Ben Stiller has long since stopped analysing what draws him to projects. Why bother? For most of his nearly four-decade career as an actor and film-maker, he has topped the box office or slyly captured the zeitgeist, devising – with a stuck zipper, a lip pout or Robert De Niro as a father-in-law – some of pop culture’s stickiest cinematic moments.

So when he first started filming in his parents’ apartment a few weeks after the death of his father, Jerry Stiller, in 2020, he wasn’t sure why, exactly. “It was just this instinct,” he says. Partly, it was about preservation; the five-bedroom on the Upper West Side of New York City was his childhood home, and it was due to be sold. Until the last possible moment, he shot video tours of the memento-filled, and then emptied corners where he and his older sister, Amy Stiller, grew up, doing bits and homework, bickering and celebrating, with Jerry and their mother, Anne Meara, who died in 2015.

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, they were also a bridge from a midcentury Borscht Belt comedy style to one developed for the TV screen. For an audience of 30 million viewers, they played up their real-life identities as a husband and wife mismatched in culture and religion – in the years when interfaith unions were still rare. 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 own work.

Ben Stiller quickly realised he should make a documentary about them. The film, Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost, which opened in US theatres on Friday and streams from October 24th on Apple TV, dips into their comic lineage, a legacy that Ben Stiller has transformed as the star of billion-dollar blockbuster series like Night at the Museum and Meet the Parents (he’s filming its fourth instalment) and as director and co-writer of satires like Tropic Thunder and Zoolander.

It’s also part family history, or therapy, as Stiller and his kin drill into what it was like growing up backstage or on sets, with sometimes absentee parents.