It’s been 17 years, nearly to the day, since the release of Tropic Thunder. Starring an unbelievable appearance from Tom Cruise, Robert Downey Jr. in blackface, Jack Black, Danny McBride and Ben Stiller, the movie covers what happens when a group of actors playing soldiers have to become real-life soldiers.
It’s a movie that would probably not get made today for a number of reasons, not the least of which is Downey Jr.’s role. With a script from Justin Theroux, Stiller and Etan Cohen, the movie got an 82 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and made nearly $200 million worldwide.
At the time of Tropic Thunder’s release, war movies were a dime a dozen in Hollywood. The U.S. was in wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and there was a bloodthirsty American audience hungry for Serious Combat Movies following 9/11. Tropic Thunder was made right in the time of that period, but Stiller was actually inspired by a previous period of war films. 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. “This guy named Dale Dye would train them and then they would go make the movie.”
Stiller’s original idea for Tropic Thunder was for it to be about actors coming back from those camps and not being taken seriously by real veterans for their struggles. “I thought it would be funny to make a movie about actors who really take themselves seriously,” Stiller explained. “At first, I wanted to do it about actors who went and did the boot camp and made a movie and then came back and felt like nobody cared — like the actual Vietnam veterans.”
That sounds like an incredibly hilarious premise for a film — but maybe not the winning premise for a comedy. “It was a funny idea, but in reality, I was like, ‘Oh, that’s not really that funny,’” Stiller admitted. “But I did want to make fun of how actors take themselves seriously in those situations. So, that’s how the idea for the movie evolved.”
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