'Drive' came to me because the casting director knew my manager and called and said, 'You've always talked to me about Albert wanting to play the heavy. I think he should read this.' My ears just perked up.
I was offered 'Pretty Woman.' I was offered 'Big' and 'Dead Poets Society.' But what was important to me in those years was to make movies, to make these Albert Brooks movies.
I guess I was the class clown - with a name like Albert Einstein, you don't hide in the back. I'd read the school bulletin to the class, and I'd add activities and make stuff up. It was good, a good 10 minutes every morning.
All we did in Alabama was have a read through with the script, but there was, 'No, well, it needs more. You've got to do this, Albert. You've got to do that, Jessica.' It didn't feel like that at all.
My favorite country blues player was Big Bill Broonzy. City blues was Freddie King, but I liked them all - Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Ralph Willis, Lonnie Johnson, Brownie McGhee and the three Kings, B.B., Albert and Freddie. Jazz-wise, I listened to Django, Barney Kessel and Wes Montgomery.
I don't think Albert Einstein could have devised an equation to guide the leader of the free world during the wildly tumultuous post-9/11 realities without a modicum of help from the opposition party and the vast majority of the print and electronic media.
I would like Albert Brooks to have received the Oscars for best actor, best director and best screenplay for 'Modern Romance.' I love that movie.
I remember, my mom, she's lived in Spain for about thirty years, and we were playing the Royal Albert Hall, and she was with some friends from New York. Morrissey came out with the sign 'The Queen is Dead,' and my mom's friends are like, 'Oh my God.' They took it literally.
When I lived in Paris in the early '80s, I had the occasion to hang out with Prince Albert of Monaco quite a few times.
I would love to do a movie with Albert Brooks; we're so different, but I find him so funny, and I can be just as seemingly narcissistic as he comes off, the 'it's all about me' kind of thing.
