has talked about the basketball scene, and compared you to Stanley Kubrick for torturing him with multiple takes...
Yes. It was not easy to have 12 takes of a man putting his belly, his sweaty belly, into Ben's face, but we had to do it. We had to do it. The guy was on a trampoline and he jumped into Ben and, you know, we had to get it right.
You've cast the two biggest female stars in TV comedy [Jennifer Aniston, Debra Messing] here, so what did you hope they would bring to the table?
Watch John's answer to the question here
How do you explain your fixation with the overflowing toilet, which has featured in Meet The Parents and Along Came Polly? Is this something that's happened to you?
Of course, it's happened to all of us I think! I can't imagine one person that that hasn't happened to.
Do you want to share that story?
No! No, I don't. That's why I write these movies and let Ben go through it. So I don't have to.
So it's like a catharsis for you to see Ben go through all this torture?
Very much so. It's better than therapy.
You could draw a lot of parallels between Along Came Polly and Meet The Parents, so aside from the chance to direct, what was the challenge for you?
