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Beloved Oscar winner James L. Brooks is recounting what Jack Nicholson told him the night their 1983 film Terms of Endearment won five Academy Awards.
Terms of Endearment won five Oscars in 1984: for Best Picture, Best Director (Brooks), Best Actress (Shirley MacLaine), Best Supporting Actor (Nicholson), and Best Adapted Screenplay (Brooks).
“The night that we won everything, my mind was blown,” Brooks tells PEOPLE in this week’s issue. “I’d won the writing Oscar, and, and then the director’s thing happened, and I’m just sort of in a stupor. My head is down. I’m dazed … and Jack says, ‘Go for the triple.'”
Brooks added that winning his first Oscar was “tremendously emotional,” with the other wins feeling “surreal after that.”
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Brooks directed Nicholson in Terms of Endearment , 1987’s Broadcast News, 1998’s As Good as It Gets and 2010’s How Do You Know.
Speaking to PEOPLE, he says the actor is “like a veteran soldier.”
“He’s it, he’s the guy … nobody like him,” Brooks says of Nicholson. “Nobody like him. I think maybe in a way you could possibly go through everybody … maybe say Bogart, no way. You know, just some great acting. And the extraordinary charisma, same thing. One of the greatest actors alive, with extraordinary charisma.”
Brooks had not written or directed a movie in the last 15 years until his new movie Ella McCay hit theaters Dec. 12.
As he told PEOPLE, though, “I never didn’t want to come back. It wasn’t like that.”
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Following his last film — the Reese Witherspoon-led 2010 comedy, How Do You Know — Brooks married his longtime girlfriend Jennifer Simchowitz, in 2024, and also spent time producing movies like The Edge of Seventeen and Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.,
“In there, I fell in love, got married, and I truly don’t have a conscious answer for it other than I had jobs that I loved,” he adds.
