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Trailer: 'Tower Heist': After workers at luxury condos in New York discover that the billionaire in the penthouse has stolen their retirement, they plot the ultimate revenge: a heist to reclaim what he took from them. With Ben Stiller, Eddie Murphy and Matthew Broderick.
Ben Stiller, left, Matthew Broderick, Michael Pena, Casey Affleck and Eddie Murphy seek revenge on a Wall Street swindler in the comedy caper Tower Heist. / David Lee / Universal Pictures
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In the ten weeks leading up to New Year’s, Americans can count on two rock-solid certainties: We’ll overeat like crazy. And we’ll face an onslaught of heavily hyped movies, when the studios bring out their biggest guns: serious Oscar contenders, 3-D action blockbusters, star-studded ensemble comedies.
Tower Heist could be this season’s mega-hit in the latter category. Headlined by Ben Stiller and Eddie Murphy, it’s a caper flick as fresh as today’s Twitter news feed, only funnier. Stiller plays the hardworking manager of a luxury high-rise. When a Wall Street tycoon bamboozles the building’s staff out of their pensions, they decide to rob his penthouse — and recruit Murphy, as a streetwise petty thief, to school them in the ways of crime.
Besides their new film, which opens Nov. 4, the Heist-meisters have plenty in common. Both grew up in New York — Murphy in gritty parts of Brooklyn and Long Island, Stiller in the cushier Manhattan ’hoods frequented by his parents, comics Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara. Both got their career break on Saturday Night Live. Both are dads: Stiller to a young son and daughter with wife Christine Taylor; Murphy (who’s twice divorced) to eight kids, ages 4 to 22.
The pair sat down with USA WEEKEND at a Beverly Hills hotel after our photo shoot (and shortly before the news broke that Murphy would host the Academy Awards in February) to talk about the celluloid subject of the season: holiday movies.
It's a wonderful season.
Do you guys have plans for the holidays?
STILLER: We’ll be doing Christmas and Hanukkah. There’ll be presents for the kids, and we’ll all hang out together.
MURPHY: It’ll be pretty traditional. Gifts, a big dinner and relatives you haven’t seen since last Christmas.
How about movies? Any coming up that you're eager to see?
STILLER: There’s Hugo, Martin Scorsese’s film. I’ll check out anything he directs.
MURPHY: I’m going to see Puss in Boots, with Antonio Banderas.
That's a Shrek spinoff, of course. Have you ever considered doing one with your donkey character?
MURPHY: Well, I did so many of those movies — and then there were the Shrek TV specials, the Shrek rides. I don’t know. I’m kind of donkeyed out.
What are your all-time-favorite holiday movies?
MURPHY: As a kid, I watched The Ten Commandments every year. The March of the Wooden Soldiers, with Laurel and Hardy. And those claymation Christmas cartoons — Rudolph’s Shiny New Year and The Year Without a Santa Claus. My kids like those, too.
STILLER: And The Grinch Who Stole Christmas! It’s fun to be able to pass that stuff on. I watched pretty much the same stuff as Eddie, except for Laurel and Hardy. And I’ve always loved It’s a Wonderful Life. I think that’s just a great movie.
MURPHY: I was never interested in that one until I was in my 20s. Now I watch it all the time.
Would it be nuts to draw a parallel between that classic and Tower Heist?
MURPHY: Oh, yeah — the decent working man who’s being taken advantage of by these rich [expletive]. And the working man is like, “OK, I’m gonna take the situation over and right this wrong.”
STILLER: It’s the same as Robin Hood.
Kid stuff
What kinds of movies do your children like?
STILLER: My girl is 9 and my boy is 6, so we see a lot of kid movies.
Is that ever painful?
STILLER: Generally, yes. [Laughs]
MURPHY: My 11-year-old loves anything with ghosts or aliens. If it’s scary, she wants to see it. She’s cool with it at first, but then at night she’s like, “Aaaaaaah!” She has bad dreams.
Has being a parent affected the kind of films you choose to be in?
STILLER: You not only watch kid movies, you start to make them.
MURPHY: Yeah. You want to make things that everybody can sit down and watch together. [Pauses] But not to the point where it’s “This is all I’m going to do from now on!”
Do your kids think of you as a star?
MURPHY: When they’re with you every day, it’s impossible for them to see you as anything but Dad. If they see you as a movie star, you haven’t spent enough time with them.
STILLER: The only time it’s strange is when they see people react to me. When someone takes a picture, they’re like, “Do you know them?”
When I was a kid, my parents were well known, and when someone would want to talk to them, I felt like it took their attention away from me and my sister. So I try to be really aware of that.
Do you have to repress your R-rated side in front of your kids?
STILLER: I’ll sometimes curse inadvertently, and then I’ll realize the kids are there. That used to freak me out, but I’ve found that if you make a big deal about it, they notice it a lot more.
MURPHY: I don’t have a repressed raunchy side. I’m not like the characters in my movies. I’m a regular dad at home. We have a cut-and-dried rule: They can’t see R-rated films, including mine, until they turn 16.
Youthful Indiscretions
Did you ever sneak into movies when you were young?
MURPHY: I remember going to see Coffy, with Pam Grier, when I was 12. Those were the first grown person’s [expletive] I’d ever seen. She wound up playing my mother in some horrendous film I made, Pluto Nash. I thought, “Wow! I’ve seen her [expletive]!”
STILLER: I snuck in to see The Exorcist with my older sister when I was 9. Scared the [expletive] out of me! All that stuff happening to Linda Blair.
Have you ever shown your kids a movie that was a little more advanced than you expected?
MURPHY: I’ve taken my kids to a PG-13 movie where it’s like, “Hey, this should have been an R!” They go a little bit over the line. But I’ve never seen an R-rated one where I was like, “Oh, come on, this should have been PG-13!”
STILLER: PG movies used to have a lot more stuff in them, though. I was watching Ghostbusters with my son the other day, and they’re just swearing and cursing. I was like, “Whoa!”
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