Fresh Air - Filmmaker Albert Brooks

Episode Date: November 17, 2023

Comic, actor, screenwriter and director Albert Brooks is the subject of a new HBO documentary called Defending My Life. It examines his career from his standup in the late '60s to his films including Real Life, Modern Romance, and Lost in America. It's directed by Brooks' longtime friend Rob Reiner. Brooks spoke with Terry Gross in 1996. Also, Justin Chang reviews May December, directed by Todd Haynes, which dramatizes a '90s tabloid story.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. Comedian, actor, and filmmaker Albert Brooks is the subject of a new HBO documentary directed by his longtime friend Rob Reiner. It's titled Albert Brooks Defending My Life. Today we're going to listen to our interview with Brooks, who our critic at large, John Powers, once called the funniest man in America and our leading satirist of middle-class self-indulgence. Brooks has written, directed, and starred in the films Real Life, Modern Romance, Lost in America, and Defending Your Life. He started his career as a stand-up comic, and in addition to making

his own films, he co-starred as an insecure journalist in broadcast news and as a campaign worker and taxi driver. More recently, he appeared in HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm. Playing himself in the episode, he decides that after going to so many funerals where wonderful things are said about the deceased, he wants to have his own funeral before he dies. Here he is stopping by his friend Larry David's house. Larry is there with his sidekick Leon. Listen, I just stopped by to pick up a photo of you, me, and Marty Short taken at Lincoln Center that I want for the memorial. Can I borrow it?

Sure. That's all? Yeah, yeah, it's in there. Thank you. This memorial. Yeah, that's it. I love this. Hey, what's the dress code for the event? Like any funeral, the dress code is a dark suit.

Can I bring Mary? Yeah. Is she a fan? Has she seen any of my movies? I'm going to be honest, A.B., I haven't even seen any of your movies. Okay, well, there's two on Netflix if you want to watch them before you come. Terry spoke with Albert Brooks in 1996 when his film Mother was released. He plays a middle-aged man in the early stages of divorce. He knows he's screwed up, and he blames his insecurities on his hypercritical mother, played by the late, great Debbie Reynolds.

In an attempt to understand what went wrong in his relationship with his mother, he moves back in with her. And as soon as he walks in the door, he knows I'll have it. Are you sure you want salad? Yes, I want salad. Not just for my sake. Mother, I don't get into this food stuff now, please. Just give me a little salad. Oh, I know what I could do. I could scrape the top off the meatloaf. What would that do? Well, it wouldn't be as much meat then. But it's still meat. What difference does it make how much you have? You really don't like meat, huh? No, mother. I don't like eating cows. Oh, honey, everything comes from a cow. Everything. The classic Jewish mother in a lot of American fiction and movies is the critical, domineering, overprotective mother. The mother in your movie is critical, but she doesn't care quite enough

about the son. So she's not domineering and overprotective. The son almost wishes that she was. Right. Nor do I think this is a Jewish mother. But because the Jewish mother is such a cliche of exactly what you say. And I wasn't out to make it a particular religion. I think that there are two kinds of mothers on the planet, no matter what religion or who they are, and that's either the mothers that think everything

their children do are perfect, or the other kind. And this is about the other kind. They can be Catholics, Protestants, Jews, or atheists. It's just the idea that, you know, they're critical. However, the real mothers, the mothers that I have met, once the children leave, they don't want them back. Who would want them back? Did you ever see a bird when the other birds leave the nest? They tear down the nest and find a tree and don't tell the other birds where that tree is. So it's, you know, the idea that they want children back is, it's silly to me. And that's the cliche part. Being critical isn't. So is your mother really critical? Well, she's, you know, loving, but she's, it's not, and I wouldn't even call it critical.

