Albert Brooks on Breaking New Ground with “Looking for Comedy in a Muslim World:” “You know, the very fact that there are no movies like this is entering a mine field because whenever you make a movie, you have some other kind of movie to say, ‘Yeah, this movie isn’t too violent because I can look at this…’ There’s certainly not been any comedies about anything post 9/11, and very few dramas, just the few that are coming up now which I call ‘the terrorists with a heart of gold’ dramas. Those movies like suicide bombers changing their minds. But the idea of making something that you’re reasonably making people try to laugh at, I can’t call it like a mine field, but I knew it was going to be unusual. It was the whole reason I wanted to make it.
I’m just dismayed that since 9/11 so little has been done in the arts about this, especially in motion pictures. If you look at the movies that are, the 2005 movies that are all considered in the awards, all of them are set in the past, all of them. “Brokeback Mountain,” “Munich,” “Good Night, and Good Luck,” “Memoirs of a Geisha…” I don’t know if it’s a conscious decision by filmmakers to say, ‘I’m not going to deal with it,’ or if people sort of don’t know how they’re going to deal with it.
As I said, there’s a few dramas that are coming up that are trying to tackle this thing, but there’s no comedy and that’s sort of what I just thought. I sat home the first year and we were scared every day, ‘The next attack is coming tomorrow. Don’t open your mail…’ There was the anthrax. Everything is bad. The, the second year, it lessened a little bit but they were still saying be careful of holidays. Then the third year, now it’s developed into, ‘Look, we know it’s coming.’ We don’t know when.
This is the new world, and it’s never going to end, and that’s basically what the message is. Don’t expect a peace treaty on this war. There won’t be a moment where you’ll ever know it’s over. That’s what they’re telling us. So if this is the world, from now on, then you’ve got to make comedies. It’s kind of like a broken arm that doesn’t heal. It’s like, ‘So this hurts now, and I have to lead my life with this arm.’ I was just amazed that nobody was acknowledging, at least through the art form that I do, that this has even happened. The few comedies that are contemporary are teenage sex comedies anyway, and they’re just sort of dealing with, ‘Will I get laid or not?’ And 9/11 doesn’t enter into that brain, so I got frustrated by it.
The other main reason was, because when I wrote this movie and filmed it, they hadn’t even brought Karen Hughes back. Her job, I guess, what they’re calling it now is PR to the Muslim World. There wasn’t even anybody attempting this and that was mind-boggling to me. It still is. I don’t know why the US won’t take your trillion dollars and buy the weapons. I understand that’s what they’re going to do, but take a billion dollars and put 50, 000 people on the ground. I call it the ‘schmooze corps.’ Let people just make contact around the world, because America, all people know about America is what they read in the paper - and it’s not been really great for the last number of years.
What I found in India when I would go to dinner with somebody and you would have contact with them, if they had a good time with you, they would be thinking, ‘Eh, that guy is pretty cool. It’s a cool place.’ So, those two main reasons: one, I hadn’t seen anything about this subject. And two, I thought we should have some sort of PR. Now, obviously, they’re never going to have a ‘What Makes People Laugh’ program, but that’s the idea of the comedy.”
Page 2: Albert Brooks on Finding Locations and Doing Stand-Up
