Albert Brooks Quotes
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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.
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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.
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I started on television. I had five years of network television before I ever got up on a stage. The first thing I ever did was in 1967. This guy Bill Keene had a little talk show at noon, and Gary Owens took over for a week. He knew about this dummy bit I used to do, this ventriloquist thing, and I was on 'Keene at Noon.'
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'Finding Nemo' has spawned so many sort of emotions over the years. I don't even know that you could really understand exactly what parents and kids are seeing in it, but they can see a lot of different stuff.
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I made my living in comedy, but I'm not a silly person. I've got all these sides to me. Even in my movies that I've written myself, the characters sometimes border on great anger or nutsiness or other kinds of behavior. I'm not just doing fart jokes for two hours.
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Twitter, to me, works if you're funny. Twitter doesn't work as a promotional tool unless you do it very, very, very occasionally.
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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.
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I did years of summer stock. I sort of only wanted to be an actor. And then at 19, I was funny, and I had some of these bits that I did for friends, and I immediately could get on television.
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I'm a member of the Academy, but I don't know who all the other Academy members are. It's not like a politician who knows who is in the Iowa caucus.
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You know what it is, the reason so many 18-year-olds, 19-year-olds are saying 'Drive' is their favorite movie is that 'Drive' is a 90-minute trip into what a lot of seventies filmmaking was. It encapsulates the best of a certain kind of style, and a style that a lot of people haven't seen before, with the music and the way it's edited.
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Even in my comedies, I don't take anger as a joke. I think anger and laughter are very close to each other, when you think about it. One of the things I like about a character: I always think it's fascinating when a character can turn on a dime and go from one emotion to another. I like watching that.
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'2001' is a really interesting movie because it came out in 1968, and everybody thought that that was possible, and look how ridiculous that was. We don't have ships like that, and you know, nobody in 1968 was going, 'Oh, that'll never happen!' But of course it never happened. We're not even close to it.
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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.'
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How many people didn't get a part who would have been better than the person who got the part? Thousands.
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I come from the place where I am thinking 'I have put my blood on the pages.'
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Nobody will leave any place unless they're forced out. That's the nature of humans. Once you're there, you're there. I've never seen anybody get up voluntarily and leave any place.
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The first act is writing, the second act is filming, the third act is releasing. If you have to partake in the third act, it hurts the first act of the next one. It's like a prizefight. You get punched.
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I'm really fond of 'Real Life' because I think it anticipated a whole movement. And people forget, they talk about 'Spinal Tap,' but that wasn't... this was a mockumentary a long time before that. It was one of the early, early sort of mockumentaries.
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Bullfights are hugely popular because you can sit comfortably with a hot dog and possibly watch a man die. It won't be me, but I can sit comfortably and watch it.
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Most entertainment is trying to get you. It's tested, like toothpaste.
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If you paint, write, do mosaics, knit - if it's solving that part of your brain saying, 'I need to do this,' you've won.
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One thing about Los Angeles is it feels like it's not new. It feels like it's already been built, and it's deteriorating, except for the places they're trying to make nicer. But in general, you drive all through the city, and the city feels like it was new a long time ago.
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I've heard people say, 'There are no bad audiences,' but that's just not true. There are people who just shouldn't be together in a room, who produce a really bad audience.
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There's always the standard six people you can hire that have played all these villains in Hollywood. Instinctively, when they come on screen, you know what's going to happen. You don't know the story, but you know what they do.