All the Choices - Albert Brooks - Interview

Film Comment, July, 1999 by Gavin Smith

If you had to give up two of them, which one would you keep: acting, directing, writing?

If I had to, if I was forced, like it was Russia? I feel I would like to keep acting. That's the way I feel right now, but I don't want to give up any of them. I feel I'm entering an age where there's a shitload of parts that I could really play, and I'd like to keep doing that. Now, talk to me in a year. The hardest of the three is writing. It's the most gratifying; also the toughest. I would act in someone else's movie, I might even direct a movie that I hadn't written, but I'd never write a movie and that would be it. That I just wouldn't do. It would be too difficult. Given that, does your talent as a whole lie in your writing side or your performing?

I know when I'm writing, I'm acting out the different people, so I would say my acting ability has helped everything. And the reason actors like working for me as a director is that I do really understand what they do and they feel comfortable. I'm not looking at them like, Who are you and why do you get paid so much?

So writing and directing are manifestations of yourself as a performer.

If there were fifty great parts for me when I was 20 or 25, I probably never would have done this, but out of necessity I had to do it. I wasn't getting anything. If I was able to get a lot of work as a young actor, I never would have had the discipline to write and direct.

BEFORE YOU BEGAN your comedy career, you aspired to be a serious actor and studied acting at Carnegie-Mellon. Why did you go in that direction when it was already established that you had this natural girl for making people laugh?

In that era, the late Sixties, there was nobody in standup; the profession of standup was just Vegas and cigars and the Friars Club and Sheckie Green -- it wasn't a cool thing to do. If you wanted to work, you had to go work and live in Vegas. My father was a famous radio comedian, and I had certainly seen that part of it. I just didn't have any fascination or desire to do standup comedy. I always wanted to act, and at Carnegie I got a lot of shows my freshman year. I left after a year and a half. I also went to L.A. City College for a year and did the same thing.

What particularly stayed with you?

There was a guy named Tom Hill who taught the most wonderful thing of all, and that was the economy of acting. We get back to Jack Benny and how less is more. That always made a lot of sense to me.

What happened when you returned to LA. ?

I came back here and tried to get work, and I was 19 and nobody at 19 was getting much acting. Whenever a part would come up, Richard Dreyfuss would get it. I had this man at the William Morris office who has basically been in my life ever since, Herb Nanas, and I'd always go and make these people laugh. One of my friends, Larry Bishop, whose father was Joey Bishop, had a ventriloquist doll hanging around. I picked it up and one thing led to another and I created Danny and Dave, and it made everybody laugh. These people convinced me -- and they were wrong, by the way -- but they said, "Listen, if you'll be willing to be funny, you'll get everything you ever want, you will zoom right past everybody else and get right to the front of the casting door." Well, I didn't. All I did was get a lot of standup comedy work. I probably got Taxi Driver because Marty Scorsese was a fan of my comedy. But it took too long to get that one part.