James L. Brooks Quotes

[Screenwriting] is no more complicated than old French torture chambers, I think. It's about as simple as that.

A lot of things just aren't true any more.

I think you have a pact with an audience in every picture, and I think the pact is to try and be truthful and to be real.

The thing that usually gets me through the writing is that my feelings of wretched inadequacy are irregularly punctuated by brief flashes of omnipotence.

I took some time out for life.

There was a great director who directed a picture that I wrote who barred me from the set quite appropriately and said, "I'm sorry, Jim. When you're directing, you don't need to know everything. You need the illusion that you do." And, you know, and I WOULD be there behind him trying to signal the actors in, you know, in a way I wasn't even aware of.

I had a marketing idea that everybody hated, decency is sexy.

You become so obsessed, and that's not a bad thing for a movie. Serve it with that sense that it's the whole world.

Once you read the script, it's the only way it can be.

I spent two years telling studio heads that it wasn't a cancer picture. I hate cancer pictures. I don't want to see a cancer picture. There is only one thing worth saying about cancer, and that is that there are human beings in cancer wards.

When you produce and direct your own film you havethe somewhat consoling feeling that the producer will kill for you.

I love romantic comedy, but I think you have to have another idea that you're chasing along with romantic comedy.

I value comedy. I value somebody who can be funny.

You have more and more people coming into the tent with the creative guys [on Hollywood films]. You have marketing and concept testers, advertising people. What you find gets the high numbers is easily appealing subjects: a baby, a big broad joke, a high concept. Everything is tested. The effect is to lessen the gamble, but in fact you destroy a writer's confidence and creativity once so many people are invited into the tent.

Dagwood Bumstead was a great unrecognized hero of American literature. He showed up every day, he got knocked down every day, he never got to eat his sandwich every day, the dog jumped on him every day, his wife was giving him a hard time and he showed up every day.

Things get very distorted when you do a movie, weirdly so.

I always believe you can't kill good movies, because somebody's in some room and will die unless it gets made.

What does it mean for an actor to make a part his own? It means that he takes on what you had intended and starts to put in his own stuff so that it becomes something that could only happen if he played it.

It never stops, accepting that fact is difficult. I took some time out for life.

Media reporting denied privacy to anybody doing what I do for a living. It was no longer possible to work on your picture in privacy.

Great things that can happen when you're doing a movie.

I've done it with Broadcast News-where there was no finish line, there was no agenda that I had to move all the characters to this point, that I was sort of open to what happens.

I have a lot of nightmares.

Kids in general make things fresh and alive and they have this great appreciation for, Holy mackerel, we're making a movie!