MOVIES : The Nichols Touch : The stage and screen director talks about technique, daydreaming, working in New York and how good movies make themselves

M ike Nichols has been making movies for 25 years. His films include “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (1966), “The Graduate” (1967), “Carnal Knowledge” (1971), “Silkwood” (1983), “Working Girl” (1988) and “Postcards From the Edge” (1990). His newest film, “Regarding Henry,” stars Harrison Ford as a slickly successful New York attorney who is forced to re-evaluate the meaning of his life after being shot in the head during a convenience store holdup. Annette Bening plays his perfectly ornamental wife, who suddenly finds herself married to someone who doesn’t remember her.

Born in Berlin in 1931, the son of a Russian doctor, Nichols came to America at the age of 7 as his family fled the rise of the Nazis. He entered show business in the early 1960s performing improvisational comedy with the Second City company in Chicago and in nightclubs with partner Elaine May, who also went on to become a film director.

He has never lived in Hollywood and continues to make his home in New York, where he is married to his third wife, TV news personality Diane Sawyer. He is also unparalleled among major American film directors for his continued work in the theater, having staged such prominent productions in New York as “Barefoot in the Park,” “The Gin Game,” “Hurlyburly,” “Waiting for Godot” and “The Real Thing.” Best known perhaps as a chronicler of Upper West Side sophistication and the media class, Nichols is a silken presence who can talk about the end of the world with a smile. As he was completing work on “Regarding Henry” in Los Angeles earlier this year, we met for lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and later, after he had returned to New York, we spoke again by phone.

Question: As someone who has worked with stories as long as you have, do you find it harder to be struck by the originality of a story, any story?

Answer: Well, for reasons I don’t understand, I’ve always been most interested by behavior. When we were all at Second City, Elaine and I did what people called “people scenes,” which meant that they weren’t particularly political or have a social message, they were just about the behavior of people. That’s why I love Chekhov. If you love behavior, you tend to be drawn to small or nonexistent stories. For somebody like that to get a powerful story like I had in this picture (“Regarding Henry”), and to a lesser extent in “Working Girl,” is like a vacation. And then the fun is to see if you can get the behavior in anyway, even though the train is moving very fast and very inexorably because of the power of the plot. But also there are different definitions of plot. Everybody said “Virginia Woolf” had no plot. Well, of course it did. Everybody says “Godot” has no plot. Of course it has a plot. It’s just a huge plot: our whole lives.

Q: “Postcards From the Edge” certainly qualifies as what’s often called a “small story.” It was well-reviewed, but many people commented that much of its fun was in its star casting--Meryl Streep playing the show-business daughter of Shirley MacLaine. How much do you think the film depended on its star elements?

A: A movie of course is the people to whom it’s happening. Bogart and Bacall--how can you take away “You know how to whistle, don’t you?” and imagine it on somebody else? These are events, and they’re created with a number of elements. One is the words and another is who the people are and the third is how the camera sees them. But it’s all those things. That’s the joy of movies.

Q: Still, not to take anything away from its quality, it’s hard to imagine a studio today bankrolling a script like the one Carrie Fisher wrote without Mike Nichols and Shirley MacLaine and Meryl Streep attached. Because not much happens in the way that Hollywood generally defines action . Would you agree?

A: I think that’s true, but it was quite a deliberate juggling act. “Regarding Henry” has a very powerful plot, and it’s a different kind of work where you know all the time you’re being driven by this very powerful engine. But I very much enjoy another kind of story where you have to stay entertaining because you don’t have that huge engine of events. After all, “Postcards” is about a small step forward. Which seems to me a perfectly legitimate thing to do in a movie if you can keep it interesting.

Q: How is it that you became a director and not a writer?

A: I don’t know. I think I never got in the habit of writing. I talked . Elaine and I talked out sketches. We never wrote them down. We improvised them in front of an audience and then rearranged them a little or let time change them. The only person who ever wrote down what we said was the stage manager, for cues. So I never got in the habit. And I’m very gregarious. I don’t think until I’m with people. I don’t think alone at all.

Q: But doesn’t everyone think when they’re alone sometimes?

A: I dream. My wife has a very sweet, generous definition of why I so often miss what people are saying. She says that there are people who need a lot of dreaming time awake. It’s a very loving way to describe inattentiveness. But it’s true that I sort of go off into vague dreams and fantasies.

