Mel Brooks’ biggest gripe with filmmaking: “I don’t want to compete”
Mel Brooks is responsible for some of Hollywood’s greatest comedies; his approach to satire and parody irreversibly shaped the comedic landscape.
Starting out back in the 1940s as a writer for shows like Admiral Broadway Revue and Your Show of Shows, Brooks eventually made his directorial debut in 1967 with his classic black comedy The Producers.
Balancing writing, directing, and starring in most projects, like Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, and Robin Hood: Men in Tights, Brooks seems to do it all. No task seems too large for Brooks, who is still working away as he approaches one hundred, although that’s not to say that the process of making films always goes swimmingly.
Take Blazing Saddles, for example, which Brooks claimed was written “in the middle of a drunken fistfight,” according to an interview with Tablet Magazine. “There were five of us all yelling loudly for our ideas to be put into the movie. Not only was I the loudest, but luckily I also had the right as director to decide what was in or out.”
When it boils down to it, though, Brooks finds the competitive and collaborative aspect of filmmaking to be quite the challenge at times, simply because there are some things that he’s just not qualified enough to dictate.
The filmmaker told The Stackers Reader, “Actually, terrible as it is to say, I really don’t like the collaborative process in general, because everyone you bring in has his own idea of how things should be done. The cameraman wants to shoot a scene a certain way because he likes the light that way – I don’t want to compete with his technical brilliance.”
He added, “The costume people have their ideas, and I have to deal with them. I mean, you don’t want robots, but you also don’t really want peers – what you want is very creative and willing underlings. And of course, the biggest compromise is having to give what you’ve written to the actors.”
Not only does Brooks find working with others difficult at times, but he also finds the role of being a director something that comes a little unnaturally to him. He makes it work because “everybody comes to you with their problems, they don’t want to see you screaming or sucking your thumb,” but he’s not one of those directors who gets off on the power trip of bossing everyone around. He just wants everyone to be happy.
The director explained, “There are guys who love that part of it. A lot of people making movies don’t really give much of a shit about what’s up there on the screen. They really believe what’s more important is what’s happening on the set or behind the scenes, the business of ‘Here’s your special chair’, and So-and-so is late and would you like to speak to her in her trailer and all that shit.”
Brooks will never be that kind of director, which is perhaps why he hasn’t actually directed that many movies across his career. Since the ‘70s, Brooks’ directorial efforts have been few and far between, his most recent being 1995’s Dracula: Dead and Loving It. It seems like he prefers to write and act, leaving someone else to be in charge of bossing people about.
