The 2000 box-office smash Meet the Parents starred Ben Stiller as Gaylord “Greg” Focker, an easy-going Jewish hospital nurse who wants to marry a lovely blond Gentile woman, Pam Byrnes, played by Teri Polo. He seeks the approval of her father Jack, an uptight, super-macho, super suspicious former CIA agent played by Robert DeNiro, who spies on him, belittles him and generally gives him a hard time. As Greg struggles to win Jack over, just about everything that can go wrong hilariously does so.

Meet the Parents grossed over $330 million worldwide, so a sequel was inevitable. We had met Pam’s parents, so how about we meet Greg’s? Screenwriters Tim Rasmussen, John Hamburg, and Vince DiMeglio came up with the only logical characters for comic tension—Roz and Bernie Focker, former hippies who believe in free love, frequent hugs and kisses, and unabashed sexuality. Roz, in fact, is a sex therapist for seniors. When Barbra read an early script, she loved the character of Roz Focker. But she was reluctant to come out of her self-imposed movie retirement. “All I could think of was, Can I really do it?’ Barbra said. “Because I like to sleep late, and stay in bed. For this movie I would have to get up at five. That is not cute.”

As director Jay Roach recalled to Rebecca Murray of About.com, “She has a good life, a great husband. James Brolin’s such a cool guy and she has this beautiful house – and she loves working on her house. That was actually the hard part. I had to compete with the houseplants. It took a year of phone calls and drafts of scripts. We finally came up with this one scene she really loved where she got to throw Robert DeNiro down on a massage table and jump on top of him and rub oil all over him. Once we got that, that was it.” After reading an early draft, Barbra had suggested the writers put in a scene between her and DeNiro. “Because there was no contact between my character and De Niro’s character in that [early] script, so I suggested what if I was somehow sexually massaging him or…I had to have some interaction. If you have me and DeNiro in a movie, you have to have something, so they wrote the massage scene.”

Producer Jane Rosenthal added that persuading Barbra to play Roz was only a dream at first. “But then as the script and the character evolved, there was only one person to play [Gregg’s] mother. And Ben really wanted her. He called her and said, ‘I want you to play my mother.’” Another major reason Barbra agreed was the chance to act with her long-time friend Dustin Hoffman, who signed up for the film two months before she did. Jay Roach revealed a third reason: “She’s never done a movie where she wasn’t the star. She was grateful to be in an ensemble.” And, Barbra added, “I’m happy not to have to be worried about every single little thing. If it screws up, it’s your fault!”

One of the screenplay writers, John Hamburg, told the New Jersey Star Ledger that once Barbra had been signed, he rewrote sections of the script expressly for her in addition to the massage scene. He also did some research. “I looked back at all these old movies of hers like Owl and the Pussycat and What’s Up, Doc? She’s funny, and she’s got great comic timing. So this is a callback to that era of Barbra Streisand.”

Barbra decided to take her cue for Roz’s look in the film from Ben Stiller’s. “He has dark, curly hair [in the movie] so I thought that I wanted to look like him. I have a 6 year-old goddaughter, she has very curly, longer hair and I just thought that they [the Fockers] were stuck in the seventies, so I guess instinctively I started to dress like her and look like her. Then when the movie was done and I was looking at the poster, I was thinking that looks so familiar to me. Then I thought, that’s how I looked in A Star in Born and that was in the seventies but I didn’t think about it consciously before the movie started.”

Barbra based her characterization of Roz’s interaction with her son Greg in her own relationship with her new poodle, called Sammy after her late predecessor. “I’m in love with my dog Samantha [and] there is a way I speak to her--‘You, the poodle, good morning!’ She petted and baby-talked to Ben, who was sitting next to her for the interview. “So I thought that’s the way I would love my son.”

Once the casting was set, Roach was a little concerned about having so many big stars in his movie, especially since DeNiro and Hoffman are Method actors, and Barbra is not. “They all come at it very differently. Most of the time it’s okay because, as an ensemble sitting around the dinner table, especially when there’s all six of them, they start to pick up on the flow and the energy level. They’re like great theater actors. I mean, we did some takes that were eight minutes long and they were amazing. When they work individually, then I really have to adjust how I direct them and how they work in the scene and as the character. Ben Stiller knows every line and has got it all down. He knows the structure of the scene and then he riffs off of that. Dustin Hoffman will come in and he’s in a play mode from the get-go, so the lines are already different and completely malleable. The other actors have to keep up with him because he’s on the scene, but he might not be on the same lines as everybody else. But that’s a great magic because accidents happen, really great, hilarious accidents. A lot of what’s great about the film actually is Dustin just going off in some weird direction.”

