Early in Ella McCay, the new film from the Hollywood legend James L Brooks, the titular heroine’s secretary – played by Julie Kavner, the voice of Marge Simpson – explains that this politically themed comedy is set in 2008.
There’s a good reason why the film, which stars Emma Mackey as a young woman navigating a sudden promotion while managing complicated ties to her philandering dad, overbearing aunt and roguish husband – a trio played by Woody Harrelson, Jamie Lee Curtis and Jack Lowden – is not quite contemporary.
“I did not want to write about politics today. It is divisive,” Brooks says. This is not so long ago, and people still liked each other. That has changed in the US, and it has been a terrible thing for everybody.”
Brooks has spent more than half a century wringing comedy and emotion out of everyday lives. He remains one of the few American storytellers whose work, not least as a founding father of The Simpsons, consistently bridges character, culture, extravagant sentiment and good, clean fun.
RM Block
His career has always resisted the special-effects-driven vogues of Hollywood; instead he mines the often absurd choices we make. Or what he once called “life – I mean, that’s what real life is, isn’t it?”
A rare triple Oscar winner for his 1983 debut feature, Terms of Endearment – he took home the best-picture, best-director and best-adapted-screenplay prizes – Brooks has also been nominated for five other Academy Awards. His television work has scored an extraordinary 21 Emmy Awards.
“After Terms of Endearment I went to a producer friend of mine who knew the score,” Brooks says. “I asked him how many bombs I would be allowed afterwards. He said, ‘I think you get two.’”
Four decades and six movies later, Ella McCay continues a long line of female-driven stories that began with The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which Brooks cocreated in 1970, and also threads through his movies Broadcast News and As Good as It Gets.
“Somebody once did a drawing showing the women, starting with Mary and going forward,” he says. “I try to nail the contemporary woman. I grew up with my sister raising me, and my mother and her sisters. My mother had an unfortunate husband, and that became the fight of her life. Her sisters became the balm. That was the conversation around me.”
Born in Brooklyn and raised in New Jersey, Brooks began his working life as a CBS usher in New York. The role proved unexpectedly transformative: after he filled in as a copy boy in the newsroom for a colleague on vacation – one who never returned – he found himself in journalism.
Long commutes home through the Broadway district also allowed him to wander into second acts of plays, teaching him valuable storytelling skills. A chance encounter with the producer Allan Burns in California, where Brooks was working in the documentary sector, opened the door to a hugely successful career in writing rooms.
“I learned early on this is a team sport,” he says. “Especially movies. I’ve never believed in that auteur stuff. If somebody way down the credits doesn’t do their job right, the movie is dead.”
I don’t feel any lack in cinema. I think the heart beats true
His pioneering television work brought together a huge array of professionals. The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Rhoda, its spin-off, broke new ground. Taxi and The Tracey Ullman Show, both of which he created, proved a fecund source of talent. It was Brooks who talked Matt Groening into creating a series of animated shorts involving an anarchic yellow family for Ullman’s programme. Brooks and Groening have remained executive producers on The Simpsons since its launch, in 1989.
“Every Thursday everybody goes around the table, and we read the script, and then we do the key rewrite before we send it to the animators,” Brooks says. “Sometimes the script changes only a little, and sometimes quite a bit.” That has been standard operating procedure since the first George Bush was US president.
Ella McCay marks Brooks’s return to film directing after a decade in which he produced such fine pictures as The Edge of Seventeen and Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret for the writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig. Earlier production credits included such well-remembered hits as Big and Jerry Maguire.
“I always have a bit of the director inside me,” he says. “But the producer in me does not want my voice to be there. I enjoy trying to help somebody else with their voice. I like being away from myself when I do that.”
Brooks has built his career around eclectic ensemble casts, consistently attracting performers whose contrasting energies generate friction and momentum on screen. In films such as Broadcast News and Terms of Endearment, he paired lively opposites – Holly Hunter and Albert Brooks in the former; Jack Nicholson and Shirley MacLaine in the latter – whose distinct acting styles blazed up the screen.
Ella McCay similarly brings together an impressive cast, ranging from his old friend Brooks to the impossibly hip Ayo Edebiri.
“Part of what I’m doing as a director is to try and make the picture a team sport,” Brooks says. “Then you are together looking for what the next frame is, what the next scene is. I always say to the actors, after I am happy, ‘Do you want one for yourself?’ Sometimes that ends up being the take I use.”
His organic, incremental process is vanishingly rare in franchise-happy Hollywood. Before Ella McCay, Brooks’s most recent movie as writer-director was How Do You Know, a romantic comedy from 2010 starring Reese Witherspoon, Owen Wilson and Nicholson (in allegedly his final film role). It struggled at the box office against films featuring bigger brand names – Tron: Legacy, Yogi Bear, and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
That’s the business now. With few exceptions, they don’t make breezy adult-oriented pictures like As Good as It Gets (or indeed Ella McCay) any more. Still, even in the current climate, he had few problems shepherding Ella McCay to the big screen.
“Disney is my home studio because we know each other through The Simpsons,” the 85-year-old says. “I don’t feel any lack in cinema. I think the heart beats true. Yes, there’s a lot of genre films. But I thought the most recent Superman was a terrific film. I was totally enthralled by it. I think any genre can be thrilling if somebody takes it and does the right thing.”
Although it has become something of a sport to bash The Simpsons, regular viewers can attest that the past three series have marked a renaissance for the long-running animation.
“Definitely,” Brooks says. “We always had the showrunners change from time to time. We’ve been giving it new blood. And right now we have Matt Selman, who is really taking the show in exciting new directions. He’s the captain of the ship. And we’re all part of the crew.”
In July The Simpsons was renewed through to its 40th season; a new movie is scheduled for release next July. For Brooks it’s still the day job.
“This great thing happened to us: Disney+ came in,” he says of The Simpsons’ current streaming home. “Suddenly people were seeing the show who have never seen us before. It was just a blessing. And with the blessing came a great new energy.”
Ella McCay is in cinemas from Friday, December 12th