My mother has always sort of been puzzled why I'm who I am. And I think one of the reasons is that if my mother and I, if there was one thing we didn't share, it probably was she didn't get my sense of humor. You know, sense of humor is a very personal thing. And you can love a child and still have no idea why other people are laughing at them. So I think that my mother was always sort of, I mean, I know from doing, I must have done 50 Tonight shows when, you know, Carson was hosting, and the audience would laugh their head off,

and my mother and I would always have the same conversation after every show, which was basically I would say, did you see it? And she would say, oh, honey, it was wonderful. What did Johnny think? And I would say, well, he liked it, but did you like it? No, of course, honey, but Johnny liked it. So that was going to be my autobiography title, What Did Johnny Think? Now, there's some very funny things about food in the new movie. You know, your character comes back to the mother's house, and she saves a lot of food in the freezer,

where it's guaranteed to taste really bad after a while. Yes. And she buys all those horrible store brands in the movie. It's Sweet Tooth Sherbert. Yes, I made that up. Oh, is it perfect, though? Yes. So was this a problem at your home, too, that your mother would buy all the cheap brands?

Yes, that part is, my mother, we could afford anything, but she just didn't believe that there was, you know, like Debbie says in the movie, honey, there's no difference. The man in the store told me it's just the label. I think that my mother probably back of her mind, she felt that all food came from the same vat in Chicago, and they just, you know, put on a different label somewhere. Did you ever go to the, yeah, go ahead. I'm saying, I mean, we had brands of food. I never, they looked like the real thing. I mean, like the cookies, you know, they were black with white in the middle,

but it was like, you know, Sori-Os. It was one letter off. And, you know, there's a thing that I love in this movie. This Sherbert that's been in the freezer for about 16 years and you can't even see it anymore. And I say to, you know, my mother in the movie, I say, look at this crap that sits on the top. And she has named it. She says, oh, no, honey, you look under the protective ice. I love the protective ice.

I said, you've named this stuff? I can't believe it. But my mother still, to this day, my mother has this Neapolitan ice cream. There aren't three colors anymore. It's just one color it's blended into. I don't know what that color is even, but the chocolate and vanilla and strawberry have long ago stopped being divided. They just are like a light yellow.

The roles that you write for yourself are often characters that are very self-absorbed and very selfish in their own way and don't see their own flaws. That's a new twist. I'm just trying to think if I agree with that. I don't know if that's necessarily true about being selfish. I think they're...

Well, modern romance, it's true. Oh, modern romance. Well, modern romance wasn't so much selfish. I mean, there's a guy trapped in a relationship that, you know, he shouldn't be in. And he's desperately trying to hang on for dear life. I mean, it's not like, you know, if he were in control, if he actually was with somebody that, you know, he was supposed to be with, I don't think he would be selfish. He's only selfish because she's, you know, she has no, really shouldn't be with him, and I think he senses that and gets panicked. I guess what I'm trying to ask is, do you want to play characters that are completely lovable or that you love them, you identify with them, but then you also stand back a little bit and say,

but wait a minute, he's going too far with this, or he's too self-absorbed? Are you asking me do I want to? Yeah, yeah, yeah, when you're creating the character. I'll tell you, you know, I think it's very dangerous if you start to write characters where you say, I want to be loved. I think the thing that you do is you tell a story. And when you create a story,

the character needs to be faithful to that story. I mean, let's take modern romance. Here was an obsessive relationship. A guy's in a wrong relationship and drives this woman crazy. If there'd be no way to tell that story and make that character lovable, I mean, you couldn't, then you just shouldn't make that movie. So I sort of like, you know, figure out what story I want to tell, and then the characters need to, you know, be appropriate to the story.

In some of your early work as a comic back when you were doing stand-up and in some of your really early movie work, you made fun of a certain showbiz kind of comedy. Yeah. And I'm wondering, you must have grown up with that. Your father was a comic. Yeah. Well, my father died when I was 11, but I still remember that it was okay to be funny, and I watched somebody do it for a living, even though he pretty much was out of it by the time I was born. I used to listen. He was a radio comedian.

