James L. Brooks

“The Importance of Being Earnest. This has one of my favorite one-liners: 'If you are not too long, I shall wait for you the rest of my life.'”

“Lady Eve. Okay, Lady Eve has one of the best love speeches ever written. His speech about, you know, when I look at you I see two children coming towards each other, they're eight years old and keeps on advancing it.”

“Some of these travels. Everything by Preston Sturges.”

“Shampoo because everybody in the cast hit it out of the park.”

“Albert Brooks is one of the specifically original and great comedy talent. And Julie Hagerty was the perfect person for him to play with. And this has one of the most famous comedy monologues in film. Albert wrote, I think with Monica Johnson on this, wrote, directed, starred in. I think I was in this. He always said, 'Be in the film and I'll make it fun.' I always said yes, it was never fun. But this is the most valuable thing I got from the experience.”

“Before I directed my first film, John Cassavetes and Elaine May were on the studio lot and they were improvising a play. It was the most amazing thing I've ever seen in my life. He was so generous and just hanging with him, you know, there'll never be a spirit of film like him. I'll make a case for him being one of the great men ever in film and started independent film. I mean, you can't be more important than him.”