Q: How did Jeffrey Abrams’ script for “Regarding Henry” find its way to you?

A: Harrison Ford sent it to me. He called me and said this was the most interesting script in many ways that he’d read in five years. And I read it that night, and I called him back the next day and said, “I agree, I want to do it.” We loved the central idea of a man who, through circumstances, looks at his life as though he were a stranger. And rejects it. Q: Did the two of you talk much about the problem of having a main character whose mental state is somewhat unfathomable to the audience?

A: Our main concern was to learn as much about these kinds of injuries as possible. And we did. We wanted to be accurate and to keep faith with the people who have had these kinds of head injuries. We worked from that research and with a neurologist and a head-injured man who was suggested to us as a technical adviser. It was from those relationships that we developed what we knew had to be the new, simpler Henry. It was that direction in which we worked rather than the connection to the audience, because I assume Harrison always has a connection with the audience.

Q: Were you able to find a personal connection to the story of “Regarding Henry” in any way?

A: What we all do is bring those parts of your experience that are a microcosm of that. And it was very easy to find in my case.

Q: How is that?

A: I got put on a sleeping pill by a doctor about five years ago, which put me into a sort of pre-psychotic depression. Nobody knew what it was. And I was in it for months, this sort of hell. And when some doctor finally figured out that it was this pill, which is called Halcion, I was taken off it and I was back to normal in less than 10 days. And I remember enough about that experience, about looking at my life before and after, that I had a lot to draw on.

Q: How did it change the way you viewed your life?

A: I changed my life entirely when I came back. I got divorced and remarried. I moved. I changed everything. I wanted another life. And then I got it.

Q: How do you respond to articles in which writers have found an overlying theme in the work of Mike Nichols?

A: I never think about it. For one thing, it’s impossible to think about it. For another, I think about Medusa a lot. It’s one of the best myths: We really must not look. I have friends who see themselves as the public sees them, and they are stone.

A: You don’t accept the idea that you have a certain style or technique?

Q: I think it may be true that by the time you’re in your middle to late years, your technique should have burned away. It should be invisible. Like (Jean) Renoir. What is a great Renoir shot? I have no idea. I don’t think there is one. He just shoots it. It’s just people who happen to be alive as you’re watching them doing recognizable, slightly mysterious, very enjoyable things.

I think that as soon as somebody says, “What a shot!” you’re lost, it’s over. Because you’re talking about yourself instead of your material.

Q: But your work does have a certain style. At least there are moments in many of your films that seem to carry a personal stamp--like Shirley MacLaine in the kitchen in “Postcards From the Edge” mixing and mixing that health drink in the blender and then finally adding the pint of vodka. They’re moments of sharp irony, funny but a little mordant too.

A: I don’t disagree with you. I tend to see sharp ironies. Although I like life a lot more than I did, it will always be part of me to sort of see the sweet and sour aspect of the sharp ironies.

Q: Do you think some people are going to see “Regarding Henry” as uncharacteristically sweet for a Mike Nichols movie? Does it seem different in that way to you?

A: I don’t know. There’s a lot of bitter in this particular sweet. And there’s a lot of sweet in the bitter of “Virginia Woolf.” These are distinctions that I’ve always found difficult because every story brings with it its own tone, and if it’s a good story, it’s difficult to come to one simple conclusion about it. If it were simply a sweet story, I would think it was a failure.

Q: But the view of human nature on display seems considerably different and warmer than that in, say, “Carnal Knowledge.”

A: Maybe of some human nature. You can count the human natures that are seen with affection and approval on one hand in “Henry.” And you could count on 20 fingers those that are not. If you mean that it comes out with a hope of love and family, that’s absolutely true. And I don’t have to be ashamed of that.

Q: Do you think you’ll work in the theater again?

A: I’m out of sorts with the theater at the moment. Too many people have told me they’re never going to work in New York again--Baryshnikov, Steve Martin, Robin Williams. I question whether I will. It’s just too hard. The more you try for it, the more they go after you.

Q: You’re talking about the critics?

A: The critics and, in some weird way, New York itself. At the moment it just doesn’t offer you enough back. Of course you can blast right through that with something like (John Guare’s) “Six Degrees of Separation.” But that’s one in 10 years. That’s a lot of plays and a lot of brokenhearted playwrights.