He went under the name of Parkia Karkas, and he was a Greek dialect comedian, and that's the character he played. And even though he was off the air when I was born, we used to have these huge, you know, those big 16-inch records of all the radio shows, and I would listen to it, and I sort of was able to see into show business early. You know, somehow I got it that it might not be exactly what you think it is. How did your father, who I assume was Jewish, his name was Einstein, how did he get to play a Greek dialect comic? Well, he played, you know, during the 40s when he was on the air. I think being an immigrant coming to America was a very

popular thing. And I don't know how exactly or where. I know he was born in Boston and he worked in the advertising business. And I think he just did this character for fun. And then Eddie Cantor heard him once at a dinner and actually, I think, thought he was really Greek and said, talk to him slowly like he wouldn't understand him. Would you like to come to New York and be on my show? And my father said, you can talk faster. I'm born in America. And I don't know why he came up with that, but I think the idea of the poor immigrant who comes to America was something that, you know, obviously he liked. When you started doing comedy, your comedy was, it came out of who you were as a real person. Yeah.

And a lot of your monologues were pretty autobiographical. Right. I never told jokes. I don't think I've ever told a joke in my life. Right. So this more autobiographical approach was really different from where your father was coming from, where he didn't even play his own ethnic group, let alone talk about his life. Absolutely. And that's exactly right. Did you feel like you had any models for what you wanted to do, a more autobiographical approach? No, I'll tell you, when I was very young, I remember watching Jack Benny and thinking that this man figured it all out. Jack Benny really never told jokes. I mean, look what he did. He would stare and people would laugh. And his persona was so clear. It was so, the audience understood it so well that he really, you know, he was amazing.

He was the world's great minimalist. Is that what you were trying for, to do very little and have it be very effective? Or just sort of a, you know, those old guys used to play themselves. This is not a new thing, Jerry Seinfeld and stuff. This is one of the original things that radio and television did. George Burns and Jack Benny and Fred Allen. It was their lives we were laughing at. So I think it just showed you that you didn't have to stand up there and say,

my wife is fat. There were other things to do. But actually, the kind of comedy I did, I really didn't see before I did it. So I didn't have a role model in that somebody was making fun of the, I sort of was making fun of the institutions that were still going on. When I first started, you know, I tried out everything I ever did on national television. There weren't any clubs to even go to if I wanted to. So it was interesting because I sort of would think up things in my house and drive down to NBC and do them on the Dean Martin show. And at that point, if you were funny, all people would say to you is, when are you going to Vegas? And, you know, that's all they associated it with. And I tried to sort of change that, just at least for myself. I mean, not, you know, in any great

sense that I'm going to change the world, but I just sort of, I remember I always would say, when people would say, are you funny? Yes, but I'm, you know, but it's not, but I'm trying to be real too. I mean, I was trying to give dignity to this idea of doing stand-up because it had none. Everyone who ever, you know, heard that you did comedy just thought that you were just

sitting there with a big cigar and opening for Frank Sinatra. Albert Brooks speaking with Terry Gross in 1996. More after a break. This is Fresh Air. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the Wise app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. Let's get back to Terry's interview with Albert Brooks, who is the subject of a new documentary on HBO.

Early in his career, he did stand up on TV variety shows like Dean Martin and Merv Griffin. His contemporaries thought he was funny, but on the variety shows, he played to a predominantly older audience that often didn't know what to make of him. Well, the first thing I ever did was a ventriloquist act called Danny and Dave, which was basically the world's worst ventriloquist. He was introduced as, you know, a real ventriloquist, and his mouth moved more than the dummy, and the dummy used to drink water while he would sing,

and, you know, I would do all of those ventriloquist tricks where I would try to smoke a cigarette, and, you know, I just threw the dummy on the floor to get him out of my hand so I could smoke. And, you know, many people laughed, and a couple of people in the very beginning said, that's the worst ventriloquist I've ever seen. So, and this happened in my first movie. When I did real life, I played a character called Albert Brooks. And, you know, here was a man named Albert

Brooks who set up this whole thing as a realistic experiment of filming a family and trying to make it a sociological experiment. And I would say half the reviews I got in America were real. I still remember, you know, I remember, I'm not sure if it was Rex Reed or somebody who said, why in God's name would a studio give this man money to do such an important experiment? And, you know, I was stunned. I always thought everybody got, you know, figured everything out. But they didn't. It just took years to sort of, you know, maybe make a few people realize that this was thought of and it wasn't just a bad act. Well, it's kind of like the whole world was on your mother's wavelength and not quite getting the jokes.

