DAVID ALLEN
BROOKS

		Review by E.C. McMullen Jr.
IT HELPS TIP JAR AN INTERVIEW WITH DAVID ALLEN BROOKS - 2001 "We're lucky, in this country, to be able to follow our passions." - David Allen Brooks

Feo Amante's Under the Microscope:
An interview with
David Allen Brooks
by E.C.McMullen Jr.

PAGE 3

DAVID: My Mother was from Montana. She was tough, physically. She never complained, not once. I had to bear down on myself to stay there and do the loving thing. I part of me wanted to bail but I didn't.

I finally got her to a hospital and chemo, but tried to honor all the rest of her beliefs. I'm still not sure whether chemo was the right answer, but we did spend a year where she was feeling all right.

I took her back home to Montana where her Father, my Grandfather brought Indian Motorcycles to the state in 1912. We went fishing and had a good time in her last year. She died about six months after that without complaining once.

I felt like I helped her die well, or at least as well as she could.

Being with my Mother in her last days, helped me move out of the breakdown. Because I had focused on someone else. I started doing volunteer work with people who are making their transition. Not hospice work, this took place through a church that I worked through. They'd send me out to people that had asked for support. It kept me very grounded and humble. I felt like my only job was to "hold a good space" for them to die in, for them, whatever they thought that was, without imposing my ideas on them. I learned it wasn't my concept of they way they should die, but their idea of how they wanted to go, their wish for their environment. Some people wanted to talk. Some wanted to know what I thought was next. Sometimes it was folding socks and putting them in a drawer: keeping it very light.

ECM: Man. This is hard stuff.

DAVID: Is this too hard to read?

ECM: I don't know. I know that, you think you used to be self-critical, but in talking to you I can tell you are still very self effacing. Questioning yourself is still a big part of you.

DAVID: Doubt. The mind killer. I'm pretty insecure in some areas. Acting really opened me up. Its not a comfortable process, but compared to the religion I was brought up with, which turned me into an emotional brick - acting was and is a very therapeutic process.

It feels kind of weird, opening up like this.

I'm telling you all this because I'm hoping that someone reading this can get something out of it. I think, sometimes, we all have an obligation to . . . share.

So I started to move up and out of my breakdown. I was lucky, a lot of people don't survive that kind of depression.

ECM: Especially in your business, where someone's personal trauma is news and subject to everyone else's uninformed opinion about what that person is going through at any given moment.

THE CRUSADER

DAVID: Yeah, anyway . . . I realized I had to go out and start my acting career over! It wasn't just going to come to me. So I did. I didn't like going into offices that hadn't invited me in. I started to see how overwhelmed casting people can get in this business. And, as usual, the doors I was trying to open - didn't - but other doors did.

That's when I saw Fern Champion's name, on my agent Tom Howard's desk. It was in the break downs (on job opportunity's of the day), so I went out to see her because I had known her in New York. If she hadn't been so nice, I would have been too discouraged to come back for a second audition. There were all these tall, young, exotic guys reading for the role. "Do what you want with it and bring it back."

And that's where it all started, the second beginning of my career.

ECM: Which started with Babylon 5: The Crusade.

DAVID: Yeah. It was Joe Straczynkis' writing, it was rich and I really got eccentric with it. The fact that Max was basically a brilliant researcher in alien language and archeology. It appealed to me in a sense that I had an idea of what it might be like to be an intellectual, and I followed it.

David as the dark and edgy Max in BABYLON 5: The Crusade.

As soon as somebody is brilliant, they have a hard time fitting into this world. Joe made it so that Max certainly didn't fit in, and didn't mind it. Underneath it all, I think we all want to be accepted. Max's arrogance was in direct proportion to his need to fit in. They are directly proportionate. I filled out, in my imagination, what Joe had started on. He gave me the parameters and I filled in the colors.

For me, Science Fiction has wider parameters than any other literature. You are redefining time and space and there are really no limits. The viewer is asked to take on a bigger possibility of what's real. Plus, Joe makes you feel confident.

There was an added element that was really fun. Max's complete arrogance that I don't have . . . uh . . .

ECM: As he arrogantly says how humble he is.

DAVID: (laughs) Ha! Well, I admired his arrogance in a way. His willingness to have people not like him.

