An inability to look at dead bodies killed off Mike Nichols’ hopes of training as psychiatrist 50 years ago but did nothing to diminish his fascination with marriage, mating and the games people play.
His departure from medical school turned out not only to be psychiatry’s loss but a gain for stage and screen as Nichols the director probed the subject time and again, posing questions rather than answers and in the process becoming one of the most revered filmmakers of his day.
“I think finding the person for you is the great adventure. I think it is inexhaustibly interesting. It is what life is made of,” Nichols, 73, told Reuters in an interview.
Opening this week in the United States, his latest movie, “Closer,” finds Nichols back on familiar territory and is being likened to “Carnal Knowledge” (1971) both for its sexuality and its bleak view of human relationships.
A film version of the acclaimed 1997 stage play by Britain’s Patrick Marber, “Closer” is the intertwined tale of two men and two women (Jude Law, Clive Owen, Julia Roberts and Natalie Portman) who meet, fall in love, betray each other and ultimately destroy themselves.
Sometimes witty, often raw, and relentlessly ambiguous, it is what Marber calls a love story, albeit one that goes wrong, and what Nichols sees as an ode to “the importance of lying”.
“I think that ‘Closer’ is about the dangers of closeness. Do you have a right to know what is in the other person’s head? In my experience, happiness comes from being together but always maintaining enough separateness,” Nichols said.
No crowd pleaser
Despite critically acclaimed performances from all four actors, “Closer” is no crowd pleaser. For Nichols, winning over the audience is hardly the point at this stage in a career founded on taking risks and breaking taboos.
“If you are there to please the audience, it is over already. You have got to be telling the story you want to tell and hope that there are enough people who are interested in that story to make it worthwhile,” he said.
But even a mild-mannered legend like himself rankles slightly at the suggestion that the characters in the film are simply too bad to be true.
“I think the whole idea of likability is a Hollywood concept. The Macbeths were no sweethearts...If everybody is adorable, you can’t go anywhere.
“I am startled that many people are shocked because for me, in order to do this work you have to love the characters. They are us. We are them. There are parts of us that are awful. I think we give ourselves a clean report card too easily,” he said.
Nichols’ own report card has been crammed with glowing references ever since he abandoned psychiatry in college (“Looking at cadavers — that’s what got me out. I wasn’t up to it.”). He went on to win his first Tony Award for directing Neil Simon’s “Barefoot in the Park” in 1966.
He made his debut as a film director with the gritty “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” in 1966 and seduced Oscar voters with ”The Graduate” in 1967.
His HBO television production of Tony Kushner’s searing AIDS epic “Angels in America” swept the Emmy awards in September and made him one of an elite group who have won at least one of every major show business trophy — film, stage, television and music.
A question of respectMarber agreed to hand over the “Closer” film rights only after Nichols expressed interest in directing it. “He had a passion for the material and he was respectful of the writer,” Marber said.
Law, Portman and Owen cluster around Nichols with what seems genuine affection. “[He] brings out of you a sense of confidence, that you’re the only person for the job, so you should never question or doubt yourself,” Law told reporters.
Nichols said he knew directing was the job for him on the first day of rehearsal for the Broadway-bound “Barefoot in the Park” back in 1963. “I knew it right away. I knew how it should go, right away, and how to communicate to the others how it should go.”
Losing that instinct happens all the time and is what makes directing as exciting and addictive as falling in love.
“Every day on a movie and every 10 days on a play I think, ‘I’m stuck. This scene sucks. I can’t make it work.’ Unless if I move this over here and she comes in there later. And then pretty soon it seems possible. I heave one more sigh of relief and think ‘Saved once more,’
“You become addicted to it. There’s only one problem. You can’t do it in life. Life isn’t amenable to that pattern. But shooting a movie or directing a play is, and that’s why it’s so hard to give up. You can still save yourself.”