Yes, not the whole world, but a lot of people. And you're exactly right. Yeah. So you went from one scene to another. You went from the TV variety shows, which had an older audience. And then you went to opening for rock acts like Neil Diamond and Richie Haven. So it's one extreme to another. Exactly. I sort of had a whole reverse thing because everybody else does clubs and then gets on television. I did about five years of television before I ever performed in front of a live concert audience. I actually remember the first time I ever performed was in Mississippi with Neil Diamond. And I had just done in the previous year, when Merv Griffin was on CBS, I had done like 15 of his shows. And I remember trying to put together bits of a Merv Griffin show to do as a half hour in front of a live audience. I didn't even have the transitions

in my mind yet of talking to a group of people because I was so used to these bits. and it was very, sometimes it was fun, but opening for Rock Axe in the early 70s, I wouldn't wish that on anybody. Why not? Well, it was way before comedy was in or even, you know, popular in any regard. You know, comedy sort of didn't start to get this popularity until, I guess, were the 80s. And let's face it, these people took a lot of drugs and went to see, you know, they wanted to hear the loudest music they could hear. And I think there's an old Chinese adage that says, 16 sleeping pills does not make for a good comedy audience. They took a lot of these downers and would sit there and they were waiting for, you know,

Sly and the Family Stone and the disc jockey had to come out and tell them I was there. And you're going to come on and talk about things that made you neurotic and insecure. It doesn't matter. It's called talk about. It's not the human voice they were waiting to hear. They wanted to hear these amplifiers turned up to a billion decibels. They wanted to be hurt, you know. So I had some very rough experiences trying to get people to listen. I remember once I did open for Sly,

and it was in Tacoma, Washington. And the show was at 8 o'clock, and my phone rang at 7.30 in the hotel, and there was actually a motel, a little teeny room there, and it was Sly in the Family Stone. It was his manager. And at that time, it wasn't a secret. Sly was experimenting with Columbia's most famous product,

and I don't mean the studio. And so the guy said to me, he said, let me ask you something, Albert. How long do you do? I said, well, normally a half hour, but I'm a little worried about this audience, maybe 20 minutes. He said, you know, and now we're in Tacoma. He said, what's the longest you can do? I said, well, I don't know. Why? Well, Sly called, and he's in Cincinnati. He had missed the plane.

I said, what? He's in Cincinnati? I said, well, you know, what are you talking about? I got to do three and a half hours? Well, actually, it would be longer because he can't get a plane until seven. I said, look, you got the wrong guy here. I don't know if I should even go on. So I actually did go on, and I remember somebody threw a beer can and cut my leg.

And I got angry at the audience. I started to yell at them and said, he's not even here, and I'm going to go on Johnny Carson and tell them that you're horrible. And as if they would all stop and go, ooh. Anyway, I just got out of town quickly. I ran off the stage. It was not fun. Since we were talking about some of your early comedy, I thought we'd play something from your first comedy album,

which has been reissued on Rhino Records. Yeah. What are you going to play? Well, I think my favorite sketch on here is rewriting the National Anthem. Oh. And the premise of this is that nobody goes around singing the National Anthem anymore, so we should hold open auditions and find a new National Anthem. What inspired the sketch?

Well, the National Anthem is one of the silliest songs ever written. I don't think there's an American alive who knows the words, and I just sort of figured that it would, like the introduction says on the record, it would be a funny idea if people had to come to Washington and sit down at a piano and write and, you know, try to sell the country on a new one. So I played various people coming up with songs, and I sort of, you know, had a guy there who was supposed to moderate the whole thing and tell him yes or no. Why don't we hear it?

