Nicholas Stoller makes comedies about grown-ups who have not quite agreed to be grown-ups, and he is at his best when two of them egg each other on. The jokes are reliable; the stories underneath them tend to run out before the film does.
Fi1m perspective
The scene Nicholas Stoller keeps coming back to is two adults talking themselves into something a child would know better than to do. Mac and Kelly in Neighbors (2014) decide the fraternity next door can be beaten at its own game. Sylvia and Will in Platonic (2023) pick up in their forties exactly where they left off, while the people who love them watch it happen. He is good at this: the affectionate conversation that goes somewhere it should not, the old friend who encourages the habit everyone else has reasonably asked you to drop.
He began as a writer, on Judd Apatow's Undeclared and then on screenplays for other directors. Fun with Dick and Jane (2005) is too fond of the comforts it means to mock; Yes Man (2008) builds its middle as a list of pastimes and montages and heads for a lesson about moderation we had guessed in the first reel. Neither does him much credit. The turn came when he started directing. Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008), made with Jason Segel, understood that the funniest thing in a comedy is a person in pain who will not admit it, and everything he has done since is measured against it. Get Him to the Greek (2010) and The Five-Year Engagement (2012) followed with Segel, then Neighbors, an animated film about parenthood, Storks (2016), and television. The two Muppet scripts with Segel show what he can do when the sentiment has somewhere to go: The Muppets (2011) is warm and properly silly, and Muppets Most Wanted (2014) is faster, busier and emptier.
Stoller directs for the performers. He lets them riff, and he gives his women the jokes a lesser director would have kept for the men; Rose Byrne refusing to play the disapproving wife is the reason Neighbors is funnier than it has any right to be. We laughed a great deal more at it than we expected to, at a film whose premise fits on a beer mat, because the Radners are plainly the same people as the boys next door, only with worse hangovers and a baby monitor. The cost is structure. Zene Baker cuts Neighbors so that scenes end where the laughs run out rather than where the scene does. Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising (2016) has three ideas and gets about halfway through each, and its case for sisterhood is stated clearly and then forgotten. Television suits the looseness better. Platonic, written with Francesca Delbanco, is the strongest thing he has directed since Neighbors, sharp whenever Byrne and Seth Rogen are getting on each other's nerves, though the supporting characters cannot compete and the broader antics repeat.
He has said that the films he has directed all came from a deep emotional place, and the record bears him out: the ones he only wrote for other people are the ones that feel assembled. Give him two actors who like each other and a subject he has lived, parenthood or a friendship that has outlasted its usefulness, and he will get an evening out of it. Ask him for a third act and he will give you another party.
Biography
Nicholas Stoller is a British-born American writer, director and producer. Born in London on 19 March 1976, he was raised in Miami, Florida, and graduated from Harvard College, where he wrote for the Harvard Lampoon.
He is known for directing the comedy films Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008), Get Him to the Greek (2010), The Five-Year Engagement (2012), Neighbors (2014) and its sequel (2016), and Bros (2022). He co-wrote screenplays including Fun with Dick and Jane (2005), Yes Man (2008), The Muppets (2011) and Sex Tape (2014). With his wife Francesca Delbanco, he co-created the television series Friends from College (2017–2019) and Platonic (2023–present), on which he also directs and writes.
