Ben Stiller plays Tugg Speedman in Tropic Thunder.

DreamWorks Pictures / Merie Weismiller Wallace

Ben Stiller handed them out to cast and crew at the conclusion of a punishing 13-week location shoot as a gesture of thanks, but also contrition: T-shirts that read “I SURVIVED BEN STILLER’S COMEDY DEATH CAMP.”

Sitting at a restaurant in Vancouver, Canada, where he’s currently filming Night at the Museum 2, Stiller — who co-wrote, directed, co-produced and stars in the ensemble action-comedy Tropic Thunder — waved it away as a joke, a riff on marquee star Robert Downey Jr.’s acerbic nickname for the production, most of which unfolded in the steaming jungles of Kauai, Hawaii, last year.

But according to actor Jay Baruchel, Stiller might have had a different rationale for his choice of “wrap” gifts. Baruchel called Stiller a mensch and “one of the kindest directors” he’s worked with, but continued: “I think for everybody, it signaled the end of the madness.”

“The pressure got to every single person on that movie at some point,” said Baruchel, who, like Stiller and Downey in the film, portrays an actor caught in the middle of real paramilitary strife while filming a big-budget Vietnam War epic.

“It rained 12 times a day. There were a tremendous amount of things to worry about, from prolonged exposure to mud to the leptospirosis virus, caused by every animal in creation [defecating] and having it flush down the mountain. A lot of people were getting sick. You had to cross a river out of Jurassic Park every day to get to work and then go up a mountain that was like something out of a cartoon.”

Stiller, 42, began incubating the idea for Tropic Thunder more than 20 years ago, developed the script off and on for the last decade, and landed a budget from DreamWorks reported to be around $100 million.

Viewed another way, with its biting satire of studio greed, talent-agent vapidity, movie star butt-kissing and hubris, the R-rated homage to films such as Apocalypse Now and The Thin Red Line is a hugely expensive poke in Hollywood’s eye — a joke Hollywood paid through the nose to have played upon itself. Nevertheless, after his work on such mainstream fare as Night at the Museum and Meet the Fockers, Tropic Thunder marks Stiller’s return to the kind of edgy, take-no-prisoners humor he became known for on his early ’90s MTV variety program, The Ben Stiller Show.

Downey recalled that, during the Hawaiian shoot, “People were dropping like flies.” Lest he paint the wrong picture of Tropic Thunder’s co-writer/director/star, Downey points out that Stiller is more apt to get what he wants through creative collaboration than tyranny.

“He’s not mean-spirited .... He’s not one of those [crazy, mean] guys you hear about,” Downey said. “That’s not Ben. His drive: He’s obsessed with the idea of delivering the best product he can.”

Tropic Thunder’s movie within a movie centers on a quintet of buffoonish yet instantly recognizable Hollywood types — Jack Black plays a “fart movie” comic (think Eddie Murphy in Nutty Professor II: The Klumps) saddled with certain chemical dependency issues, while Downey portrays a pretentious Australian Method actor whose “process” brings to mind Russell Crowe and Daniel Day-Lewis — as they film the “biggest war film ever” in the jungles of Vietnam. A profanity-spewing studio boss (played by a nearly unrecognizable Tom Cruise) threatens to pull the plug on the production’s runaway costs unless its director (Steve Coogan) can get things under control. So he leads the cast deep into the jungle, where hidden cameras will capture the terror and dismay of hotshot actors out of their mollycoddled depth.

None of them realize until it’s too late, however, that they’ve encroached upon the turf of heavily armed heroin dealers. And a real war — of egos, wills and blazing machine guns — erupts, with Stiller portraying Tugg Speedman, a washed-up action superstar who has pinned his diminishing career hopes on Tropic Thunder.

Chief among the film’s vivid characters is Kirk Lazarus, a quintessential Method actor and multiple Oscar winner who undergoes a “controversial” skin-darkening treatment to portray an African-American sergeant. Approached for the part, Downey blanched at performing in blackface and speaking in an exaggerated Ebonics patois.

“I first got mad,” Downey said. “He’s going to call me up and say, ‘I want to do a great big movie with you, but I want you to have the highest risk factor. And I want to maybe put you up to ridicule and have people, like, hate you for what you should have ... known was wrong to do.’ ”

Stiller ultimately persuaded Downey to do it, but admitted worrying that people wouldn’t get the joke.

“It’s such a touchy area,” Stiller said. “It had to be clear: What we are satirizing is the character and his loss of identity.”

Similarly, a subplot involving Simple Jack (another film set within Tropic Thunder’s bizarro Hollywood universe) treads shaky comedic ground, lampooning such genre standard-bearers as Rain Man and Sean Penn in I Am Sam. Stiller’s Tugg breaks action-hero type to play a “mentally impaired farmhand” — a wild-eyed, bucktoothed simpleton who is repeatedly referred to as a “retard” in Tropic Thunder.

“Again, it always comes back to what we are satirizing: the actors and the Hollywood system,” Stiller said. Anticipating precisely the counterpoint Stiller presents, Patricia E. Bauer, who blogs about disabilities issues, wrote of the film: “For the 14.3 million Americans with cognitive disabilities and their families, such arguments may be problematic…. What many call the ‘R-word’ reinforces negative social attitudes just as racial, ethnic and sexually oriented slurs do.”

Tropic Thunder was greenlighted by DreamWorks in 2006. The movie was already in preproduction when Stiller received script notes from Cruise.

Stiller credits the iconic actor-producer with a suggestion that helped him conquer the better part of a decade’s worth of false starts. “He said, ‘It’s really funny, but where’s the studio head?’ ” Stiller remembered. “For me, that triggered something. It solved a piece of the puzzle.” Stiller and co-writer Justin Theroux rejiggered the plot to pivot around Les Grossman, a hard-cursing, hip-hop-dancing studio impresario who smashes Diet Coke cans when angry, verbally eviscerates his co-workers and puts profitability before actors’ safety at every turn. And, of course, Stiller gave the part to Cruise, disguised by a marshmallowy fat suit, chest-hair wig, bald pate cap and an enormous pair of prosthetic hands.

Despite his insistence to the contrary, it’s hard to shake the perception that Stiller, one of Hollywood’s most fortunate sons (his parents are the venerable comedy team Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara) has set out to bite the proverbial hand that feeds him by making a movie highlighting the entertainment industry’s self-absorption, greed and ruthlessness.

“DreamWorks always liked the script, always wanted to make the movie,” says Stuart Cornfeld, Stiller’s producing partner of 10 years. “When we started talking to them specifically about Ben’s vision as a director, they knew this was not going to be a low-budget, high-concept comedy, that we really wanted to deliver the production values of the films that inspired it.”

Even if that meant operating a comedy death camp?

“It was good, hard work, and everyone felt connected to the material” is all Stiller will cop to.