Okay. Dan Allen, Denver, Colorado. Three thousand miles from coast to coast Every citizen has reason to boast Thank you. Thank you. Can the lights be changed at all? All right, it's not important.

Before I sing my song, I should tell you a bit about myself. My name is Mr. Robert Bob Harmon, and I currently live and work in the very exciting city of Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm an entertainer. And you know, Vegas is a great place, an exciting place, but originally I'm from a much quieter place,

a place up north, out west, a place I call Portland. What a great place it is. In one 30-square-mile radius, there's more to do than almost anywhere in the world. There's hunting and fishing and boating and camping I am it's how I get into it the actors it's got beautiful waterfalls and gorgeous trees but you know it's part of a bigger place it's part of a country can you guess which country it is no it's not Denmark or Poland or Sweden or Rome. Get on with it! It's a lovely place I call home.

I'm proud to say I've got a country. Got a country. I spell it A-M-E-R-I-C-A. Get off his face! Thank you. Thank you. That's Albert Brooks from his first comedy record, Comedy Minus One, which has been reissued on Rhino Records. Now, hearing all those really inspired anthem satires

that you came up with made me think that you must actually know something about music. That's you at the piano, isn't it? Yes, and yes, I play piano, and I think that music and, well, first of all, music and comedy are very, very similar because, you know, there's that word timing, and I think that that, in essence, comedy is a form of music. When you're making people laugh, there are stopping and starting and louder and softer and all the things that music have.

I know that when I'm working on a motion picture, one of the earliest things I do is I sort of think of what kind of music should be in this particular motion picture. It helps me write. So I've always been musical. I taught myself to play the piano when I was in college. How did you decide to go from comedy to movies?

Well, really all I ever wanted to be was an actor. I never wanted to do comedy. I went to Carnegie Mellon and I studied acting. And at 19 years old, I came back to Los Angeles and saw that I couldn't get any acting roles to save my life. There weren't that many roles for 19-year-olds anyway, and Richard Dreyfuss was getting all of them. So there were, you know, some people in my life who convinced me that if I did stand-up, I could get all the work in the world, and that would get me acting. And it really didn't work that way. It just got me more stand-up. So when, in 1974, late 74, NBC decided that they wanted to,

well, actually, a little bit before then, I had written an article for Esquire called Albert Brooks' Famous School for Comedians. And there was a public television show on at that time called The Great American Dream Machine that would do various, they would do film segments. And I turned that into, I guess, what would be the first infomercial. And again, people thought it was real. I pretended that this comedy school existed and told everybody that they could be funny. And I took them on a tour of the school. But it was my first short film. And it was very successful. And it showed me that I could sort of translate my comedy to film.

Then when NBC wanted to start, they actually wanted to, you know, do a Tonight Show on Saturday night, I was offered that as my own show. And I didn't want to do that anymore. I wanted to get into film. So they said to me, well, we would like you associated with this. At this time, they hadn't, there were no primetime players. Nobody was even on board. So in turn, for coming on first and doing publicity and allowing them to use my name, I made an agreement to make six short movies for the first year of Saturday night. And that was the greatest course you could imagine. Penelope Spheeris, who now, you know, is a well-known director,

she produced these shorts. And in a space of eight months, I was able to write and direct and edit. And, you know, it was like juggling plates. I would be writing the third one, editing the second one, casting the fourth one. You know, I was just really able to learn a tremendous amount. And from then on, I never really, you know, got out of it. I made my first feature real life. And in that same year, I got my first acting job, which was taxi driver. Yes, and your role in Taxi Driver. What a great film to get started in.

Did you realize how lucky you were when you got that role? You know, a great guy to have a chance to, yes, I was able to figure that out, but I never, who would ever know that that would turn out to be, you know, what a legendary movie. Well, in Taxi Driver, you play a campaign worker who, on the presidential campaign, who works with Sybil Shepard. Yes, and you know, there's a funny story with that. Oh, tell us. Well, Paul Schrader, that part wasn't written. So Marty Scorsese hired me and said, you know, maybe you could figure out that part. And, you know, we could figure out the lines and everything. And so we worked on it. And what you see on the movie was sort of like developed in a hotel room.

