Tagline: And you thought your parents were embarrassing.
Meet the Fockers movie storyline. In the year 2000, audiences were invited to come along with male nurse Greg (a.k.a. Gaylord) Focker (Ben Stiller) on a weekend as he lost his luggage, set the backyard on fire, went a little over-the-top in a game of water volleyball, spray painted the cat and was administered a lie-detector test by Jack Byrnes (Robert De Niro), his girlfriend’s father (who turned out to be not a horticulturalist, but an ex-CIA operative reluctant to allow Greg into The Byrnes Family Circle of Trust) in the blockbuster comedy Meet the Parents. The film became the runaway hit of the fall of 2000, tallying more than $300 million worldwide.
Now, Greg has managed to earn his way inside the Circle of Trust and things are going great. He and his fiancée Pam (Teri Polo) are excitedly planning their wedding and there’s only one tiny, itsy-bitsy little thing left to smooth the way to the altar: the future in-laws need to spend a weekend together.
So, Greg and Pam climb aboard Jack’s new state-of-the-art RV (with the Kevlar-reinforced hull and the two-inch Plexiglas windows) for a trip to Focker Isle, the Cocoanut Grove domicile of Bernie and Roz Focker (Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand). The next 48 hours will provide the parents of the intended bride and groom a little time to get to know each other, but more importantly, give Jack the opportunity to study Greg’s parents.
The film was a commercial success and is currently the highest-grossing film starring Robert De Niro. The film grossed $46,120,980 on its opening weekend in North America (5,000 screens at 3,518 theaters, averaging $13,110 per theater, or $9,224 per screen). At the end of the film’s 149 days of release, it grossed a total of $279,261,160 in North America, and $237,381,779 in other territories, for a total worldwide gross of $516,642,939, with an estimated 44 million tickets sold in the US. The film’s budget was $80 million.
About the Film
An old show business axiom dictates that comedy is truth-a glimmer of recognition, the acknowledgment of a familiar situation, as in “Hey, that happened to me,” quickly followed by the nearly instantaneous feeling of relief that this (most probably) painful situation is happening to someone else, onscreen.
For instance: being introduced to the intimidating parents of your intended spouse and finding out that your future father-in-law is a covert government agent with a knack for ferreting out the truth. Or, even worse still, after meeting the couple that produced the person you love, having your future in-laws down for their first introductions to your own flawed, idiosyncratic family-a stay-at-home father and liberal lawyer from the 1970s and his plain-speaking, sex counselor wife.
Parents… meet the parents. In order for the originating filmmakers and cast of the runaway comedy hit of 2000, Meet the Parents, to return to the story of a male nurse named Gaylord Focker and his desire to marry the WASPy daughter of a CIA operative, all needed to be sure that the story was worth continuing and that the new ground trod would prove (as it had in the past) rife with comic and truthful possibilities.
And while the first film ended with the question that suggested a possible sequel, (when Jack Byrnes asks his wife, Dina, “What kind of people would name their child Gaylord Focker?”), it was much easier in theory than in reality to continue the comic storyline begun in the original. Because Meet the Parents proved successful with the public-eventually grossing more than $300 million worldwide-as well as critics, all concerned realized that the bar for a potential follow-up had been sat rather high.
“The response to the first movie was so overwhelming, that it was quite hard to find a story that could live up to our expectations for a sequel,” says producer of both Parents and Meet the Fockers, Jane Rosenthal. “We were genuinely thrilled that Parents had struck such a chord with audiences. So it was always about finding the best story.”
For the director of both films, Jay Roach, the issue was not so much who these Fockers would be, but how they would compare to the upstanding family from Oyster Bay, the Byrneses. And although always attached as the director of the possible sequel, Roach “needed to be convinced that there was a reason to make another film,” offers Rosenthal. “He always said, `There has to be a compelling reason to tell this story.’ It was never just a sequel for a sequel’s sake. He kept that question in the forefront of everyone’s mind every step of the way.”
Says Roach: “I think Greg Focker dreads the Byrneses meeting the Fockers because he knows that they’re worlds apart, both culturally and socially. In almost any way that you can imagine, the Fockers are going to be a little bit problematic for him in terms of the way he knows Jack Byrnes will look at them and judge them. It’s Greg’s dread and bleak fantasy that drives this all forward.”
Greg has continued in his habit of bending the truth, trying to tell people what he thinks they want to hear. It doesn’t help that he has intimated that his father is a lawyer (which he was, but put his career on hold to stay at home and raise Greg) and his mother, a doctor (true, but he’s left out the vital detail that she counsels senior citizens on ways to improve and prolong their sex life well into their twilight years).
It is the impending family get-together that will allow Pam’s father the chance to evaluate the legacy potential of the Focker family line-as Jack says in the film: “…like studying a frozen caveman, if I can see where you came from, I’ll have a better idea of where you’re going.”
