Albert Brooks
Albert Brooks
Albert Lawrence Brooksis an American actor, filmmaker and comedian. He received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for 1987's Broadcast News. His voice acting credits include Marlin in Finding Nemoand Finding Dory, and recurring guest voices for The Simpsons, including Russ Cargill in The Simpsons Movie. Additionally, he has directed, written, and starred in several comedy films, such as Modern Romance, Lost in America, and Defending Your Lifeand is the author of 2030: The Real Story of What...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth22 July 1947
CityBeverly Hills, CA
CountryUnited States of America
The whole world is tense. Everybody gets the international news. There's been no American comedy at all that even remotely addresses the subject in any way. My goal isn't to solve the world's problems. My character wasn't even able to do his assignment. But the premise of wanting to find out about somebody -- other than the stuff that the CIA will tell you -- there's no hope unless we do that.
Fear is playing a major part in Hollywood production,
When we spoke, he told me, 'The Newsweek thing has changed the world.' And I said, 'Wasn't it 9/11 that changed the world?' But Michael said he just didn't want to take a chance.
This was enormously challenging, because it involved filling 120 blank pages with an actual story and words people say.
Listen, there are some movies that are set in stone and the writer or the director does not want to change, but I've never worked on a movie, including my own, that didn't take advantage of a rehearsal process.
I had a very wise person tell me that he thinks marriage, when you're younger, you keep thinking you can fix things. That's what people do. And you can't really fix anything. It shouldn't be a massive difficult thing every day. Life's difficult enough.
By the way, movies are like sporting events in that you're as good as the movie you're in. You can sit in a room for 20 years and go do a movie and you can just kill in it and you move to the head of the line again. By the same token, you can do five movies a year and if they're dreck, it's nothing.
My mom was a professional. My dad and mom met each other in a movie called 'New Faces of 1937.' My mom went under the name Thelma Leeds, and she did a few movies, and she was really a great singer, and when she married my dad and started to have a family, she sang at parties.
Even if you didn't see the movie, you'd see two words you'd never seen put together before - comedy and Muslim. Comedy is friendly - it's the least offensive word in our language.
The world really changed after 9/11, not just in the tragic way, but in every way. So it took me a couple of years to even understand how my art form I could process any of this. When the world changed, eliciting laughter with subjects that were funny to me before 9/11 just didn't seem good enough.
Once you sign on as an actor, you know, you don't go to the editing room, you don't see how they cut, you don't see how they score, you don't see how they cast the rest of the movie.
Twitter, to me, works if you're funny. Twitter doesn't work as a promotional tool unless you do it very, very, very occasionally.
Steven Spielberg seems to have wanted to be a director from 13. He put his dog in a certain position and made him eat at four o'clock. He liked to direct it. But, to me, directing is tedious. Especially if you're acting in it. And I'm inherently lazy.
When I went to acting school, the kids that got the best grades were the kids that could cry on cue. But it didn't really translate into careers for any of them, because the external is the easy part.