James L. Brooks - biography

“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.”

“Great things that can happen when you’re doing a movie.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“A lot of things just aren’t true any more.”

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

“I have a lot of nightmares.”

“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.”

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

“I’m big on research.”

“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.”

“Tone is up for grabs in what we do - what’s the tone of the scene.”

James L. Brooks directed the following films:
Terms of Endearment (1983)
Broadcast News (1987)
I’ll Do Anything (1994)
As Good as It Gets (1997)
Spanglish (2004)
How Do You Know (2010)


James L. Brooks contributed to the screenplay for the following films:
Starting Over (1979)
Terms of Endearment (1983)
Broadcast News (1987)
I’ll Do Anything (1994)
As Good as It Gets (1997)
Spanglish (2004)
The Simpsons Movie (2007)
How Do You Know (2010)