I just sort of worked on things. And he would tape it. And that's what would appear in the script. And when it was all over, Paul Schrader, the writer, said, you know, I want to thank you. That was the only character I really didn't know. And I said, really? I said, you knew Travis Bickle and Harvey Keitel and all of the pimps and hookers, but a simple guy who works at an office, you couldn't figure out, huh? So it was really a great experience. There's a scene where Robert De Niro, as Travis Bickle, the taxi driver, is hanging around the campaign headquarters,

you know, just eyeing Sybil Shepard, who he really wants to pick up. And he comes in and tries to talk with her. And your character chases him out. Did you come up with a way to do that and the lines to use and stuff? Well, De Niro did something interesting because in those days he was, you know, very method, way before the restaurants, you know. He wouldn't ever even talk to me. So that moment of uncomfortableness was extra real. And of course, I thought it was

just, you know, about method acting. Then at the cast party, he wouldn't talk to me either. He just didn't want to talk to me. But seriously, he wouldn't let me know him. I was trying to make conversation and say, so are you having, you know having fun doing this? And he would just walk away. So at that moment where I had to come up and figure out how to throw him out, it was extra tense because I didn't know who the hell I was dealing with. Well, tell us how you and your character as this very kind of like middle class campaign worker who isn't a very physical person deals with De Niro, who's this really threatening, marginal figure, shadowy figure walking in. Well, he uses the police. He keeps saying there's police across the street. I'm going to call the police. I don't think he could do this alone. So that's really the only way he would do it.

This guy I played is not going to get in a fist fight with the guy that Robert De Niro played. I mean, immediately De Niro goes into this karate position and, you know, he's playing the world's most frightening man anyway. So all my guy is doing is, there's police across the street. I'm calling police. I'm calling police. You know, getting police in there a lot. Albert Brooks speaking with Terry Gross in 1996. More after a break. This is Fresh Air. Now, after your role in Taxi Driver, which direction did you want to head in?

The role of playing actors, of being an actor in other people's movies, playing characters who weren't necessarily like you at all, or going in the direction of making your own movies and writing characters that were very close to your personality and directing it yourself? I think if offers started to come in six a week, I probably would have just pursued acting only. I mean, I still, you know, I love to do that, but they didn't. So I, it forced me into

writing. And once you're going to write, then you have to, you know, do the whole deal because you can't, writing is the blueprint. And if you're going to, if I thought there was a director I could hand my stuff to and go home and go to sleep, I would. You know, part of me is a lazy guy. But I think that you need to, if you don't do it yourself, especially in comedy, you'll never get it right. The nuances will be wrong. The casting will be bad. And so once I decided that I could sit down and write these movie scripts, the rest was just something that, you know, I had to do.

There's a line that you're really quite famous for from broadcast news in which your character says, wouldn't this be a wonderful world if insecurity and desperation made us more attractive? Did you write that line? No, Jim Brooks wrote that line. It seems like you should have written it. Well. Well. I'm not taking credit for it.

Right, right. Did that ring true to you? You know, not really. I mean, I understand what you're saying, but, you know, I don't know. I don't feel that that's me necessarily. I play these characters. I'll tell you something.

I once did a bit on television that I only did once, and it was on a Tonight Show, and actually Johnny was sick and Joey Bishop hosted, and the fact that Joey Bishop did it meant it was never repeated. And all I did was, it was about five years into my career, and I came out, and I sat down in a chair, and I talked to the audience for three minutes without getting a laugh about life and the philosophy of life. And I said, basically, I'm five years into my career, and I have no more material left. And I said, don't think I couldn't

fool you, because I could. I mean, what do you think? I couldn't get a laugh. I could take down my pants and get a laugh, but that's not who I am. What? You don't think I could? And I wound up taking down my pants. I took off my shirt. I put eggs all over my head. I kept saying, you know, but that's not, I'm not going to really do that. And when I was finished, I sat there with no clothes and 16 pounds of food dripping from my face. And I looked right in the camera and I said, but this isn't the real me. And then I took an 8x10 out of my shorts and I said, this is the real me. So I have a half-brother and somebody called him up. His name is Charles Einstein.