Q: Did you happen to see the production of “Hurlyburly” that David Rabe directed a few years ago with Sean Penn and Danny Aiello at the Westwood Playhouse?

A: No. I didn’t. I was in New York.

Q: It was not received all that well out here, certainly not the hit your production was in New York. It’s odd, but with plays about Hollywood or aspects of Hollywood, you would think this would be the market for them, but it doesn’t seem to be.

A: No, and yet the interesting thing about theater is, watch the places where it isn’t (prominent), because it will be. And the places where it is, it turns to stone. I’ve seen some very interesting things here. At the, what is it called, the L.A. . . .

Q: T.C. (Los Angeles Theater Center).

A: Yeah. And this guy David Schweizer is a very talented director. And Marlene--what’s her last name--the one who wrote “Kingfish”?

Q: Meyer.

A: Yes, very talented. There are things happening here. I don’t think it’s bad for theater to be relatively ignored.

Q: No?

A: No, I think it’s hard when it’s a big hit--there are replacements after three months, a manager is keeping it going, and it has long ago turned to cement. And the audience consists of tourists in New York.

Q: When he was working as a director for Laurence Olivier at the National Theater in London, Roland Joffe, who later directed “The Killing Fields” and “The Mission,” said that Olivier advised him to quit the theater for films unless he wanted to go on being a butler all his life--the idea being that a stage director does little more than show the actors where to hang their hats and which chair to sit in.

A: I don’t agree with that. Directing in the theater teaches you to create events, to create the events of the play--the things that aren’t the words. God knows, directing a movie is different from directing a play--they’re just different things--but the theater is very valuable.

Look at Annette Bening, who’s brilliant in this picture and I think is going to be a big star. She spent years at ACT (American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco) doing hundreds of plays. And, boy, can you tell. Because she can do anything that comes up. Somebody who has had that experience--not unlike Meryl--it’s a little bit like somebody who’s used to driving a large truck with eight or 10 gears getting a Thunderbird. Put them in a movie, and it’s easy. They’ve got Hydramatic drive, they’ve got power steering, they’ve got easily adjustable seats.

Q: Do you blame studio executives for the blockbuster fever that has swept Hollywood in the last decade?

A: The difference between the conglomerates and the barons who used to run these businesses is not that the barons were superior, but that they knew how to balance it. Even (William S.) Paley (former chairman of CBS) knew that when you had all the ratings, you still had to do something classy on Sunday. That’s all over now. Nobody ever does a movie now because it should be done, never mind what it makes. That doesn’t happen.

Q: When did it begin to change, would you say?

A: I think when the world changed. I mean, after all, the movies we all loved in the ‘40s and the ‘50s weren’t all about hits and misses. Each studio made a certain number of movies, some did better than other movies, but it wasn’t this wild extreme where some movies make $17 million the first weekend and others make $350 per theater. It’s this weird congealing of everybody doing one thing, everybody professing one opinion. Which certainly is a product of television.

Q: Has your marriage to Diane Sawyer changed your view of television at all?

A: I would say no. I think the part of television she’s in--news--is so separate. Certainly many things have happened to news too, but to some extent it’s still about standards. I also like television very much and I watch it.

Q: What do you watch?

A: It’s sort of a pal in the room when I’m alone. I don’t care much what it is.

Q: That was Marshall McLuhan’s point, wasn’t it?

A: Absolutely. I think he was right.

Q: So you don’t watch anything in particular?

A: Nothing in particular, but more than anything, old movies. But I don’t get out the program guide and see what’s on. I come home and lie on the bed and flip through the channels. Anything that holds me, I watch. But then, I’ll watch and phone, watch and read.

Something very odd has happened that I don’t understand even, in which few, if any, experiences stick with you. Especially the ones outside your personal life. Of course the ones in your personal life do: You fall in love, somebody leaves you, you lose someone in your family. Of course these things are as they were--or almost as they were. Not entirely. Because people are more and more insulated against strong feeling, it appears. But certainly in experiencing something outside yourself--a book, a play, a movie, a painting, a piece of music--even if you like it, it’s relatively disposable. It’s forgotten.

