The best movie line Mel Brooks ever wrote: “That’s my favourite”
It’s hard to be objective about art, and even harder to be objective about art that’s yours.
Any creative will know that’s true, as it is utterly impossible to remove your work from the emotional context it was made in, or the memories that inescapably become tethered to any and every corner of something you’ve made: just ask Mel Brooks.
As an actor and director, Brooks has made a lot. He’s starred in at least 50 movies, producer over 20, and directed more than ten of them. On top of that, there’s the TV and theatre work he did, meaning that his resume lands like a heavyweight champ on his peers.
What that also means is that his life is packed full of the memories attached to that work. It’s full of good days on set, bad days on set, nice experiences working with people or bad ones that tainted the project. It’s full of stress and joy and disappointment and euphoria, all of which likely becomes tied to certain movies scenes or even certain characters or pieces of dialogue which come to represent those moments.
Thus, it kind of becomes impossible to judge his own art in any real way, especially when it comes to the movies he’s written too, for there’s layer upon layer of biased personal opinion and experience getting in the way of any clear judgment.
Yet still, Brooks has a favourite line.
“It is at the end of Blazing Saddles,” he said, picking out an all-time favourite moment from his own work, “Gene Wilder as the Waco Kid asks Bart where he is off to, and Cleavon Little as Bart answers with ‘Nowhere special’. Gene responds, ‘Nowhere special. I always wanted to go there’.”
Even without the context or the knowledge of Brooks being the one to pen the thought, it’s a beautiful exchange all its own. It’s tender and poignant and easy to imagine as a moving end to a western flick, even if it’s a satirical one.
“That’s my favourite line,” he admitted, partly because of the irony of it all. “So they ride off toward the horizon, and as ‘The End’ comes up on the screen, they get off their horses and get into a big stretch studio limousine that drives them off into the sunset,” he added, clearly still impressed with his own meta gag at the end of the movie that satirises an entire genre. Perfectly nailing the type of dialogue those movies are built on, versus to joke ending, maybe Brooks simply loves it because it’s a great example of his own talent.
Or perhaps there’s a personal story there, maybe a great memory of the day in the writers’ room for the film, or a good day on set when Wilder delivered the line. Either way, it holds an enduring fondness, sticking out amongst a lengthy list of lines from an even lengthier resume.
