LOS ANGELES — It's easy to say that James L. Brooks loves his characters. You probably love them too: Mary Richards on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," Shirley MacLaine's Aurora Greenway in "Terms of Endearment," Holly Hunter's neurotic news producer Jane Craig in "Broadcast News," having her regular morning cry.

With a legendary career in film and television as a writer, director and producer (winning three Oscars and more than 20 Emmys), Brooks has practically trademarked a certain kind of warm, affectionate storytelling, in which imperfect characters emerge as resilient and touching, while also being very human and funny.

His latest movie, "Ella McCay," his first in 15 years (it's in theaters Dec. 12), bears the filmmaker's signature touch. Although in describing his loving relationship to his characters, Brooks, always with an eye for detail, takes exception to one thing.

"I'm just questioning the word 'love,'" says Brooks, 85, turning the idea over in his mind. "I want to know them as people. I want to be true to them as people. And I think almost everybody in the picture is flawed."

An expressly political comedy set in a relatively manageable but unnamed American state in 2008, "Ella McCay" follows the 30s-ish title character (Emma Mackey) as she is tapped to move up from lieutenant governor to governor when her ambitious, charismatic boss (Albert Brooks) is picked to be secretary of the Interior. She is immediately embroiled in a relatively harmless sex scandal involving her husband (Jack Lowden) while also constantly worrying about her overprotective aunt (Jamie Lee Curtis) and agoraphobic brother (Spike Fearn). The cast includes Woody Harrelson, Kumail Nanjiani, Ayo Edebiri and Rebecca Hall.

For our interview, Brooks is seated in a comfy chair in the cozy bungalow that is the longtime home of his production company, Gracie Films, on the Fox lot. His office is full of memorabilia from his own projects mixed with photos of Old Hollywood, including one signed by George Burns and a portrait of Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe from "The Misfits." A table off to the side is cluttered with miscellaneous awards. (His Oscars are in a closet at home.)

Nearly 40 years after the series began, Brooks is still actively involved with "The Simpsons" week to week, sitting in on table reads and offering notes and advice. As to what keeps him working on the show, when he easily could have stepped away long ago, Brooks says, "Just to be pitching laughs — it just keeps you honest. It's better than a good gym."

Brooks' previous film, 2010's "How Do You Know," was mostly dismissed by critics at the time and largely overlooked by audiences, although the unusual rom-com has since built its own small, dedicated fan base. A hospital room scene featuring Reese Witherspoon, Paul Rudd, Jack Nicholson, Lenny Venito and Kathryn Hahn is a modern screwball master class. Regardless of what one thinks of it, it has been a long 15 years since it came out.

"So they tell me — so they tell me repeatedly," Brooks says with an air of exasperation. "I have been active. I produced."

Laughing at the notion of feeling he has to justify how he spent those years, he adds, "I have such a defensive rap now."

He admits it took about a year to get over the reception to "How Do You Know" and in the intervening time, aside from producing 2016's "The Edge of Seventeen," 2018's "Icebox" and 2023's "Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret," Brooks at some point began gathering material for what would eventually become "Ella McCay."

His writing process always begins with talking to people, he says — in this case those involved in politics and governance at varying levels — and eventually a screenplay emerges.

"What should be the process is that you start and kill yourself over story," says Brooks. "You have a story to tell. And it's very dangerous to start without that. So, putz that I am, I had characters. And then I spent a long time, finally, on the narrative. I had pages filled with characters without a story and then the story happened."

Eventually the specifics of the character that would lend the movie its name began to take shape. Ella is fiercely committed to her job, burrowing into the minutiae of legislation to become deeply connected to it emotionally. For example, she passionately extols a program for free children's dental services because a good smile leads to increased confidence, which statistics show can ultimately boost graduation rates. But Ella has no patience for the sort of glad-handing that seems like second nature to her former boss. Yet while the film is set in the world of politics, it is not exclusively about politics.

"I was starting to talk to political people and I don't think politics is the thing that I wanted to examine," Brooks says. "It happens to be her job."

"She's somebody who tries to fix things," he says of the character. "She has a gift and her dirty secret is she can make people's lives better. That's her dark, dirty secret. That's the motor that drives her. I had the good fortune to be with an ex-governor and the governor's mate. And it came up that the governor had not thanked the mate six years ago in a speech. And it was still an open wound. And [hearing] that, something went click."

Clues in the story, such as a reference to which states had medical marijuana at the time, can be used to narrow the location down to 12 possibilities, including Rhode Island where much of the film was shot and whose state capitol building is a location for numerous scenes.

For Mackey, the 29-year-old French-English actor who broke out with a role on the Netflix series "Sex Education" and also appeared in films such as the international smash "Barbie" and the romantic drama "Hot Milk," this was her first lead role in an American studio production.

"We are very different," says Mackey of her crusading governor, on a video call from London, where she is currently in production on Greta Gerwig's "Narnia: The Magician's Nephew." "She's from a different culture to me, speaks differently, acts differently."

"Jim has a very good B.S. radar, so there was no hiding, I just had to go all out and try to be as fearless as I could be," Mackey adds. "And what Jim seeks is that you don't stop until we've tried all avenues. Then you can finally stop and then maybe we'll revisit it tomorrow. It's continuous. How amazing to be in that. It's tough, but it's good to be in that sort of rhythm. The muscle's always exercising."

