Albert Brooks

I’ve done performances in movies that I was immensely proud of and the movies didn’t take off like a rocket at Cape Canaveral, it didn’t take off.

By the way, movies are like sporting events in that you’re as good as the movie you’re in. You can sit in a room for 20 years and go do a movie and you can just kill in it and you move to the head of the line again. By the same token, you can do five movies a year and if they’re dreck, it’s nothing.

Listen, there are some movies that are set in stone and the writer or the director does not want to change, but I’ve never worked on a movie, including my own, that didn’t take advantage of a rehearsal process.

My mom was a professional. My dad and mom met each other in a movie called ‘New Faces of 1937.’ My mom went under the name Thelma Leeds, and she did a few movies, and she was really a great singer, and when she married my dad and started to have a family, she sang at parties.

I like movies about failing.

Movies are an expensive business.

I cast unusual people in my movies.

I’ve always been in the middle of making my own movies, so taking acting jobs that take me away from that has been impossible.