Mel Brooks
Mel Brooks
Melvin James Brooksis an American actor, comedian, filmmaker, composer, songwriter and veteran. He is known as a creator of broad film farces and comic parodies. Brooks began his career as a comic and a writer for the early TV variety show Your Show of Shows. He became well known as part of the comedy duo with Carl Reiner in the comedy skit, The 2000 Year Old Man. He also created, with Buck Henry, the hit television comedy series, Get Smart,...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth28 June 1926
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
I love writing songs. I'm a songwriter.
When I'm writing a script, I don't worry about plot as much as I do about people. I get to know the main characters - what they need, what they want, what they should do. That's what gets the story going. You can't just have action, you've got to find out what the characters want. And then they must grow, they must go somewhere.
Writing is simply one thought after another dying upon the one before.
You're young forever when you write. Alfred Hitchcock directed until the day he died. As long as you don't have any dementia or Alzheimer's, if you have your All-Bran every day and clear yourself out, I think your brains are gonna be all right.
Comedy is serious - deadly serious. Never, never try to be funny! The actors must be serious. Only the situation must be absurd. Funny is in the writing, not in the performing. If the situation isn't absurd, no amount of joke will help.
Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.
Everything starts with writing.
Everything starts with writing. And then to support your vision, your ideas, your philosophy, your jokes, whatever, you've gotta perform them and/or direct them, or sometimes just produce them.
No creative writer knows what is commercial and what isn't. You just write from your heart, you write from the deepest, creative urges in you, and you write from your soul, and you just either get lucky or not.
I've never been happier than when I was writing the musical score of The Producers. One song after another tumbled out of my head in what was the most soul-satisfying experience of my career. And in my less than humble opinion, I must say that it turned out to be surprisingly good.
There's no lightning. There's blood, sweat and tears. There's a good idea and there's 18 months of due diligence, hard work, day and night.
That's Tom Meehan. You wouldn't dream he'd come up with those home runs. You'd think: 'Tom Meehan. Gentile, structure, taste. But you wouldn't think he'd come up with the jokes. But he's got it. He got it all.
I think people should buy 20 of them. Buy 20 and save a lot of them for Christmas presents. Who knows how many of these they make? They might be gone.
I loved Westerns as a little kid, and I loved horror films.