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15 Apr 09
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If his movies have a common denominator, it’s probably their intelligence and, though Mr. Nichols doesn’t think of himself as a writer, their writerly attention to detail. They’re almost invariably based on good scripts, from which he extracts extra layers of nuance.
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“It’s painful and hard to remember now how long and how carefully we worked. I really do think it’s important to sit with a text for as long as you can afford to, reading and talking and doing what I call ‘naming things,’ which is just explaining what happens in every scene. Now you have to do it all in your head, and you have to do it pretty damn fast, because nobody’s going to pay you to do prep. You’re going to have to do it on your own time. It can be done, of course, but it’s just much harder
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Ms. Ephron compared Mr. Nichols’s way of preparing to psychoanalysis. “You sit there for days and days,” she said, “and he keeps asking questions. What is this scene in the movie about? What does it remind you of? You free associate. And eventually you figure it out.”
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Mr. Nichols is a great believer in the single big idea, the controlling metaphor or idea that defines a picture — the notion that Benjamin in “The Graduate,” for example, is on a conveyor belt, just like his suitcase. But he is also like a psychoanalyst in that he trusts a lot in the unconscious. The point of all the preparation, he said, is to get to the point where you’re surprised. And, he added, “You want to keep doing it until you get to the thing nobody could have planned.”
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And she said, ‘Oh, you never know what you’re going to do until you do it.’ That’s it. That sentence says it all, and it’s what happens when you’re in the very highest realms of this stuff. The director can’t make it happen. It’s about all being in the same place and being moved by the way each of your imaginations kindles everyone else.”
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Ms. Streep said: “What makes Mike so great is one of the hardest things for people temperamentally drawn to directing. People who direct tend to want to be in control, and Mike’s gift is knowing when to take his hands off and just let it happen. A lot of directors are still dealing with the text when you’re on the set. Mike has done all that beforehand, so when you get on the set you feel it’s a secure world where all the architecture is in place. You can jump as hard as you want and the floor won’t give way.”
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You could say that it’s in talking movies that inner life begins to appear. You can see things happen to the faces of people that were neither planned nor rehearsed. This is what Garbo was such a master of: actual thoughts that had not occurred before that particular take. And you can see this taking tremendous leaps with Brando and Clift and then with Streep.”
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He added: “The greatest thrill is that moment when a thousand people are sitting in the dark, looking at the same scene, and they are all apprehending something that has not been spoken. That’s the thrill of it, the miracle — that’s what holds us to movies forever. It’s what we wish we could do in real life. We all see something and understand it together, and nobody has to say a word. There’s a good reason that the very best sound an audience can make — in both the theater and the movies — is no sound at all, just absolute silence.”
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