W
ay back in high school, a young Ben Stiller first encountered Turber’s story – a story that
almost as soon as it had been published in Te New Yorker began making an impact that belied its ultra-brief length. It inspired a beloved 1940s screen comedy, numerous theatre works, and sealed the phrase “he’s a Walter Mitty” into the popular lexicon, referring to anyone who throws more energy into diverting daydreams than into real life. For Stiller, ‘Te Secret Life of Walter Mitty’ offered a rare chance to look at a touchstone American tale afresh, from new times.
Te 2013 film, ‘Te Secret Life of Walter Mitty’, due for release this month, sees the actor and director take that famous two- and-a-half page 1939 classic and open it up into a 21st Century comic epic about a man who finds that his real life is about to blow his wildly over-active imagination out of the water. Stiller’s applies a contemporary rethink to one of the most influential fantasy stories of all time – indeed the quintessential tale about the irresistible allure of fantasising.
In the 2013 re-imagination, this Walter Mitty (Stiller) is a modern day-dreamer, an ordinary magazine photo editor who takes a regular mental vacation from his ho-hum existence by disappearing into a world of fantasies electrified by dashing heroism, passionate romance and constant triumphs over danger. But when Mitty and the co-worker he secretly adores (Kristen Wiig) stand in actual peril of losing their jobs, Walter must do the unimaginable: take real action – sparking a global journey more extraordinary than anything he could have ever dreamed up.
We’re all a little Walter Mitty. Where we place our feet might bear no geographical resemblance to where we leave our head. Tey might not share the same time zone; the same atmosphere; the same planetary
parameters. Such is the disconnect that daydreaming allows us, that it’s a state of being that we all escape to sometimes. Some more than others. None more so than Walter Mitty, the charactermade famous by James
Turber’s 1939 classic, ‘Te Secret Life of Walter Mitty’, a short story that saw its initial publication in the New Yorker as a mere jumping off point.
26 /December 2013/
outlineonline.co.uk
Applying Turber’s endlessly escapist character into the full-scale complexity the 21st Century, replete with our never- switched-off worlds of our social networking, gave Stiller the opening to push his story further; comedically, dramatically and cinematically, bringing the full visual spectacle of modern filmmaking to the mix.
“What I love about this story is that it can’t be categorized,” Stiller says. “It has comedy, it has drama, it’s an adventure story, it’s real and it’s fantastically hyper- real. Yet at the heart of it all is a character who I think everyone can connect to – someone who appears to be just going through the motions of modern life but is living a whole different life inside his head. To me, he embodies all those things we imagine about ourselves and the world but that we never say.”
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