The second documentary by Douglas McGrath (best known for his narrative films Emma and Nicholas Nickleby), Becoming Mike Nichols explores the early career of Nichols through three specific phases: his early life as a German immigrant living in New York, his early collaborations during and after college with Elaine May, and his early directing career on stage and eventually on screen. Playing as a cross between a biography and directing master class, Becoming Mike Nichols is an engaging study of the filmmaker’s early career. We spoke with McGrath at the Sundance Film Festival, where his film had its world premiere, about what would be the director’s final performance, so to speak, as discussed in the interview.
The Film Stage: Can you tell us a little about how you approached these interviews?
Douglas McGrath: I think of the film as a sort of film version of what his autobiography might have been like had he done one. He had been planning to do one and couldn’t do it, decided not to do it and friends of his, Jack O’Brien being one, thought, “Oh, this is a big mistake not to write down your stories. These are great stories. There is a lot of insight in these stories and a lot of humor and other things.” So really Jack got the idea rolling that there should be a film and then Jack is friends with Frank Rich, who is one of the producers of the film, and Frank’s connected with HBO, so they all put their heads together and thought, “Yes.” HBO was like right away because they loved Mike, they had done two things with him Angels and Wit and they were going to do a third and they really, I mean they knew who it was, they knew how valuable he was, and so Frank called me and said, “Would you like to do it?” and I’m yes I would like to do it, and it was established pretty early on that the best way to do it was just to have them talk. They’re old friends and I think one of the virtues of Jack’s involvement is that Mike was so much more relaxed with Jack than I have seen him in other interviews where you can often be more formal because you don’t know the person.
Yeah I really like the approach of focusing primarily on his earlier work. Was that always the focus or did Jack ask him about his later works as well?
He did. Jack asked him about everything and he would always answer but he didn’t have much to say about the other pieces. You know he’s always very enthusiastic — “oh I love Tony Kushner, oh I love Meryl Streep” — you know and all that, but he didn’t really have anecdotes and he didn’t really have, that he wanted to share anyway. He really wanted to talk about the early years and he told me lots about them in great depth, with great affection and with, giving his age, which was 83, complete clarity and I think a great deal of insight and affection.
So it was one of those things that, as I watched everything from the days we were shooting, I thought, and especially when we got in the editing room, I just thought, “This is the film.” It was, it came very quickly that that was the film because you think, “We don’t have to touch on everything.” I mean why do you want to hurry through, what you have to touch on is, as much as there is of his career to touch on, which is a lot, then you can’t spend any time on anything. I mean you have to. “Oh, yes, I did Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf. Elizabeth Taylor was in it.” Okay, that was enough. You have to kind of spin through and I thought, “I know these stories let’s hear those and not, not do what wasn’t as detailed.”
I liked that particular focus. I’ve just seen Richard Linklater: Dream Is Destiny, and the filmmakers in that picture approach his filmography in a less conversational way and try to cover his whole career. That doesn’t necessarily allow for the same conversation regarding the craft of directing to emerge as it does following this approach.
I have something to say about that. I mean I haven’t seen that film yet. In a way somebody’s life is often… you can know what you need to know about somebody’s life with a wedge of their life. You don’t, because most of the rest of somebody’s life is variations of the wedge, if you know what I mean? So this was the period that was most interesting to me because it starts off with him, “Who am I? What am I doing? Where am I going?” you know the questions we all ask. I am still asking. [Laughs] And, and he starts to figure it out and then he kept figuring it out, and by the time he finished The Graduate he’d kind of answered it. “Oh, I am Mike Nichols, I’m this guy, I’m going to do these movies and these plays.” So then to explore those plays, it wasn’t that they were not good, and those movies. Of course they were, they were, he did many wonderful things, but there wasn’t that same sense of discovery for him and thus for the audience as there was in the early stuff.
It’s rather interesting, because certain filmmakers seem to have a difficulty later on as they either evolve and get out of their comfort zone or they’re panned for not taking risks. Nichols certainly has had quite a lot of acclaim and a few misses. Did he ever talk in the conversation about those periods?
Well, I’ll tell you what Mike told me. Well, you know the interesting thing about anyone’s career is somebody, I forget who it was, says there is only seven stories, you know really seven stories; there’s the love story, there’s the whatever they are. Most things are variations of something that, if you do a lot of work, pretty soon you are doing variations of the something, and what Mike told me one day — which I thought was really interesting — we were just chatting, and I was telling him this is what I think the structure of the film should be. It seems natural and I kind of walk him through it and he was very enthusiastic about that, and I had been a little worried that he might not be because he’s done so many other things.
But I’ll tell you the thing about Mike was he was so smart and so he wasn’t deceived about anything. He said, “I’ll tell you something — I think most directors do their best work early.” He said, “I think I did. He said, “I think The Graduate was my best film.” So he said, “I’d rather be talking about that and what the choices were.” Now I said, “Well, I think that’s sometimes true,” like with Kevin Smith you were talking about. You know people they find that they have had all these stories building up and they get to tell them and you start with what you think are your best stories first and that makes sense, cause you want the chance to tell anything later but you want to start with your best things first, okay.
