Albert Brooks on Choosing Locations to Film "Looking for Comedy in a Muslim World:" Brooks said he never considered filming in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, or Jordan. “No way. There’s no possibility; there’s no film commission. Where do you think ‘Syriana’ was filmed? I believe it’s Morocco.
The one thing about this story that was very important to me was the India/Pakistani conflict. Now Pakistan is a Muslim nation, and the minority population is so large… The minority Muslim population in India is so large that it qualifies it as the second largest Muslim population in the world. I also was always interested in showing India as it is now. And, again, you usually see ‘A Passage to India’ or ‘The Jungle Book.’ I don’t think many Americans know what the streets look like today. So I was always interested in South Asia. If you include Indonesia and India and Pakistan, that alone is 500 million Muslims. That’s a large part of the Muslim world.”
Albert Brooks on Studio Involvement: Brooks said it took about two years from the initial idea to finishing the script, and Brooks credits Steve Bing with making the film a reality. “There was no studio; Steve Bing was the man who put up the money. I would never have gotten the funding from a studio. Now, Steve Bing had a distribution deal with Sony and he told Sony, ‘I’m making this Albert Brooks movie. This is what it’s called…’ They said, ‘Sounds great. Sounds like we’ll give it to Tri Star.’ You know, they have different divisions, so they have to decide, ‘Okay, this one will go to Tri Star.’
Then when I finished shooting, we had our first meeting. I showed them a rough cut of the Fred Thompson scene, which sort of explains the movie. Everybody thought that meeting went well, except me, because one of the gentlemen there - I’m not mentioning any names - but one of the gentlemen made a joke about the title. ‘Great title. I guess we’re going to have add a lot of phones to answer the calls we’re going to get on this one.’ (Laughing) I’ve never heard a studio make a joke that wasn’t what they really wanted to say. I left going, ‘So you think it’s going to be okay here?’ ‘Yeah, nah, they would tell us.’ ‘Yeah, but didn’t they tell us? That’s not what I heard.’
They made posters. They made the trailers. They booked us at the Toronto Film Festival. I saw the big release board. October 7th was our release day. Four months later, about a week and a half after the Newsweek article about the Koran, which was later retracted, where they desecrated the Koran. Monday morning, Steve Bing called me and said they didn’t want to use the title. ‘I told you this!’ I was angry because they wasted five months.
We found Warner Independent immediately and they were really excited about it but they didn’t have an October slot. So now it’s now. I’m just sort of angry that they wasted our time. And, by the way, I saw that Sony trailer, and you wouldn’t believe it. Not only did they not want the title, but they didn’t want to tell anyone what the movie was about. It looked like, ‘Bill and Ted Go to India.’ I really couldn’t figure it out. ‘A comedian decides to put on a show overseas. Wait, wait a minute, what about the plot?’ Where’s the scene where he says, ‘We want you to find out how to make Muslims laugh’? It wasn’t in the trailer.”
Albert Brooks on Returning to Stand-Up: “Well, in this film, it’s different because I was the director so I had so much to do to make these scenes filmable. That audience you see, they were there for two solid days because you’re filming this from 17 angles. So I’m talking to them as a director, and then I’m becoming the comic they’re not supposed to laugh at. Then I grab the mic and I’m talking to them again as the director. The first three or four hours, I had to get people not to laugh. When you tell people not to laugh, six people laugh, and everyone laughs at them. Fortunately it was about 111 [degrees] in that theater and by about noon, people weren’t laughing. But then I had a whole other problem. People were screaming, ‘When do we eat?’
From my very start of doing stand-up comedy, I tried all these bits on national television. There were no clubs to go to and sometimes the audience would laugh and sometimes they wouldn’t laugh as much. I never judged the bit on how they laughed. If I liked the bit, I’d tuck it away. I’d do it again in another three years and a whole new group of people laugh again. It was interesting. When you did Johnny Carson, that’s all that mattered. You might have 300 people and only 100 people really dug what you did. But if Johnny was laughing, you got an A. And, by the way, if everyone liked it, and Johnny didn’t like the bit, you never saw him again.”
