Lifestyle Magazine

10
How was it like to walk the catwalk for real for
Valentino in Paris?
That was crazy! That was really exciting and scary
because it was a big surprise - you can't trip and
it was a big thing we worked on for about a year
to get to that point and keep it a secret and Anna
was a big part of making that happen too. The
lead up to it was pretty wild because we were
hiding for 3 hours backstage, the models didn't
even know... In fact if you look at the video, I
come out and then, a model comes out behind
me thinking that I was gonna be the end of the
show and they didn't tell them that we were
coming out, and someone comes out and pull
her back in. We wanted to figure out a way to
announce the movie in a different way and
it was really great for us, it was exciting
to see that people actually had a nice
reaction, we didn't know what we
would get. The surprise really is
what people responded to and
how they thought Valentino had
such a sense of humour for him
to do that.
We know how women feel
about the pressure for their
looks in Hollywood, do you feel
such a pressure?
Well you know, I mean, I guess I feel like
as a person everybody is different. I think as
you get older, you just want to feel good about
yourself, for me as I get older, I think about my
life and I feel it gets much simpler. I just want to
be healthy, be happy! I just want to be around
because I think that's the reality of life, you start
to see all sort of things happening to people and
those realities that we live with. That's really my
thing, I just want to be healthy.
Your wife Christine Taylor played your
girlfriend in the first Zoolander. Is she in this
movie as well?
Ben: She appears in the movie yeah, but because
that big disaster in the beginning of the movie, it
sets everything off... You know, it's a world where
supernatural things can occur so.
Why did you wait so many years for the second
one?
Well, it wasn't intentional. I think if when the
movie came out it had been a big hit, we would
have done a sequel then but nobody was
clamouring for it. But then a few years after the
movie came out, it seems like it still had a life
and back in 2005 we tried to do it, we wrote a
script. It just didn't come together, the cast and
the elements weren't happening then so we let
it go for a while. I've never been thinking I have
to do a sequel to the movie, I was really happy
that people still remembered the movie and liked
it, and of course as the years go by, I thought I
couldn't do it because it has been years. 2010
came and we decided to go back in because it
started to feel like the movie was still in people's
consciousness and so I wrote a script with Justin
(Theroux) in 2010 and thought we were gonna
do it then and we couldn't get the elements
together the right way.
It's hard to make movies.
They come together very
specifically. This movie,
I thought, all the cast
was really important
in it, I wanted to bring
it all together and
so we let it go again
and then, it wouldn't
just go away! Back in
2013ish, is when we
started to really look at
it again.
Did you feel any pressure?
Yes definitely! The more time went by the
more I was "Wow, how do we do this?!" because
we are getting older and people really seemed
to love the movie so how do you make it good
enough and all those things.
But in writing the script in 2010, I got excited
of what it could be and then when we got the
cast together, when Will said he wanted to do it,
Owen (Wilson) was into it, we did a read through
of the script with everybody last year. That was
last year in September that we really locked in, it
was exciting, everybody was into it and it dealt
in and it was, "Let's do it!". I thought if we could
do something different and take some chances
with it, that was really important to me because I
thought the first movie committed to the reality
of what it was and took chances to what it was
so the second movie should try to take chances
too and not be trying to recreate what the first
one was.