Albert Brooks Quotes on World (4 Quotes)

After September 11, I sat in my house for a year and I was scared. In that first year, all that was happening was that the next one was coming tomorrow, maybe this weekend, maybe on Monday. That entire year, everybody was panicked. The second year, the attacks were going to come on the holidays. Be careful on July 4th. I wouldn't go to Times Square on New Year's Eve. The third year, we're not sure it's going to come, but what they kept telling us is that this is never going away, right One day I thought that this is insane What is our life like We're going to hide until we're killed You want to get back to a normalcy, even if there is some impending doom, and normalcy in my mind is to be able to deal with it, in a motion picture comedy. There have been no comedies about this, certainly not from America. The comedies that have been made that take place in the present are generally these teenage sex comedies that never talk about the world, so they're not going to deal with it. So what are you going to do I just thought that I want to find a way to just get in this door, just to be able to stand up and say that I'm acknowledging the new world here. Maybe we can get a few laughs for 98 minutes, and then we'll go on.

When we spoke, he told me, 'The Newsweek thing has changed the world.' And I said, 'Wasn't it 911 that changed the world' But Michael said he just didn't want to take a chance.

The whole world is tense. Everybody gets the international news. There's been no American comedy at all that even remotely addresses the subject in any way. My goal isn't to solve the world's problems. My character wasn't even able to do his assignment. But the premise of wanting to find out about somebody -- other than the stuff that the CIA will tell you -- there's no hope unless we do that.

The world really changed after 911, not just in the tragic way, but in every way. So it took me a couple of years to even understand how my art form I could process any of this. When the world changed, eliciting laughter with subjects that were funny to me before 911 just didn't seem good enough.