But what’s interesting is that I said you know sometimes many people have a middle period, a fallow period where it’s either they are not having the success they had or they might be doing good work but it’s not catching on with the public or they might not be doing good work. But then they, if you have the perseverance and the talent, then you find things again. Mike had a fallow period, he had a very distinctly fallow period in the eighties where he — I forget whether it was the eighties or the seventies — but where he had a series of things that hadn’t been successful, and that was a little rattling to him because he had had only success at the beginning.
I mean, he just had hit hit hit hit. So it’s deceiving at first because nobody has all hits and then he had to learn to regroup and come back and in a way his great come back film was, I think, was Silkwood. He came back, he had done something before it, but Silkwood you think [Claps hands] “Okay, he’s in charge of what he’s doing you know, great.” But we also talked about other directors that came back and I said, “What about John Huston?” John Huston starts out amazing with The Maltese Falcon and does a series of great films — including one of my favorites, The African Queen — and then has a long period of things that weren’t catching on or didn’t quite work, and then he comes back with Prizzi’s Honor and The Dead, and I think The Dead is just great. The Dead was his last film, and Mike’s like, “That’s right! That’s right, John Huston — he’s different, he’s different.” So, you know it’s fun to talk about things like that.
I know you as mostly a narrative guy, so what drew you into documentary?
It’s my second documentary. I made a documentary for HBO about a very colourful character and if you haven’t seen it I urge you to see it because I think you would like it. You’re from New Jersey — it’s about Jerry Weintraub. Well, I made a documentary about him for HBO called His Way, and I loved it and I’ve never done documentary work. I love documentaries though and I loved doing it and I liked exploring what we were doing and how to make it, and I wasn’t planning to do this, but when they asked me to do it I thought, “Oh, my God, I’d like to do that,” but as a writer and a person who does narrative work…
I think that’s something that I bring to it, which is that you listen to all this stuff like I’ve taken as a writer and I’ve taken a semi-big book like Emma, which is, like, 400 pages, and an even bigger book, Nicholas Nickleby, which is eight-hundred-and-something pages, and I have to figure out all that material what’s going to make a two-hour movie or a two-and-a-half-hour movie. So it’s a lot of assessing and calling, and in a way that’s what both these were to. In Jerry’s case we had sixty hours of footage, in Mike’s case we had six hours of footage. It was much less, and in Mike’s case it became clear but it was my story telling sense I think that guided me. Sometimes he would tell a good story and you would just think there is no place for it in the structure and you want to kind of, if you have a structure that works, pay attention to it.
The structure of this film is interesting because you filmed two series of interviews on stage — one with an audience and one without. Having seen the whole six hours, I’m curious about how different these interviews and the dynamic was.
That’s a very good question, because I have thought about it a lot funnily enough, because we wanted to do the audience. We wanted to do it because Mike had been a performer, but we didn’t want the whole film at all to be in front of an audience. I was afraid it would be Inside the Actors Studio. A smarter version of Inside, a less odious version of Inside the Actors Studio, and what’s really interesting, having sat with all the footage for a long time, is that the dynamic with Mike and Jack along with no audience is very intimate and relaxed.
You can see on his face and Mike’s demeanor in front of the audience. His energy came up, but his demeanor changed. He still told great stories, but I see less in him that is revealed personally. When I just look at his face without the audience I see a different quality than with the audience because of course he’s performing to a degree. Even though he has Jack there to make him comfortable, I think there’s still a little bit of the, whatever that formality is that comes in performing. But it was very interesting. His energy was quite a bit higher because you had the adrenaline of the audience being there, and in some ways that was helpful for the stories and also because he’s so smart he knew which stories are just perfect for an audience and he knew which stories made more sense to have between the two guys.
Was there a list of questions given to him in advance?
No, no, no, he knew nothing in advance. I mean he knew it was going to be about him, but he’s smart so he knew the general idea of questions, but no, Jack had his own questions and then the questions always started things. Then Mike would say something Jack hadn’t expected and he’s like, “What do you mean? Why don’t you tell me about that or why or what?” So Jack had a guide but he wasn’t uh bound by it.
Did you collaborate with Jack on that guide?
They are mostly his questions. I don’t want to take anything away from him, but occasionally I would say don’t forget about this or I noticed this, and I did think on the first day Mike told the story, the hilarious story to me, of Elaine May making up the title song for the brothers, and I did say I think you should ask about that when we have the audience because it’s just too good. The other stuff didn’t need to be repeated for the audience, but that was its own. Because you’ll notice with Jack — just Jack alone — it’s much more about his own intellectual process, and with the audience it’s more about anecdotes that demonstrate what that process is, but he knows there’s an audience there who want to hear full stories about the characters. Whereas with Jack he can talk about the mental process and the artistic process that led him to make his choices.
Becoming Mike Nichols is now in limited theatrical release, airing on HBO, and streaming on HBO Go.