James L. Brooks

[on I'll Do Anything (1994)] I wanted to do a Hollywood story. At the time it seemed to me, and it turned out to be a real miscalculation, to get the truth about Hollywood, the form had to be larger than life, a musical. I did a lot of strange things on that. Because of my background I went for actors on it and not singers. I'm in love with actors. I had great musical people, the best. I had Twyla Tharp as my choreographer. Prince as my songwriter. Sinéad O'Connor did one song, a beautiful song. And I went to work, and it was the first time I fell in love with my leading lady, who was this six-year-old magical child. And her mother was great--part of the movie was based on my experience with my own two daughters, and I sort of became a surrogate dad. I had all these other people around me that I loved and it was great. And then we went to our first preview. And it was a disaster. We had walkouts, it was awful. Then the worst thing of all happened--someone who saw it told somebody who told somebody who told the Los Angeles Times about what had happened, and then they came after the story. So now here I was trying to fix the film and I actually have the major home-town newspaper publish what had happened, and kill us dead in the water. And they made a story out of my odyssey, came to my next preview and it was just horrendous. So eventually I pared down the music, took almost all of it out. And you can speculate on a lot of things about why the picture didn't work. I'm a guy who started out in one form and changed it to another, but the movie played and people laughed, because I saw it with an audience. But it utterly failed commercially and I felt like I had let down a lot of people. It's my job to take it personally. When I ask people to join me and work with me, who else is responsible? But I haven't seen the movie in a long time and I still think it's a good movie. Show less «

[accepting the Best Picture Oscar for Terms of Endearment (1983)] It took a long time to get the picture made and this community has been generous to this picture from long before it was made. There was a lot about every studio turning it down; I think it's much more significant that a Hollywood studio made it and that [the] Hollywood studio was flexible and that the studio ended up happy that it made it--I think that's significant. too, that there was an audience for this picture. Show less «

People used to say, you know you're in the hands of a good screenwriter when you're not aware of the writing. I've never subscribed to that. In Juno (2007), suddenly you're riveted by the fact that people haven't talked like that before. I think the treat is always when you are aware of the writing. Show less «

I saw Annie Hall (1977) with a group of people working in comedy and television. We were all stunned. Stunned. It was like watching a spaceship land. That something that funny could also be that beautiful. Show less «

While you're doing it, it is sort of a lonely kind of feeling, even though you are surrounded by so many people giving beyond the call. That's generally true of movies, there's a sense of urgency, people risking their tail, people working past exhaustion. That's what moviemaking is. It's lonely because you asked all of them to work that hard for this idea you had. Show less «

[on being employed by a studio] Sometimes they give you so much rope you forget it's around your neck. But it always is. You feel it when they yank it. Show less «

[in 2014] The great thing in television, usually the writer's in charge. It's the one place. In movies it's certainly not true. But in television it's true and there's something--the inmates running the asylum and all that. And there's something to that. Right now, there are so many great shows that are truly authored. It's a place where writers are in charge. Right now, a lot of the great things we see each year will be on television. Show less «