John Brooks, Influential American Filmmaker and Recluse, Dies at 73

By Alice Trout

John Brooks, the innovative American filmmaker and subsequent recluse, who earned world-wide acclaim for his avant-garde constructions, died on Saturday at his home in Los Angeles, California. He was 73.

His death by suicide was confirmed by family Monday morning.

Brooks garnered two Academy Award nominations for Best Director over his three-decade career, winning once. His films played with the boundary between subjective experience and objective reality in novel ways, often moving between rigid realism and abstract surrealism within the same scene, and focused on issues of memory, social connection, and consciousness. He wielded immense control over his films, involving himself in every minutia of the filmmaking process, from writing to cinematography to the performances of his actors. Each screenplay was entirely written and edited by Brooks himself, and each was original.

“The most important artist of his generation,” wrote Paul Thomas Anderson, in a tweet following Brooks’ death. “Human portraits, paintings really, that’s how I think about Brooks’ work. There’s an intimacy intrinsic to his films. Others have tried to copy, but it just comes off hokey.”

From his first feature film, 1978’s Gunther’s Wind, to his last, 2007’s Enter, Brooks enjoyed both critical and commercial success. Gunther’s Wind—a gut-wrenching portrayal of domestic violence told through the eyes of a thirteen-year-old boy—garnered eleven Oscar nominations, including Best Director and Best Original Screenplay, and remains one of the most critically celebrated directorial debuts of all time.

Following its success, his next film, released in 1983, was the significantly more experimental Blue Fire, the story of a murder trial in the pre-war Soviet Union, which begins with a 47-minute monologue. Angelo Badalamenti won an Academy Award for Best Original Score, and the film was also nominated for Best Film Editing, Best Cinematography, and Best Costume Design.

Blue Fire was followed by 1988’s Can’t We All Just Agree on One Thing?, a Vietnam war epic that won Academy Awards for Best Original Screenplay and Best Picture, and 1993’s Dark, a drama following a cat moving in and out of an animal shelter while the families that adopt it struggle with divorce, drug addiction, and mental illness. Dennis Hopper, who played a soldier in Can’t We All Just Agree on One Thing? and a father struggling with depression in Dark, received Best Supporting Actor Oscar nominations for both roles.

Beyond personal accolades, Brooks was beloved by the actors he worked with, even while his precise style left little room for experimentation.

“He’s very particular,” Kyle MacLachlan said during an interview on the Late Show while promoting 1998’s A Day in the Life of Sandra Bailes. “There’s very little leeway given to the actors... he has a vision in mind, and he doesn’t really let you deviate from that. And he doesn’t let you rest until you make it there. Which could seem daunting. And it is! But he’s so completely in your corner. He’s going at it with you. So it’s different and challenging, but I think as an actor that’s fun.”

While filming Dark, Brooks famously halted production for months to take actress Jodie Foster, who played an animal shelter employee, on a road trip from New York to San Diego, stopping at various museums, shows, parks, and animal shelters along the way, all in order to get her on the same page as her character.

“You never got the feeling that John was frustrated,” wrote Foster in her 1998 memoir Foster Child. “He wanted it how he wanted it, but wasn’t demanding. You felt his support through his advice, patience, and joviality.”

Brooks won his first, and only, Best Director Oscar for 2003’s Sunnyside, a film about a schizoaffective man and the American healthcare apparatus that fails him.

“Sunnyside is the rare film that changes how the American public perceives an issue in totality, perceives their fellow man,” film critic Roger Ebert wrote in 2003. “It almost feels more like a documentary than a piece of fiction.”

Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1949, Brooks spent his early life in the borough. “Urban splendors and juvenile hijinks,” said Brooks about his childhood, in a 1999 interview with the New York Times. “It was wonderful. It was perfect.” An avid chess player in his youth, Brooks placed third in the 1962 New York City Junior Chess Championship at the age of thirteen.

His father, Bruce, was a general maintenance worker at Brooklyn College for over thirty years, while his mother, Mary, wrote poetry, including the published collection Shuttered Windows, and cared for John and his sister Mary.

Brooks studied film at New York University, during which time he directed dozens of short films. His last, Manicopita, was screened at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival. After earning his B.A., Brooks moved to Manhattan’s West Village, where he remained until leaving for his Hollywood Hills mansion in 1995.

Brooks’ final film, Enter, consists of nine loosely connected scenes that most consider to represent the protagonist’s internal dreamscape. The nonlinear narrative and stream of conscious style has led some critics to note similarities, and debts, to Andrei Tarkovksy’s 1975 art film Mirror. But there are significant differences as well. Brooks relied far more than his predecessor on the visual and audio distortion inherent to actual dreaming, as well as the perspective-shifting characteristic of daydreaming (many scenes alternate rapidly between first-person and third-person perspective). The film was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

Shortly following Enter’s completion, Brooks began to break off contact with friends and family. He divorced his then wife, Katie, and gave up complete custody of their children. It was, paradoxically, both an amicable and horrifying divorce.

“It is and was very unusual, and very hard,” Katie Brooks told Lesley Stahl during a 2011 interview for 60 Minutes. “It had nothing to do with our relationship, we still loved each other very much. And he loved his children. And they adored him. The divorce was presented by John as a need to be alone. He wanted to work on and through things alone, things that he couldn’t, wouldn’t tell me about. It was horrible and it was surreal. It was like losing him. And it has been like a loss, it has felt that way. We haven’t seen him, we don’t receive calls, he doesn’t answer calls, he doesn’t answer letters, there’s no contact there at all. Nothing since the day we left.”

The last fifteen years of Brooks’ life, beginning with the theatrical release of Enter, were spent in complete isolation. The hope of the first few years—that Brooks might be working on a tight-lipped project or gearing up for a shift into television—slowly dissipated as time went on. Countless journalists, documentarians, overzealous fans, and even his ex-wife and children were turned away at his front gate. No one, except for presumably the security service he employed[1], had any contact with Brooks during these last years. The reason for his self-imposed seclusion is still unknown.

What is known, is that John Brooks has touched, and continues to touch, the lives of millions through his films.

He is survived by his ex-wife Katie, daughters Jill and Emily, son William, five grandchildren, and sister Mary.

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[1] Numerous attempts to contact the former members of Brooks’ security service were made. No response has been received.