Albert Brooks

The idea behind 'Defending Your Life': Imagine if you had to sit in a courtroom and watch your life. I don't care who you are - if you committed a crime and you had to have all of your emails searched and made public, who on this planet could survive that? Nobody. ”

I'm really fond of 'Real Life' because I think it anticipated a whole movement. And people forget, they talk about 'Spinal Tap,' but that wasn't... this was a mockumentary a long time before that. It was one of the early, early sort of mockumentaries. ”

I like to do things that I want to see myself. With 'Defending Your Life,' I wanted to see some aspect of death other than angels and the thing that 'Ghost' was about, because that didn't make any sense to me. So that's the reason: it fills a hole. ”

If you're going to act and do this for a living, you want to play something that the audience didn't expect. ”

Well, you know, with every character, if you're going to expose yourself, you've got to figure out every detail that you're going to play. So there's no character that you can just go put on his shirt and be fully prepared. ”

I've always been the king of silence. I've always been a minimalist comedian. I've taken my influence from Jack Benny, who was the king of that... I've always done 'less is more.' ”

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. ”

Movies are an expensive business. ”

I'd still like to see 'Survivor' minus the planned show-biz parts. That would be the purest form of show business - I want to see someone so hungry that they eat somebody else's foot. ”

I made my living in comedy, but I'm not a silly person. I've got all these sides to me. Even in my movies that I've written myself, the characters sometimes border on great anger or nutsiness or other kinds of behavior. I'm not just doing fart jokes for two hours. ”