Actor-director Ben Stiller honours his late comedian parents in Stiller & Meara

Ben Stiller has long since stopped analysing what draws him to projects.

- Melena Ryzik

So, when the American actor and filmmaker started filming in his parents’ apartment a few weeks after the death of his father, Jerry Stiller, in 2020 at the age of 92, he was not sure why, exactly.

“It was just this instinct,” he said. Partly, it was about preservation; the five-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side of New York City was his childhood home, and it was due to be sold.

Up until the last possible moment, he shot video tours of the memento-filled, and then emptied corners where he and his older sister, actress Amy Stiller, grew up with Jerry and their mother Anne Meara. Meara died in 2015 at the age of 85.

Then, too, he wanted to memorialise Jerry and Anne - or Stiller and Meara, as they were better known in their performance heyday, a comedic duo whose banter catapulted them from the club circuit to household fame in the Ed Sullivan era from 1948 to 1971.

For an audience of 30 million viewers, they played up their real-life identities as a husband and wife mismatched in culture and religion. At home, they worked relentlessly on their routines, honing the razor timing that their son, who will turn 60 in November, absorbed and seeded through his work.