“Jack is going to get a sense of what the two gene pools will create in terms of grandchildren and Greg knows that is what Jack is obsessed with,” notes Jay Roach. “Greg sees his potential downfall-Jack will look at his parents and see what Greg is truly all about. Because of this, Greg over-compensates and tries to manage things… which just makes it all worse.”
Once the idea for the movie was formulated and a screenplay embarked upon, the thoughts turned to casting: Who would and more importantly, who could play the Fockers?
“In our fantasy world, Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand were our `dream team,’” offers Rosenthal. “The fact that they were initially intrigued with the idea was beyond our wildest dreams. Jay met with them, then Ben [Stiller] and Bob [De Niro] called them both up. Ben and Jay, I think, were really instrumental in helping persuade them both to be a part of the Focker family.”
Roach explains, “When we were looking for the perfect people to play Bernie and Roz, there weren’t a huge number of choices that seemed exactly right. There really were only two people, when you picture them with Ben.”
“I initially had this image of who `Dustin Hoffman’ was supposed to be,” explains Ben Stiller, who originated the role of the Focker scion and reprises it in the new film. “The actor from The Graduate and Midnight Cowboy and Rain Man-a real body of work with an iconic stature. But in reality, he’s a really funny and goofy guy, actually closer to Bernie than to some of the famous roles he’s played. He’s incredibly warm and generous as an actor.”
Filmmakers initially approached Hoffman, taking a cue from psychology textbooks that the father/son link is perhaps the most profound in establishing exactly who a son turns out to be. Says Roach: “We wanted to lock that relationship in first, to provide a really important dynamic and complete what would be a key triangle, between Jack and Greg and Greg and Bernie.”
Potential scheduling difficulties were ironed out once the director sat down with Hoffman at his Los Angeles office: “Dustin is barefoot in his office and I listen to him talk about his family and everything else. He’s incredibly generous and open, and 10 minutes after you’ve met him you, you feel like he’ll tell you anything… and I realized he just is Bernie Focker.”
So strongly did Roach feel that the actor inhabited the qualities he saw in the head of the Focker family that he fed the writers details about Hoffman to incorporate into the character. “Who Dustin is and who Bernie came to be were in perfect synchronicity,” adds the director. “Dustin has no personal space issues whatsoever. He’ll eat the food off of your plate and you can eat the food off of his. After talking with his wife, Lisa, I realized that he is the Jewish mother of his own family, similar to Bernie’s relationship to his family. And that dynamic is in direct contrast to Jack’s alpha male-not wanting to relinquish control of his family. With that set, I knew the core of the movie was in place.”
In essence, Roach was asking Hoffman to play himself. “And over all these years, no one had ever asked me to do that,” says Hoffman. “Bernie Focker is basically the kind of a guy who wouldn’t mind leaving the door open while he went to the bathroom on an airplane just so he could continue a conversation with the people that he was talking to around his seat,” says Hoffman.
“In looking at Bernie and Jack,” he continues, “I guess I would say that opposites are sometimes the same. We appear to be at opposite ends of the spectrum, ideologically speaking, but in a way we’re both overbearing to our children, not allowing them to individuate. This is the third time I’ve worked with Bob, and it’s always easy and fun to be in a project with him. And Ben’s comic instincts are as sharp as any actor I’ve ever worked with.”
In looking to casting Bernie’s mate, the list was, once again, extremely short. Per Roach: “We wanted someone who was a truth-speaker, very direct and uninhibited-also very open and affectionate. And Barbra just brought an amazing complexity to the character. Roz is the breadwinner and Barbra has this strength that was right for Greg’s mom. Barbra Streisand in real life is incredibly sweet and incredibly loving and also very direct. She just says exactly what she thinks and has strong opinions about things-as with Dustin and Bernie, the character and the actress were perfectly in tune.”
Stiller found the part of Roz provided Streisand “with a chance to return to some of the lighter comedies she’d done previously, like What’s Up Doc? and others. She’s a truly impressive artist-she is an icon, but she’s also funny and smart and just great to be around. She’s extremely warm and, like Roz, she has that ability to really listen.”
Streisand and Hoffman have been friends for over 40 years but the new film is the first time the two have worked together. “We went to an acting school together, and Dustin was dating my roommate at the time,” recalls Streisand. “He was the janitor at the school to pay for classes and I was babysitting for my teacher in exchange for classes. Working with him is really fun, because we both like to improvise-like musical riffs, instruments playing around the melody.”
Meet the Fockers (2004)
Directed by: Jay Roach
Starring: Ben Stiller, Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand, Blythe Danner, Alanna Ubach, Ray Santiago, Tim Blake Nelson, Shelley Berman, Owen Wilson
Screenplay by: Jim Herzfeld, Tim Rasmussen, Vince DiMeglio
Production Design by: Rusty Smith
Cinematography by: John Schwartzman
Film Editing by: Alan Baumgarten, Lee Haxall, Jon Poll
Costume Design by: Carol Ramsey
Set Decoration by: Sara Andrews
Art Direction by: Andrew Neskoromny
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for crude and sexual humor, and language.
Distributed by: Universal Pictures
Release Date: December 22, 2004
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