Daniel Stern Reveals He Almost Directed Ace Ventura

Daniel Stern wants to direct another movie.

By Jamie Jirak

Daniel Stern is an actor known for many roles, including Marv in Home Alone, Phil in City Slickers, and The Narrator in The Wonder Years. Currently, you can catch him as NASA administrator Eli Hobson in the fourth season of For All Mankind on Apple TV+. In addition to his career as an actor, Stern also has some directing credits to his name. He helmed ten episodes of The Wonder Years and directed Rookie of the Year, the 1993 baseball comedy about a young boy who becomes a major league pitcher for the Chicago Cubs. During a recent interview with ComicBook.com, Stern was asked if he'd be interested in directing again, and he revealed he almost directed Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.

"Good questions. I have pursued directing. The thing was when Rookie came out, I got a ton of offers to direct other films. But it was also the time when I was doing a sequel to Home Alone and then doing a sequel to City Slickers," Stern explained. "Just to be crass, I hit the cash cow for the one and only time in my life as an actor and it was like, 'I don't think I can jump out with my family. I got to sock some of this away.'"

He continued, "Then I was the original director of Ace Ventura, and I was on Varsity Blues and I had things, but then I got another job. So I've been trying to direct something and I've directed a bunch of television stuff that I did a show, Manhattan, that I directed. It was on a few years ago about the atomic bomb. I thought for one second about directing For All Mankind. No way. I wouldn't be able to pull it off. It's too big. It's too technical." 

"That's my best thing, truthfully. I'm a much better director than I am an actor," Sten admitted. "It's very hard to stay focused on it because it takes so long to get a movie made. To get something, you got to get the pieces together. You got to get all the stuff. I am a sculptor too, so I do bronze sculptures and I do them for cities. I do monumental figures. So I get to go to work every day in my studio and work eight hours. Then I've written a book. So that took up a lot of time and I get a lot of creative satisfaction from many other things now."

"So the showbiz thing is such a fight that I get distracted from it by actually creating things in my other life," Stern added. "But I do want to direct one more film because I love that. Directing, it's really getting the best out of other people. That's the gig. You see everybody's talent and you get the best out of it. Not just the actors, but the prop guy, and the lighting guy, and the camera people. You motivate the crew and you put everybody on the same track for the same vision of the story to tell. It's a wonderful human getting the best out of a human job. I do want to do it again and I had the time of my life directing Rookie of the Year."

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"So I appreciate you noticing that because that was a big, big thing in my life and it still is, and I still want to do it, but I just can't... It's so fricking hard to get a movie made," Stern concluded.

Stay tuned for more from our interview with Daniel Stern. 

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