He's been called one of America's natural comedic resources. His humorous takes on human behavior have resulted in such celluloid classics as Lost in America and Defending Your Life. And his performance in Broadcast News earned I him an Academy Award nomination. So why is Albert Brooks still one of Hollywood's best-kept secrets?
PT: How would you describe what you do to someone who's never seen your work?
AB: Well, it would depend on who that person was. I mean, if it was a Lithuanian steelworker, I wouldn't even bother.
Let's go for a regular old American.
Well, I do a lot of different things...
What does it say on your passport?
I think maybe writer. I attempt to create a form of seriocomic entertainment to either delight, enlighten, or disgust, whichever you'd like. In terms of making motion pictures, I write and direct and act. I guess you'd say I'm a filmmaker.
Maybe this is just as tough a question: Who's your audience? Who are the people who respond to your films?
Well, it's always different than I think. We live in a time where a film doesn't simply go into a movie theater; it goes to television, it goes onto tape. So people discover these movies. The guy who does my gardening had a whole long discussion with me about Defending Your Life and he barely speaks English; I almost couldn't understand him. But it seemed to move him in some way I'm not doing anything so complicated that the average person couldn't hike it. You know, I get letters from Norway—I don't know what that means.
How do you have the confidence to play people who display such human foibles?
I'll tell you; 'cause I don't know anything else. I guess if I knew enough that I could make a choice, I'd probably be scared to do it. But I'm sort of like the Roadrunner; I just run. And if the mountain disappears, tough luck. That was the nature of my stand-up act. I never started in clubs. I used to think up things in my bathroom and go down and do them on national television. So I got initiated into just going with my gut. And it's really all I can do.
Do you have a sense as to whether more women than men respond to your kind of humor? Are some men afraid of it because it's too close to the bone?
This is a generalization, but I think women's brains are more accessible to ideas and differences. And they can accept stuff that's weirder. I think there are enough intelligent men out there who get it, but women will watch behavior that's different and process it better. In general, women are less threatened by their emotions.
When women are asked what they want in a man, one of the first things they always say is a sense of humor.
Yeah, I know. I've always read that.
Do you think it's true?
Well, somehow I think Fabio gets laid more than Gilbert Gottfried. So I'd like to give those women lie detector tests. (Laughs.) Listen, I think a sense of humor is important, providing it comes with a good body.
The thing that seems to have an impact on people is that you live out, via your characters, some of people's worst nightmares.
Right. And the goal is to do it entertainingly, so you make people laugh.
And the audience has no fear. People are just watching with amusement, knowing that somehow...
Right. Believe me, that wasn't the case with Modern Romance [about a neurotic Hollywood film editor who breaks up with his girlfriend and decides he wants her back—a second time]. There was a character so full of human foibles that half the audience got scared to death. Even if they saw themselves in him, that behavior was frightening. Other people were grateful they weren't the only ones on the planet that acted like that. It's a funny thing when you show behavior in a real way. Just as people don't like to talk about or address their problems, there are as many people who don't like to see any form of themselves. It's scary. It's like homophobic behavior—you know, it's realaphobic.
Where did the idea for Mother, about a man who goes home to live with his mother after his second divorce, come from? You haven't been divorced.
No, no. I haven't been. But it's easy to imagine, ha. And I don't have to be divorced to know that in my life, I've either gone out with women who were like my mother or not like my mother. The main thing is I had not seen this relationship presented in any way that I could identify with. There've been a few mother-daughter movies that are somewhat realistic. But the mother-son movies are more comical than realistic: Throw Momma from the Train, Stop! or My Mom Will Shoot. You don't sit in the dark and go, "Oh my God, that's my mother." You know, unless you're Jesse James. It's such an important relationship, probably the most important one that a man's gonna have. I'm surprised there aren't a thousand movies about it.
I like to do things that I want to see myself. With Defending Your Life, I wanted to see some aspect of death other than angels and the thing that Ghost was about, because that didn't make any sense to me. So that's the reason, it fills a hole.
Only in someone's wildest dreams would they put their room the way it was when they were a kid, though.
Right. Well, that's the best thing about a movie...
The vicarious thrill?
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