Making it as good as it gets

With his press junket screening just 48 hours away, James L. Brooks is holed up on a sound mixing stage on the Sony lot, surrounded by his editor, composer and sound engineers, trying to finish “Spanglish,” his first new film in seven years. Murmuring on the phone, the filmmaker suddenly lifts his head, like a turtle trying to see over a rock. His brow furrowed, he seems in urgent need of a nugget of information. Since I am directly in his eye-line, the question is posed to me. “Excuse me,” he says, unfailingly polite. “What day of the week is today?”

As he fidgets with last-minute fixes, Brooks has the air of an absent-minded scientist in his lab, tightening the final bolts on his creation. He’s been at work on “Spanglish” since November of last year, filming for months on end, then tinkering, fussing, polishing and fussing some more. The film, which features Adam Sandler, Tea Leoni, Cloris Leachman and the Spanish actress Paz Vega, is a cross-cultural story about a beautiful Mexican single mother who comes to work for a turbulent West Los Angeles family, causing seismic shifts in every corner of the household.

Due in theaters Dec. 17, the film pulses with Brooks’ signature comic portraits of people under emotional duress. As its title implies, “Spanglish” depicts the cross-pollination of two societies: a narcissistic U.S. culture with its concerns about money, weight loss and private schools, and an immigrant culture, represented by Vega and her 12-year-old daughter, struggling to preserve family ties while coping with the unruly freedom of the Anglo universe. The complex mother-daughter dynamics that are present in Brooks films, dating back to “Terms of Endearment,” permeate every inch of the story. When Vega first comes for a job interview with Leoni, she glows with beauty. Envious but impressed, Leoni announces, “You’re gorgeous.” Before Vega can say a word, Leoni’s mother, played by Leachman, chimes in: “She didn’t mean it as a compliment. It’s more of an accusation.” Vega, meanwhile, doesn’t speak any English.

When Brooks returns to his phone call, now knowing what day it is, composer Hans Zimmer reminisces about the time, on a previous film, when he told Brooks he was getting married and taking a two-week honeymoon. “Jim negotiated it down to 72 hours,” Zimmer says. “And before I left, he reminded me that nobody has ever had a good time for 72 hours.”

Even though three of Brooks’ four films have been nominated as Oscar best pictures, the veteran filmmaker is under more pressure than ever before to deliver a hit. “Spanglish” arrives at a time when film studios are feeling the heat from their parent media conglomerates to take the risk out of the movie business. In practice, this means that most studios are allergic to making costly adult-oriented dramas or comedies -- the very genre Brooks has worked in his entire career, both as a director (“As Good as It Gets”) and producer (“Jerry Maguire”). Even though the 64-year-old Brooks has made News Corp. untold millions as producer of “The Simpsons,” he is at an age when few directors get a second chance if they make a flop, especially with a hard-to-market film full of complicated emotions that cost $90 million-plus to make.

But with Brooks, what you see is what you get. In an era when all too many filmmakers are willing to stoop to conquer, Brooks is always rolling a rock uphill. Being painted in a corner isn’t a problem, but an opportunity. As Brooks describes his work process: “Here’s what you owe the movie -- you’re going to die some if it doesn’t work. It’s not a tremendously healthy way to think, but the movie deserves that kind of temporary insanity.”

The making of “Spanglish” lives up to that billing. As a wealthy divorced father with three children, Brooks could have written the saga of a troubled Westside clan in his sleep. But what about the story that is rarely told in Hollywood films, the immigrant journey into a world of self-absorption and affluence? Not speaking a lick of Spanish, Brooks contacted Christy Haubegger, then-publisher of Latina magazine, who helped him interview dozens of women who lived here but spoke only Spanish. They brought along their bilingual daughters, inspiring Brooks to give his housekeeper a daughter who would serve as her interpreter. “Jim had a voracious appetite for understanding a different perspective,” says Haubegger, who became a producer on the film. “He didn’t fall into the trap of thinking ‘What do these people do?’ He wanted to know ‘What does this woman do?’ ”