He was a very famous sports writer. And somebody called him up after this and said, is your half-brother insane? They said, is he insane? And my half-brother said, no. And you know why? Because he went to the market and bought all that stuff. And, you know, that's really... Right, right, right. Right. I know all these things aren't, this is what I do. It's what I prepare to do. So I don't think that I'm literally those people. There must be a reason, though, why you gravitate toward playing or writing characters who are somehow motivated by their neurosis? Well, because I think that, you know, I never believed John Wayne. I just think that movies are so fake. And I just, listen, if an alien landed on Earth and went to our cinema, boy,

wouldn't they be confused? They would think we're all police. And I just, you don't need me to do that. There's enough people to do that. So I just sort of, you know, am anti that. And anti that are people who are exposed, who are vulnerable, and maybe, you know, a bit screwed up or whatever it is you want to call it. I just think it makes for more interesting, certainly more real, and certainly funnier characters. In several of your movies, your characters have been divorced or the relationship gets really rocky. Do you ever wish that you were married with children? Is that something you've wanted and haven't been able to get? Or is that something you never quite saw for yourself anyways? Well, I have somebody in my life right now. And if things go the way I hope it will go,

that all finally might happen. So, you know, talk to me in a year. I just, you know, here's the thing. I never wanted to do this wrong. I know one thing about myself. I would be a bad divorced person. I would really, if I had to drive and visit my child and leave, I would have a heart attack. I just know that I couldn't do that. So I was willing to let that not happen, then happen wrong. And by the way, I'm not saying that if it did happen, I wouldn't fail at it, but at least you know when you're going into something, you know that deep down place where you think you've got a chance or you don't. So I've waited very patiently. You know, I'm the third little pig. I've always felt that that's who I was. And I've been building this brick house. And I'm telling you right now, I am not letting the other two pigs in.

I'm sorry. I just figured if the other two pigs were listening, they're going to be pissed. Albert Brooks spoke with Terry Gross in 1996. He's the subject of a new HBO documentary, Albert Brooks, Defending My Life. And by the way, Brooks got married in 1997, and he and his wife have two children. All right, please be quiet. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a lot of you. We got to get through it. Please be quiet. Very quickly, sit down at the piano, state your name, where you're from, play your song, all right? Don't give us any titles. Please be quiet. Don't give us any titles. We'll call them all the anthem. If we like it, we'll get your title from you later, okay? State

your name, where you're from, play your song. We'll stop you when we've heard enough. Let's go quickly. You're first. First. Ted Rutherford, Dallas, Texas. Hey world Look at us Hey, world! Look at us! We're the greatest! We're the... Thank you very much! Coming up, Justin Chang reviews the new film May December, directed by Todd Haynes. This is Fresh Air.

Hi, this is Molly C.V. Nesper, producer at Fresh Air. And this is Seth Kelly, also a producer at Fresh Air. Plus, staff recommendations, interviews from the archive, bonus audio, and what's coming up on the show. Imagine, an email you enjoy getting. To subscribe, go to whyy.org slash fresh air. In Todd Haynes' new movie May December, Natalie Portman plays a famous actor who's researching a role inspired by a tabloid scandal from years earlier. Julianne Moore and Charles Melton also star in the movie, which opens in theaters today and begins streaming December 1st on Netflix. Our film critic Justin Chang has this review. If you were in reach of a TV or a tabloid in the 90s, you probably remember the case of Mary Kay Letourneau, the Washington State school teacher who was convicted of raping her sixth grade student, Villy Folau. Letourneau was 34, and Folau was 12 when their

