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Features: James L. Brooks, "As Good As It Gets"

James L. Brooks realizes he's not the most prolific writer-director in Hollywood.

In fact, "As Good As It Gets," his new comedy-drama starring Jack Nicholson, Helen Hunt and Greg Kinnear, is only the third film he's directed in the 14 years since his first film, "Terms of Endearment," won Oscars for best picture, best director and best adapted screenplay.

"I'm not a picture-a-year guy. I'm just not," said the 57-year-old Brooks, calling from his office at Gracie Films in Los Angeles, where -- when he's not writing or directing -- he produces such pictures as "Jerry Maguire" and "Big." "But I've really been lucky to work on things I believe in, and if I can just keep it like that, I'll be really happy."

There's a pause in the conversation. "Well, I won't be really happy, but I'll be as happy as I know how." Another, briefer pause. "Well, maybe I'll be really happy. I know I wouldn't be really happy doing one a year."

The advantage of taking several years off between each project is that you do tend to create some anticipation. "As Good As It Gets," which opens nationwide on Christmas Day, is showing signs of living up to the early hype that pegged it as this year's "Jerry Maguire" after it was screened as a work-in-progress at ShowEast, the National Association of Theatre Owners' annual convention in Atlantic City in October.

Brooks attended ShowEast to present the film and to receive the 1997 George Eastman Award, which is presented by the industry to a filmmaker whose body of work is widely respected and admired. At the time the association's board decided to give Brooks the award, its members had not seen "As Good As It Gets."

"That was one of the things that occurred to me," Brooks said. "I'm going there to accept an award and they're going to hate the picture."

Quite the contrary. The screening drew a rousing response, which the critics have begun to echo.

On Dec. 9, the National Board of Review named "As Good" the second-best picture of the year (just behind "L.A. Confidential") and awarded its best actor prize to Nicholson and named Kinnear best supporting actor. On Monday, the Los Angeles Film Critics honored Nicholson with a runner-up spot in their best actor polling (Robert Duvall was the winner for "The Apostle" and picked Hunt as the runner-up in the best actress category (Helena Bonham Carter won for "The Wings of the Dove."

The awards, combined with the raves the picture has elicited from preview audiences, should help to mitigate some of the strain Brooks felt while making "As Good."

"Since I just finished the movie the day before Thanksgiving, it's still fresh in my mind how arduous the trail was," he said, laughing, "but now I look at it and there's this fun movie."

A fun movie that, it turns out, he originally did not intend to direct at all. "As Good As It Gets" began life in 1993 as a script by Mark Andrus called "Old Friends," a tale of three New Yorkers brought together by twists of fate. Brooks read "Old Friends" and liked it, but initially planned just to produce it.

"But it took root in me," he said, "and as things progressed I thought I'd just do a three-week polish on the script."

Instead, he spent a year working on it himself before turning it back over to Andrus. Then the two exchanged pages for more than another year before they came up with their final draft.

"We formed this really strange writing team, Mark and myself, working calendar years apart and never with each other," Brooks said. "But somehow, out of the mix of us, there was this really unusual agenda for a film, an agenda that I never really knew how to solve. We just kept on going forward."

Like "Terms" and "News," "As Good As It Gets" strikes a delicate balance between smart comedy and deeply felt emotional drama, sometimes veering from one to another in the course of a single scene. "As Good" also follows the Brooks tradition of letting character development take precedence over plot. As a result, it is very difficult to summarize the storyline.

"We don't know how to do it," Brooks admitted. "We can't even do it in our commercials. We can suggest the spirit of the picture and the tone of it but not the story of it."

Or, more to the point, the stories. "As Good" not only tracks cantankerous novelist Melvin Udall (Nicholson), put-upon waitress Carol (Hunt) and victimized painter Simon (Kinnear) but brings into the mix Carol's mother (Shirley Knight), Simon's agent (Cuba Gooding Jr.) and the hustler (Skeet Ulrich) who sets in motion the events that ultimately bring the central trio together. Even Simon's dog Verdell has something of a character arc and plays a pivotal role in the picture.

"I think the story between the two men is a strong story, the story between Melvin and Carol is a strong story, the story between the two men and the dog is a strong story, Carol's family story is a strong story," Brooks said. "And somehow they're not compartmentalized. It all comes together, and it becomes a very unpredictable picture, I think."

