Ben Stiller’s New Movie Went to Great Pains to Include a Cast Member’s ‘Eight-Second Fart’

You may have noticed that Ben Stiller hasn’t been acting all that much lately, seemingly because he’s been too busy directing Severance, the acclaimed Apple TV+ series that boldly asks the question: What if The Office was set in a workplace even more existentially horrifying than Dunder Mifflin?

But now Stiller is back in front of the camera, starring in David Gordon Green’s new family comedy Nutcrackers, which is set during Christmastime, and presumably features at least one scene in which somebody gets whacked in the junk.

Apparently the movie is about a “city slicker” who’s “forced to look after a quartet of mischievous rural orphans” and was reportedly inspired by movies like The Bad News Bears and Uncle Buck.

Nutcrackers just opened the Toronto International Film Festival, at a red carpet gala premiere that featured celebrity guests such as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. But despite the swank surroundings, the event quickly devolved into a discussion of cinematic flatulence. 

During the Q&A portion of the screening, Stiller addressed a number of matters, including why he decided to return to the acting world for this project. “Intuition hit me, there’s something about this movie, I want to make this movie, I want to meet these kids,” Stiller told the audience at Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall. 

As reported by Entertainment Weekly, Stiller also paused the Q&A to bring up the more gaseous aspects of the film. “Before we stop talking, I’d like to talk about the farting at some point,” Stiller exclaimed, before going on to describe how one of the child actors let out a “sustained fart” during one of the takes. “It was incredible, because we all cracked up," Stiller recalled. “I wish it was in the movie. It’s not in the movie.”

But then, Green revealed that the fart is actually in the movie, just in a different scene. The initial, unexpected fart came during a moment in which the kids are trying to get Stiller’s character to tell them a bedtime story, which presumably didn’t work for the story. But not wanting to squander movie gold, Green used the scrapped audio recording for a whole other scene. “There’s an eight-second fart that happened that we edited out of the film,” Green explained, “but I took the sound effect and put it (back in) earlier at the dinner table (scene), so the fart is still there, displaced. Nobody will ever know. It’s my secret!” (Incidentally, “it’s my secret” is never the best thing to say after you’ve just admitted to something in front of a crowd of 2,500 people.)

Stiller noted that this was “probably the only fart conversation we’ll have at the whole festival." 

This story does offer a good lesson to young filmmakers — movies can only be improved by inserting fart sounds into scenes, as evidenced by YouTube fan edits:

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