James L Brooks kept returning to Ella McCay. For more than a decade, he pulled the script from the top drawer of his desk – the one from which he still produces The Simpsons – unable to get the character and her dysfunctional family out of his head.
It survived rewrites, pauses, shifts in direction. And at 84, with a legacy like Brooks's, that wouldn’t happen unless the story was reaching somewhere personal.
And to his surprise, he is still discovering just how personal.
“I didn't realise this was a self-examination of my own messiness until you said it, so thanks for that,” Brooks tells The National.
“But when you’re trying to get the human condition right, it’s probably inevitable to get personal. And I think there were more autobiographical factors in this film than anything I’ve made.”
Brooks has long spoken about the difficulties of his childhood, including a father who left before he was born and with whom he later lost contact. As he told Esquire in 2010: “My father was an alcoholic and a model of what to avoid. My mother taught me survival.”
But he rarely connects that history directly to his work. In Ella McCay, which opens in cinemas on Thursday, that separation proved impossible. The film’s family dynamic, he says, drew him back into parts of his past he had not confronted in any of his earlier films.
And doing so was deeply cathartic. “I had a dad who was really misbehaved, and I think I’ve worked through some of that,” Brooks says. “I sort of came out of it not carrying some of the grudges I was carrying [before].”
The parallels surface most clearly in the story itself. Ella McCay opens with the death of Ella’s mother, a loss that forces her back into the orbit of the father she had kept at arm’s length.
Played by Woody Harrelson, he is a man who adored his late wife but was never faithful to her, and who remains a womaniser even in grief. Now, he wants to rebuild his relationship with Ella – a dynamic rendered with a mix of affection, frustration and unresolved hurt.
It is here, in this deeply flawed father figure trying to repair what he's broken, that the film brushes closest to Brooks’s own experience.
Ella carries traces of characters Brooks has shaped over decades: a hint of Lisa Simpson’s moral clarity, an idealism that feels inherited from Brooks himself, and a restless ambition shaped by the messy, contradictory world around her. She is both familiar and new, a character built from his past creations but anchored in his present self-examination.
While the emotions underpinning Ella McCay may be new territory, the way Brooks approaches them is not. He has always resisted the idea that comedy and drama sit on opposite ends of a spectrum. For him, comedy is simply a way of keeping the audience close while he gets to what matters – and it's why he's never wanted to tell a story outside the genre.
“What I call a comedy is a promise that you’ll have a certain amount of laughs on the voyage to tell the story,” he says. The laughs are never the point; they are the rhythm that allows difficult truths to land without melodrama.
Much of Ella McCay is built on these small, clear truths – lines that feel lived-in rather than constructed. Brooks insists those lines aren’t lessons he keeps on hand. “Think of them within the character,” he says. “The voice is just there.”
That instinctive quality has always shaped his writing. Brooks still likens the process to acting: once he understands a character well enough, their decisions and dialogue appear without effort. “Every screenwriter says when you’re going good, it’s like taking dictation – somebody’s talking to you,” he explains.
Even with that instinct, Ella McCay proved unusually difficult to crack. Brooks describes the writing as “constant work” and “lonely work” – long stretches spent trying to locate a character he could feel but not yet see clearly. That changed once Emma Mackey (Barbie) joined the film. Her performance, he says, brought Ella into focus in a way nothing else had.
“When Emma came along, it was no longer lonely work,” he says. “Working with her was certainly the home stretch of realising the character.”
The film’s emotional texture – the blend of ambition, frustration, sincerity and inherited chaos – finally made sense through her.
Brooks is already thinking about what comes next, even though his incalculably influential legacy already includes The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Terms of Endearment (which earned him Oscars for Best Picture, Director and Adapted Screenplay), Broadcast News, Taxi and As Good as It Gets.
“There’s a new one on my desk,” he teases. “It’s different … not as realistic. I hope to write it quickly.” He pauses, amused by his own optimism. His process has never been quick.
But if Ella McCay is the film that brought him back to directing after a decade and a half, it is also the film that allowed him to look back with a clarity he didn’t expect.
Its power lies not in its scale or its political backdrop, but in its emotional precision – the way it lets an old wound soften without turning the story into a confession.
One of the film’s guiding ideas is spoken by Ella to her younger brother: “never pretend you know something you don’t, because the only way in the world you cannot learn is to pretend you already know it”. Coming from Brooks, who has spent a lifetime writing characters searching for their better selves, the line feels like a quiet instruction to himself, too.
After more than half a century of shaping the way stories are told, Brooks is still willing to learn – from his work, from his characters, and now, from his own past. Ella McCay is the proof.
Ella McCay is in cinemas now across the Middle East