Meet the Fockers filmed in Los Angeles between April and August of 2004, and Barbra felt quite secure in director Roach’s hands. “I really love to be wanted and a lot of people are intimidated by me, especially directors. And Jay wasn’t at all, he’s just so collaborative and open to ideas. I think that’s a sign of true talent; when you are not afraid of other peoples’ opinions. You want to take from them.”

Robert DeNiro said he’d had a “good time” working with Barbra, even though “we have different ways of working. I think this was good for the dynamics of our relationship in the movie. She’s not a Method actor. It’s more than Method. She was very sensible in her approach. She had good ideas about stuff, and in that [massage] scene, I was concerned that it build up to a crescendo. I wanted it to build to a kind of climax, no pun intended, but... yes, pun intended!”

Barbra said she “choreographed” the massage scene with her masseuse the night before it was scheduled to be shot. Even so, the shooting proved difficult for her. “I was doing this thing with my elbow on Bobby and he kept saying press harder, press harder.’” The scene took sixteen hours to get right. “My thumbs gave out a bit. I got tendonitis and I had to wear a brace. But it was fun. Bobby’s just so good to work with.”

Ben Stiller also loved working with Barbra, and found himself a little in awe of her. “She was very outgoing from the beginning. She invited all the cast over to her house for dinner a couple of times. Going to her house is this incredible crazy thing where you try to pretend like it’s normal to hear all these incredible names, from Brando to Clinton. She has little stories about everybody. [But] there are no airs about it.

“As I was getting to the point where I felt comfortable with her, there was a fundraiser for John Kerry where she was going to sing. We all went to watch her at the Disney Concert Hall. This was after we’d been shooting for four or five week and I was so used to just seeing her as Barbra, my mom in the movie, and then I go to this thing. A full-on diva comes out and she gets a two-minute standing ovation before she even does anything. She looks and sings like Barbra Streisand and she’s not wearing the curly wig from the movie.”

But on-set Barbra was just one of the guys. Teri Polo told the story of a gift that Barbra had given her at the start of filming to “break the ice”: “She gave me a white chocolate lollipop in the shape of a breast.” (One ersatz mammary gland is a running joke throughout the film.) Barbra’s gift, Polo felt, was her way of showing her fellow cast mates she was OK with what Polo called “the film’s naughty scenes.” Polo started calling Streisand “boob” on the set. “She answers to it too—just ask her.”

When we first see Barbra in Meet the Fockers, she is facing away from us, moving her derriere back and forth as she leads a limbering-up routine for elderly Romeos and Juliets. The film’s co-producer and editor Jon Poll said that he and director Roach were a little worried that Streisand would think the introduction undignified. “[She came into] the cutting room and Jay just wanted to make sure [the shot] was okay. She was great about it. She said, ‘Sure, it’s funny, go for it!’” A relieved Jay Roach added, “People had high expectations about what Barbra Streisand would do in her first film in a long time. She loved the idea of teasing them and having a specific reveal of her face after she’d been waving her hips around for a few minutes.”

Roach told USA Today, “Dustin and Barbra should have been a comedy team. They have great comic timing. They could have done vaudeville or I Love Lucy or even Tracy-Hepburn stuff.” When the Fockers and Byrneses get together for cocktails, Barbra improvised some funny business, according to Roach. “Dustin is giving a toast, and Barbra starts to sip,” Roach explained. “He tells her, ‘You can’t drink yet,’ so she spits out the drink, ice cubes and all, into her glass and says, ‘Oh, sorry.’ It was a little bit of controlled chaos but in the most delicious way.”

Upon its release on December 22, 2004, Meet the Fockers became that rare sequel that out-performs its predecessor at the box office. It took in over $516 million worldwide, making it the highest-grossing non-animated comedy of all time. (A record surpassed in 2011 by The Hangover Pt. II.) A lot of that success was credited to Barbra and Dustin, who had marvelous chemistry on screen and shared many of the movie’s funniest scenes. The film’s level of hilarity rises considerably the minute they appear and rarely lets down after that.Many expected Barbra, Dustin, and the film to be nominated for (and probably win) Golden Globes in the Musical or Comedy category. But because of a scheduling glitch, the film wasn’t submitted to the Hollywood Foreign Press Association in time for consideration.

Although Barbra’s seventeenth film was the first in which she had truly been part of an ensemble, Meet the Fockers proved another triumphant example of her box-office clout. And it won her many new young movie-going fans who had never seen her on screen before.