Q: Getting back to movies, can good movies be written to formulas? It seems so many people are writing screenplays now and trying to imitate hits that the screenplay increasingly has become a debased currency.

A: Even if you try what Disney has tried, if you try approaching movies as if they were cars, you can’t do it. They will betray you eventually. Because it’s more mysterious than that. You can’t have rules for it. It will work for a while, but it can’t work forever. It’s too weird. Movies elude everybody.

Q: Maybe it’s true, but few people will admit it, don’t you think? In fact, it sometimes seems that everyone in Hollywood is an expert who can tell you about “the problems in Act III.”

A: I was watching some awful critics’ show, and I thought, “Look at this: We think we make the movies, the executives think they make the movies, and the critics think it’s for them, it’s grist for them, that the process isn’t complete until they’ve evaluated everything, and that they’re the creative ones.”

And the joke is, that when you’re making a, God-willing, good movie, it’s making itself. It’s telling you what it needs. In my experience, in the most successful process of making a movie, you prepare like crazy, you prepare for a year, you redo the script and question it. And you take all the time casting and looking for the cameraman who can express it and the locations and the sets and so forth. And then you stop thinking and just let the movie become what it needs to become. You just show up. And I know that’s true. You get taken by this thing.

Q: Many unflattering things have been said and written about Dawn Steel, who made the deal with you for “Postcards From the Edge” when she was still running Columbia. What do you think about her?

A: Great judgment, great judgment. She’s very good. She knows what she’s doing. She went for things that were risky and were about people. And she trusted the filmmakers. And it worked.

Q: Her image in Hollywood, at least when she was at Columbia, was more often that of a barracuda.

A: Not for us, not for the people making the movies. That’s what they do to women. Men aren’t ballbusters. Men aren’t barracudas. Women are screwed. There is no posture for them that isn’t attacked from one end to the other.

Q: What about women directors like Penny Marshall and, yes, Elaine May?

A: Women like Penny and Elaine are so supremely gifted that they can enter what is essentially a locker room--that’s what a movie set is, a big locker room. All the stuff that happens to female reporters in football locker rooms happens to a woman on a movie set. And there is a secret society. I, for example, don’t go watch football games with the crew, but I don’t have to. We’re in the same fraternity. And for a woman to direct a movie is much harder than for a man. It’s harder with the executives, it’s harder with the crew, it’s harder with the actors, it’s harder with the actresses . Because the director is daddy. Nobody’s used to the director being mommy.

Q: What about the hiatus between 1976 and 1984 when you didn’t make a single film? Was that by choice?

A: It was by choice. It was cumulative. I didn’t notice what was happening. I just couldn’t find anything that I wanted to shoot. I would start, I would work on things, I would back away from them. I would change my mind. I would get to a point and then be unable to see it. I never know in the beginning if I’m going to be able to see it or not on the screen. I have to see some central thing before I can go ahead and make it. And at the end of the seven years as it happens, I woke up, making a movie about waking up, which was “Silkwood.” And I think it was in some ways Meryl that woke me up, and then it was the new untortured me. I don’t know why. The seven years were fantastically useful as it turns out.

I’m a big believer in downtime. I’m always saying to actors, just work on it and then just leave it alone. Don’t think about it for a week, two weeks, or if you can afford to, for two months. These things, for some mysterious reason, ripen by themselves. And my seven years of not making pictures, during which I did indeed do plays, were the best possible thing for movie making.

Q: Do you ever imagine not having become famous and living a different life?

A: Sure. I have a lot of friends from before. Not a lot but some. And I’m always aware of how lucky I was. I ended up in the one job that I can do. It’s very hard to unpick it after 30 years. I know that I love to be in the country with my wife. I love to take my walks. I hope I could do that anyway. It’s very hard to know. It’s wonderful not to go to the party if you’ve been asked. I’m not sure how I would be at not being asked.

I’d like to think that I could have done it gracefully. After all, my great joys don’t come from being famous. But I can’t deny that having money is swell. And having a beautiful and desirable wife. I probably wouldn’t have met her, and so forth and so on. How do you unpick it?

Q: It seems the Fates have been with you.

A: There’s something both magical and scary about surviving because you don’t really know why you have. But it’s one of those things that’s not very fruitful to over-examine. I would be very happy if this were my last picture. I wouldn’t mind that. But I think it’s even nicer to make a few more.