Brooks found it easy to identify with a character who was a single mother. With his father rarely around, Brooks was raised in New Jersey by his mother, who worked extraordinary hours to keep her family together. “Hearing my mother and her sisters talk -- that’s the dialogue and perspective that surrounded me growing up,” he says. “Though I’m a father now, it’s very weird because I have a much better idea of what it’s like to be a mother than a dad. My mother would say, “You want to know what to do to be a man? Don’t be like your father!’ ”

In keeping with Brooks’ no-easy-way-out attitude, he cast Vega, costar of Pedro Almodovar’s “Talk to Her,” even though she spoke no English. During filming, Brooks spoke with her through a translator. He plays down the difficulties, saying, “People have trouble understanding me anyway.” Vega had two dialect coaches: one to help her speak Spanish with a Mexican accent, another so her limited English would sound like that of a Mexican learning a new language.

Leoni plays the family’s manic mother opposite Sandler, who portrays a four-star restaurant chef. She was Brooks’ only choice for the part, but their relationship was so rocky during filming that crew members felt she was auditioning for a role she already had. Brooks takes full responsibility, saying, “It was the part, not her, that was difficult. It was like, I’d been fiddling around with violins and now I had a Stradivarius. We just had to struggle to get things right.”

Brooks’ runaway perfectionism was in full flower. The director spent six months shooting “Spanglish,” a maddening process that led to endless industry gossip about the film’s glacial pace and propelled the film’s budget past $90 million. For a scene, since cut, where Sandler picks out a cod to cook for an important customer, work ground to a halt while Brooks auditioned a variety of fish, determined to have just the right kind of Pacific specimen that would be at market in the season when the scene took place. Sets were struck, then rebuilt weeks later. Unhappy with the way a nighttime scene played that was set at the family’s Malibu beach house, Brooks shot it five times, once with a set reconstructed on a soundstage. When I describe the shoot as having “gone on and on and on forever,” Brooks responds: “Couldn’t you just say ‘on and on’?”

On the other hand, having made his name in TV, where he helped create “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “Taxi,” Brooks is as intent on pleasing his audience as himself. There were about 15 “Spanglish” preview screenings, with Brooks sitting on the theater aisle, nervously monitoring the reaction. “I don’t take notes, I just lose about 3 1/2 pounds,” he says. “During the focus groups, I sit way in the back, then start advancing two rows at a time.”

The audience made it clear they had trouble with the film’s final minutes, or as Brooks tells it, “They said, ‘We don’t want a Hollywood ending, but come on!’ ” Sensing their unease, he did some re-shoots that made Vega’s relationship with her daughter and the family’s future seem a bit more secure. It’s always difficult to be entirely hopeful coming out of a Brooks film, no doubt because he juggles such complicated emotions -- his dramatic scenes are spiked with humor while his comic sequences are laced with angst and unhappiness. It’s been done before, by everyone from Billy Wilder to John Cassavetes, a particular Brooks favorite. But filmmakers who want to challenge audiences these days have to do it on the cheap, not with $90 million at stake.

Fortunately, Brooks has a champion in Sony Pictures Entertainment Vice Chairman Amy Pascal, who views him as a studio treasure: “There’s never been a voice in film quite like his. He not only understands human frailty, but he knows how to make it funny and let us laugh at what’s least attractive about ourselves. The characters in this movie are original, but they’re also people you know -- they’re embarrassingly real.”

In an era when studios would rather remake a bad TV show than back a film with something fresh to say, originality has become a rarer commodity than ever. Perhaps it’s why Brooks continues to thrive, even as many of his peers’ careers have fizzled. At one point in “Spanglish,” Vega broods over the prospect of her daughter going to a snooty private school, saying to Sandler, “Either she will be odd ... or she will make herself the same as them.” It is an immigrant’s eternal concern, but Sandler understands the sentiment exactly, telling her, “Between odd and the same, you gotta be rooting for odd, don’t you?” In the world of Jim Brooks, you sure do.