James L. Brooks Quotes

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

I took some time out for life.

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

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 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.

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

I have a lot of nightmares.