Apparently, Joe liked my interpretation of Max. I also had Max very high styled, almost sophisticated, like a Parisian designer. I think that TNT wanted to see a little more bookish version of him, though.

That was the beginning of Max Eilerson in my life.

There were supposed to be more episodes when we closed shop on the story. I know that Joe had a story arc already written out. There was going to be this "Fall of Max", by the end of the first season.

What pissed me off was we were just beginning to develop the colors of our characters and their relationships. I even remember wearing a back brace, because Eilerson's posture was better than mine. His rigidity showed in his body. Our characters were just getting vivid - at least for me.

David and the cast of BABYLON 5: The Crusade (1999)

ECM: Okay so, THE KINDRED, THE DOORS, BABYLON 5, CAST AWAY, where does JACK FROST 2 fit into all of this?

DAVID: There's this crazy English guy with this wonderful English humor, named Michael Cooney, see? And somehow he got over here and started making movies. He and the producers, Jeremy Paige and Vicki Slotnik (MURDER IN MIND,

Jack Frost 2 is just this bizarre film, but Michael and the producers had done bigger films before, and hadn't had as much fun. So this was a spoof they wanted to do. Michael just wanted to make this really strange movie about a killer snowman.

David takes the Hollywood stigma of the psychotic Vietnam Vet to its ridiculous extreme in JACK FROST 2. 2000

ECM: Twice. And you wanted to help him.

DAVID: Absolutely. Stephen Mandel played my role of Agent Manners in the first Jack Frost, so I had to reinvent him. I imagined myself as a post-Vietnam distress character. Not in any serious way, but in a comical character way - a spoof on what Hollywood has shown before.

ECM: A borderline psychopath. As if the majority of our soldiers came back like that.

DAVID: Yeah, I tried for that.

I think it was Milton Berle who said that Comedy is hard, dying is easy. Its really true though. We all did our best to play it straight. Watching these folks all work together was a treat. The way we interacted and pretended to take, so seriously, a mutant killer snowman. Jeez, what a business.

My character of Manners, found nothing funny in anything, and that became funny.

ECM: I hear that even the set of the movie was done on the cheap.

DAVID: Heh, Independent films. We shot most of the movie in an orange grove. The house once belonged to the man who helped preserve the La Brea Tar Pits.

ECM: Let's talk about your private time. You've been an extreme athlete since before they invented the term.

DAVID: My physical life saved me. I've done my share of stupid things, but because I was alone I usually did them very carefully.

No back-up you see.

ECM: That solitude you've always chased after.

DAVID: To be honest, I realize I was doing dangerous things to prove to myself I wasn't afraid. When I was afraid of a lot . . . emotionally. Not so much the physical.

David takes a spill

"Are you going to be on your deathbed and look back on your toys and accolades and feel happy? Or is all that matters at that moment, is how much you were loved and created love?"

David is a kayak enthusiast

As well as a mountain climber

ECM: So where are you heading now? In the big sense?

DAVID: In the big sense, hmmm. . . hopefully into something more authentic in myself, less preoccupied in what others think.

I think I'm at the point in my life where I've gone past wishing for a particular role or part. I'm just taking whatever comes my way.

ECM: How so?

DAVID: I'm just beginning to get, at this late stage in my career, at just how important the passion is.

Passion.

Sometimes I use this idea to make decisions:

If you were on your deathbed, how would you look at the world and what would you see?

That idea helped me to paint!

Its not very practical, but its a passion now. I love doing it. We're lucky, in this country, to be able to follow our passions.

We don't have to look toward the hills everyday, waiting for the approaching army. We don't have to worry about our clean water being turned off and our cities being bombed.

David's artwork can be found on display in galleries throughout the world.

I said this days before the tragedy in NYC.

Rage, fear, vengeance, compassion are all in play now for most of us. I know I don't want to live in fear and anger. I've read that you're either coming from fear or love. I want to come from love. A tall order when you're dealing with the death of the innocent.

One way I get help making decisions like this is using the idea of my death. My deathbed cuts through the crap real fast. All I could come up with when I went there this time is that I want to be a positive influence on those around me. That's how I'll fight my war against terror. What about you?

Are you going to be on your deathbed and look back on your toys and accolades and feel happy? Or is all that matters at that moment, is how much you were loved and created love?

I'm working on opening my heart more before I die.

END

This interview copyright 2001 E.C.McMullen Jr.

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