But Brooks is also quick to point out the importance of casting the right actors in the leads.

"I do believe, with all my heart, that with anyone else in the top four parts we couldn't have gotten to first base with this picture," he said. "This picture is edgy as it is, and you need everything going right for you. We needed comedy chops, we needed dramatic chops, we needed everything."

Although Nicholson had committed to the film early on, finding actors to play opposite him "took a painfully long amount of time," Brooks said. Holly Hunter and Ralph Fiennes had been attached to the roles of Carol and Simon at one time but had moved on before Brooks joined the project. Hunt had been thrilled by the script and wanted to play Carol, but "she was younger than anyone I'd imagined for the part," Brooks said of the 34-year-old actress.

Her reading sold him, however. "I'm excitable and emotional and stuff," Brooks explained, "so that when something clicks, I usually jump up and down and I get a rush of adrenaline I can't shake off." When Hunt auditioned, however, "it was maybe the only time in my life that I didn't have that" rush, he said. "It was just totally comfortable and right. That was amazing because I don't react like that. But it was just sort of blatantly inevitable when she came in and read for the part."

Not only did Hunt willingly agree to play four or five years older, she was willing to put her own money on the line to look the part, Brooks said. "This character talks about missing sleep, and she should appear washed-out until she blooms at a certain point in the picture. And there was one shot where we had a big close-up of her -- we had brilliant makeup on this picture, but somehow it must have slid through -- her eyes looked good in this closeup and she looked beautiful."

Unfortunately, she was still supposed to look weary.

"We were actually thinking of going to a special-effects house," Brooks continued. "You know how they airbrush lines out? We were going to try to place lines in. But it was wildly expensive."

Even so, Hunt offered to pay for it herself, much to the astonishment of her director. "Now this is an actress offering to pay to look worse on screen!" In the end, however, the scene was finished without Hunt having to pull out her checkbook.

But while casting Hunt was relatively easy, finding the right Simon proved much more problematic.

"I've never in my life read and talked with so many people for one part," Brooks said.

Potential Simons included "famous people, people who I would kill to work with because of my regard for their talent. But for some reason, the alchemy between an actor and this part never happened, and it was getting very late in the game when the casting director suggested Greg."

Brooks tracked Kinnear down in San Francisco, where the actor was shooting "A Smile Like Yours."

"It seemed like a wild goose chase," Brooks said, "because we'd seen so many people, and nobody had been right."

But Kinnear's audition, which came at 2 a.m., after he'd been working all day, "was terrific."

A week later "we asked him to read again with Jack, and the extraordinary thing is that from 'terrific,' he had grown so much, given a week to work on the part. It was clear there was a real actor there."

The 80-day shoot in New York and Los Angeles was tough, Brooks said, partially because Hunt was shooting episodes of "Mad About You" during the same period she was working on the film, and her TV work had to take priority.

"We'd have Helen, and then we'd have to give her back, so it was a very artificial schedule and we paid for it," Brooks said.

But when the film was finally ready to be previewed for test screening audiences under the title "Old Friends," the production's many hassles were forgotten -- and a new one emerged.

"I was walking out of one of the preview screenings, and there was a focus group," said Brooks, "and everybody had been extraordinarily positive to the picture, and we were beaming. And as we were walking up the aisle, one guy in the focus group said, 'Boy, I'm glad I saw it this way, because I'd never go to see a movie called 'Old Friends,' and almost everybody else in the focus group agreed with him. I got whiplash turning around! It wiped the smile from my face."

Ultimately, it was the film's composer, Hans Zimmer, who came up with the current title, which is drawn from a scene in which Melvin asks a group of manic-depressive patients in a psychiatrist's office, "What if this is as good as it gets?"

"That was my advertising line they didn't want to use -- Would a picture that stinks dare call itself 'As Good As It Gets'? " Brooks joked.

On a more serious note, he offered a final analysis of his film and its appeal: "First of all, you hear the laughter, and there's no way that doesn't feel great, but even though we get laughs like that, people still respond to the emotional life of the picture at the same time.

"To me, the brass ring is if people take the characters into their hearts after the picture; these are very idiosyncratic people, and the most wonderful thing that's happened is that even though they're very peculiar, the audience relates to them, big-time. That's amazing. It's like a secret between the audience and the characters as to why that's happening. And I'm just lucky it is."

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