Albert Brooks Quotes
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If you look at the best-seller list for American fiction, they're all sequels to detective stories or stories about hunting serial killers. That's what's called American fiction these days.
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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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I don't know how, where, and why the idea for 'Defending Your Life' began; the idea had been bouncing around for a while. Stories like that sort of have to bounce. They don't come out of nowhere. I went through my own period of life with sort of everything turning upside down, and wondering, 'Why is it this way?'
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I like movies about failing.
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It's better to be known by six people for something you're proud of than by 60 million for something you're not.
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As an actor, if you're just sitting and staring and you don't know who you are in your own mind, it's vacant. And sometimes the camera is an X-ray machine, it can pick it up.
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I was offered 'Pretty Woman.' I was offered 'Big' and 'Dead Poets Society.' But what was important to me in those years was to make movies, to make these Albert Brooks movies.
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I've always liked to think ahead. Not stupid-far ahead. A hundred years doesn't interest me. But 20 years interests me, and more for what happens to humans as opposed to things.
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I don't think the goal is, 'How big a star did you ever become?' I think the goal is, 'Were you able to express yourself?' And if you're able to say yes, in any field, you've won. 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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If I start a film of my own, then what I eliminate is acting in other people's movies. Because once I start, and I go raise the money, it's about two and a half or three years, and I can't stop. I have people hired. I can't say, 'Ooh there's a good part called 'Drive'; I'll see you in three months.'
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I had done about 60 television shows, from 'Ed Sullivan' to 'The Hollywood Palace,' before I ever went to 'Johnny Carson.' At the time, that was the showcase for comics. And I couldn't believe it.
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I probably learned, being in 'Taxi Driver' before I made my first film, I would come to the set every day just to watch how that film came about. It's like a graduate course: it's terrific. You talk to the cinematographer during the breaks. You ask the electrician why they are doing this.
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It's interesting when you're part of a group - the Jews, to be exact - that the world has had such problems with.
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Twitter is the Devil's playground.
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I'd still like to see 'Survivor' minus the planned show-biz parts. That would be the purest form of show business - I want to see someone so hungry that they eat somebody else's foot.
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I'm a strong fellow.
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What's interesting about books that take place in the future, even twenty years in the future, is that many of them are black or white: It's either a utopia or it's misery. The real truth is that there's going to be both things in any future, just like there is now.
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I guess 'The Player' was a pretty good L.A. movie. And 'Chinatown.' Was there ever a better L.A. movie about a certain period in L.A.? That was terrific.
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Normally movies have the same people they use over and over for everything. It's called typecasting. They don't like to take chances. They'll go with the guy they had before.
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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.
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I don't see many explosions or ten-car crashes in the course of my life, so I don't put them into my movies. I would love to live in a society where 'My Dinner with Andre' made $100,000,000. Then I would be in the mainstream. I could do that stuff easier than I could do 'Meatballs.'
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I'm not interesting enough on my own that you'd want to see a film about me.
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My friend Harry Nilsson used to say the definition of an artist was someone who rode way ahead of the herd and was sort of the lookout. Now you don't have to be that, to be an artist. You can be right smack-dab in the middle of the herd. If you are, you'll be the richest.
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If you want to be a writer, just write. There's no magic to it.