“All we wanted to do was to make fun of ourselves and the whole movie-making process”, director Ben Stiller claimed at the press conference he gave after the screening of his comedy Tropic Thunder yesterday. Stiller also believe he’s one of the greatest actors of his stars in the film along with Robert Downey Jr, who accompanied him here in San Sebastián together with the producer Stuart Cornfield. Stiller praised the work of his fellow-actors especially Downey Jr. who he said he was lucky to have worked with. He joked that “it was very important to have someone who is considered to be one of the greatest actors of his generation and he does believe he's one of the greatest actors of his generation".

He said that he had tried to make a comedy that portrayed a world they were themselves part of by making fun of their own image. He had aimed to make it accurate but not offensive with as few insider-jokes as possible. The basic idea for a film parodying Rambo, Apocalypse Now or Platoon came to Stiller back in the 1980s when he was shooting Spielberg’s The Empire of the Sun here in Spain, at a time when a lot of his friends in Hollywood were making movies about Vietnam.