The narrator of the film, longtime Brooks collaborator (and the unmistakable voice of Marge Simpson) Julie Kavner as Ella's faithful assistant, explains to us that the story is set in 2008 or, as she puts it, "a better time when we all still liked each other." That would also be the year Barack Obama was elected president for the first time, though he is never mentioned. So does Brooks really believe people liked each other more across the political divide at the end of the George W. Bush era?

"It's absolutely true," he says. "Of course it's true. Division is a fairly recent beast that wants to devour us."

A core subplot in the film involves Ella's father, played with an unctuous, desperate charm by Harrelson, reappearing in her life after many years with his own agenda. Ella ultimately must decide whether she can forgive him for all the ways he wronged their family.

For Brooks the character was an opportunity to reconsider his own relationship with his father, who abandoned the family before he was born.

"It's still gears shifting on it," Brooks says of his feelings. He calls him a bad guy.

"I saw the damage that he did to all of us. And I like to have a little perversity in me. Hollywood movies end with something that's very often a true concept: forgive and move on. Forgiving opens the door to moving on. And I feel that in order for forgiveness to mean anything, there's got to be some unforgiveness. Something has to be unforgivable.

"That was really a driving thing in the writing of this," Brooks says.

Thinking about his father, Brooks pauses and his buoyant demeanor dims as he puts a finger to his eye as if it might begin to well up. As to whether the process of making the film helped him resolve any of his own resentment toward his father, he quietly allows, "I'm almost feeling since I did this a little movement in me. But he was definitely a bad, selfish guy who committed, you know, most of the sins."

And yet rather than make the story of his core family trauma into something like Steven Spielberg's autobiographical "The Fabelmans," Brooks makes it a secondary plot point in his portrait of a woman's many personal and professional travails.

"This was plenty," he says with a laugh, perking back up.

As much as the film is the first major Hollywood role for Mackey, a star in the making, it also features strong supporting performances from Jamie Lee Curtis and Albert Brooks. James L. Brooks and Albert Brooks are longtime collaborators, a rare situation where they have each directed each other.

James L. Brooks appeared in small parts in Albert Brooks' films "Real Life," "Modern Romance" and "Lost in America." Albert Brooks was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance in "Broadcast News" and also appeared in James L. Brooks' "I'll Do Anything," which infamously began as a musical with songs by Prince but had the music stripped out after disastrous test screenings.

The two have remained friendly through the years, so when James called Albert having written a new part for him it didn't take long to decide. Albert's role as the outgoing governor is a sly send-up of political animals, his barely concealed ambition masked by charisma, with just enough sincerity and genuine affection for Ella to make him conflicted. Working with the director again was a no-brainer.

"Look, that's one of the three people on the planet I'm not going to say no to," says Albert Brooks. "I always like to know: Do I have a chance? Can I put my teeth into this? Can I do anything with it? And he assured me that I would be able to. And I packed up and went to Rhode Island."

"He knew I was intrigued by certain things I haven't played and I have not played a character like this, sort of a straight-ahead government employee, a governor of a state, so that immediately interested me," the actor says on the phone from Los Angeles. "So he just said, 'It's a great part,' because that's what you say."

On the other hand, James L. Brooks says casting the part of Ella was difficult, looking at countless options before finally seeing Mackey.

"The conscious dream was to pay tribute to what I think was so influential in the golden age of film comedy — Katharine Hepburn, Audrey Hepburn," says Brooks. "To contemporize that spirit and that energy. Yes, screwball's part of it, but real pain, the human condition, has to be in there someplace. And that was very conscious, the tribute to those pictures. I mean 'The Philadelphia Story,' I don't know how many times I've seen it."

As to what Mackey brought to the part, Brooks says, "I thought she could do 'The Philadelphia Story.'"

"The whole challenge with Ella was to be able to sell the solidity of this person," says Mackey, describing not just her character but also the classic Brooksian heroine. She calls it "the fearlessness while also being allowed to wobble and be clumsy, but always have wit and always have sharpness and clarity."

Lest anyone think that it's easy for a three-time Oscar winner to make a movie these days, Brooks is happy to differ, saying it is as hard for him as for anyone else.

"It's like climbing a mountain," he says, flaunting his well-honed ability to turn even the toughest-learned lesson into a playful one-liner: "Everybody's waving at you, 'Go back, go back.'

"These are tough days to do a theatrical movie," he says. "And to do a theatrical movie where you can't compare, 'Hey, look, that worked, so this'll work,' makes it harder. Understandably harder. You appreciate getting the shot so much because it's tough to come by. And you're lucky to have it. And you're aware of that. And I think that appreciation of that was good for the whole process of making the movie."

And yet Brooks, who is already working on his next script and recently got married for the third time (his wife Jennifer Brooks is a producer on the new film), remains upbeat about the future, even if the business of making movies is undergoing transformational change.

"I really believe that you can't kill it with a stick, that the heart beats true," he says. "And I always know for sure that, as we're talking right now, somewhere in some room, somebody's doing this" — he mimes typing — "and against all odds, that person will get a movie made. Somewhere that's happening right now."

The mix of clear-eyed realism with a dreamer's optimism might be Brooks' ultimate trick, the bedrock of his mixed-up style of sincere, bittersweet and funny: comedies with a heavy heart. For all that Ella McCay goes through, in the end there is still a sense of hope and uplift, an aspiration for something better, emanating from the movie.

"I don't believe people don't want comedy," he says, against prevailing Hollywood trends. "Obviously, I hope that you have meat on the bone and that doesn't mean you can't do a real scene about real difficulty, especially with this picture.

"I'm certainly going for laughs," he adds. "It's all such a hard thing to talk about. I'm trying to be true to life, which always involves, you know, crap."

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