'America needs to kick itself in the butt'

Albert Brooks, best known for directing such gentle comedies as Mother, has stepped outside America for the first time to make Looking For Comedy In The Muslim World.

Brooks, 49, whose voice is heard in such hugely successful films as Finding Nemo, plays himself in his newest film to be released in late January. In the film, Washington assigns Brooks, one of America's best-known comic actors, to find out what makes Muslims laugh. The film, which has a number of South Asian actors including Sheetal Sheth, was extensively shot in Delhi and Agra.

Imagine for a moment you are not Albert Brooks and you are reading a news story that Brooks is making a film called Looking For Comedy In The Muslim World. What would you think?

(Chuckles) Well, if I were a fan of Albert Brooks, I would be excited. I would also think that the subject and idea (of the film) could be handled by very few people and this Brooks fellow is one of them.

Comedy in the Muslim world?

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Why would that be?

Because today, there are not many filmmakers who want to give credit to the audiences, and certainly those filmmakers would not think it is possible to make a film like this. All through my career, I have refused to make films that appeal to the lowest common denominator. I never knew how to do it.

Many people could say this is not a typical Albert Brooks film, it is not anything like Mother, which was a comedic study of a difficult relationship.

But this is also a film about relationships, in a much broader sense. Soon after 9/11, I began thinking about a way of bringing people who could never really meet each other.

No. I knew this when I was in Delhi and met with the Imam of Jama Masjid. When I told him what my film was about, he laughed. Besides, if anybody is made fun of, it is me. It's not them. It's not the countries. It's this guy, Albert Brooks. And my film follows a grand tradition in American films.

Charlie Chaplin was the buffoon in his own films. W C Fields took all the hits in his movies. The comedian is the one we are making fun of, and that comedian is me. I think if people who hate you can laugh with you at something, that's the quickest way to have a little understanding. If you really sat in a room with different kinds of people who normally don't speak to each other and you all laughed at something, even if it was me falling on my a**, that is something. There is at once some sort of release of pressure there.  

No, but I had to make a trip ahead of the shoot to meet with government officials. I told them the story and I gave them an extensive outline. I told them very clearly what happens in the movie. What they don't like is when films make fun of their traditions or religions. And of course, this film does not do that. But organising the real shoot was another story. We also got the permission to shoot at Taj Mahal and in the biggest mosque in Delhi.

I'm a Jewish man, and I don't think there have been more than 15 Jewish people in that mosque ever. But in order to get permission, I had to talk to the Imam. After hearing the story of the film and laughing over it, he said, 'Okay,' and I felt like a diplomat for a few minutes.

I know one thing. Genetically, the Jews are forced to retain an ability, a mechanism for survival, and that is the ability for finding out means to live with other people Or else they land up in trouble. I think my film is driven by that survival instinct (laughs).

It is the crowd. Imagine how the number of people who came to witness the shoot increased minute by minute. At first, there would be 30, a few minutes later there would be 300, and 15 minutes later there would be 9,000. And we were not even shooting with a Bollywood star. In that case, I was told there would have 1,50,000 people! But we had a lot of Indians helping us and they knew a few things about crowd control. I must say I felt very comfortable in India.

My wife and two children (both in their pre-teen years) fell in love with India too. They travelled outside Delhi and Agra, to Rajasthan, for example, as well. But because I was shooting, I had to be confined to Delhi for most part. I felt safer and more comfortable in Delhi than in Berlin or any other European city, and even Los Angeles, at any part of the day or night.

More than anything else, it is the people. There is a warmth in Indians that is real. People have to struggle hard to make a living and yet they have a genuine warmth. I was amazed by it. And then there is something outsiders hardly speak about. People wear the most colourful outfits -- bright orange, red, purple… Your senses come alive, like in the case of spices. Kids respond to that. My children certainly did.

A few things, yes. I soon realised that New Delhi was nothing like New York or Los Angeles. There was hardly any nightlife but for the one in big hotels. There were no comedy clubs, for instance.

As an artist, what were your thoughts after 9/11?

To say that the world really changed after 9/11, not just in the tragic way but also in every way, is not enough to describe my own doubts and feelings. For some time, I did not know what to make out of 9/11. I was confused. I am a comedian and for once, I did not know what kind of comedy I should make. But I could see clearly that it was wrong to condemn an entire people for what a small percentage of them had done. You find such radical people everywhere. There could be very radical Jews whose attitude is to wipe out everyone else. I felt that a majority of Muslims did not want those buildings blown up. And I began thinking of separating the groups in a community.

I began to realise that you have to separate the small group of people who want to harm you from those who do not want to harm you.

I try to make people laugh for a living. But for more than a year, because of 9/11, I could not think of a suitable comedy subject. Slowly I began to feel that there was this 700-pound gorilla sitting in my office saying, 'Deal with this, find a way.' 

It was not the first time (that they were short sighted). We dealt with the Japanese in America that way during World War II. We did not understand that majority of them did not want a violent end to any conflict. And as I was thinking on these incidents, I began to wonder if the US government wants to understand some of the groups that are opposed to America, what would it do? And two words came to mind.

Yes, public relations. And the second word in particular. I thought without those relations, we would have more bombings. It would be wonderful, of course, to get up one morning and hear that all the bad guys have been killed. But that is never going to happen.

Yes, there are many who believe that we have to build more bombs and planes. To them I say this: Do both (building bombs and public relations). But I would also tell them something else.

One less B-1 bomber -- that would cost about $4 billion -- means we can use that money in neighbourhoods across the world to do something good for poor people. And that could make people there think that Americans are pretty decent people.

No. A segment of the festival is called Operation Cultural Bridge. And my film is being shown in that segment. The whole purpose of the segment is to show films that deal with subjects that can open up dialogue between the Islamic world and the West.

If the film can get a bunch of people in a darkened room laughing for an hour and a half -- people who in real life may otherwise never encounter each other -- I feel it was worth making this film. What I'm trying to show is America making fun of itself. And America needs to kick itself in the butt a bit so others see that we're human, that we're not this giant robot that's going to kill them. If this film can make Indians or Muslim audiences laugh because we're making fun of ourselves a little bit it certainly couldn't hurt.