sexual relationship began. They had two children, one of whom was born while Letourneau was in prison. After her release in 2004, she and the now-adult Folau wed and were married for 14 years until their separation. Letourneau died of cancer in 2020. The dark and sometimes disturbingly funny new movie, May-December, was inspired by the Letourneau-Folau story, though it never mentions them by name. Julianne Moore plays Gracie Atherton-Yu, who's in her late 50s, and Charles Melton plays her husband, Joe Yu, who's in his 30s. They have three college-aged children and a beautiful home in Savannah, Georgia, where their close-knit community has long accepted them, despite the scandal that broke out when their relationship came to light two decades earlier. The director Todd Haynes, working from a smart, layered script by Sammy Birch,

comes at this material from a fascinating angle. A famous TV actor named Elizabeth Berry, played by the famous movie actor Natalie Portman, is set to play Gracie in an independent film. Elizabeth has come to Savannah to do some research by spending time with the couple, who are hoping they'll be depicted sympathetically. In this scene, Elizabeth attends a barbecue at Gracie and Joe's house and strikes up a conversation about them with one of their friends. They're sweet, aren't they? Very. They're a very beloved part of this community.

I can see that. So, what is it you love most about Gracie? She always knows what she wants. She's unapologetic. Julianne Moore, who gave two of her greatest performances in Haynes' earlier dramas, Safe and Far from Heaven, plays Gracie with an edge of steel and a childlike lisp inspired by Letourneau herself. Although Gracie gives Elizabeth a friendly welcome, over the next few days she turns brittle and a little testy as the actor asks about her and Joe's relationship. There's an

acid humor to Gracie's defiance as she refuses to wring her hands over her past misdeeds. In her mind, she and Joe and their kids are a happy and pretty normal family. But Gracie is clearly deluding herself, and it doesn't take long for Elizabeth's presence to drive a wedge between the couple as, unresolved issues rise to the surface. Charles Melton, best known for the series Riverdale, is quietly revelatory as Joe, a man stuck in a kind of suspended adolescence. We can't help but notice how closely Joe resembles his teenage kids, not just in appearance, but in age, or how Gracie seems to treat him the way a

needy mother might treat her son. But as messed up as Gracie and Joe are, May December seems to respect them more than it does Elizabeth, who's clearly working this situation from every possible angle. Natalie Portman, doing her best and subtlest work in some time, brilliantly reveals the calculation behind Elizabeth's polite smiles and gently probing questions. Todd Haynes clearly loves actors, but he isn't afraid to show how callous and even monstrous some of them can be in pursuit of their art. He's also critiquing the endless appetite for sensationalized rip-from-the-headline stories and the industry's willingness to feed it. All this would be rich dramatic fodder, even if it were played perfectly straight.

But Haynes, one of the most inventive stylists working in American movies, is incapable of being completely straightforward, and here he walks a tricky tonal line between melodrama, realism, and camp. At times he accents key moments with a deliberately overwrought burst of music, as if to give us a glimpse of the soap opera that Elizabeth's indie film project might well become. Elsewhere, his references skew higherbrow. When he positions Moore and Portman side-by-side in close-up, he evokes the dreamy surrealism of Ingmar Bergman's persona and David Lynch's Mulholland Drive,

as if to suggest that Gracie's and Elizabeth's identities are blurring together. In shifting among these different modes, Hames reminds us that we're watching a movie, and that most movies can only give us a partial understanding of the truth. Still, for all its surface artifice and self-aware humor, what's striking about May December is how piercingly sad it becomes as it invites us to feel the full weight of Gracie and Joe's loneliness and desperation. These characters may be fictionalized constructs, but their tragedy is all too real. Justin Chang is film critic for the LA Times. He reviewed May-December, opening today in, and streaming on Netflix December 1st.

On Monday's show, I talked with writer Stephanie Land about her new book, Class, which picks up where her best-selling book, Made, left off. In Class, Land is in college, in her 30s, at the University of Montana, desperately trying to fulfill her dream of becoming a writer, juggling classes while struggling to pay for rent and child care. I hope you can join us. To keep up with what's on the show and to get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air.

Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support by Joyce Lieberman, Julian Hertzfeld, and Al Banks. For Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley.