His dark quartets

Jude LAW and Natalie Portman are sitting atop a London bus, which might not be the first place you would expect to see two of today’s hotter young film actors. In fact, they’re filming an early scene in the movie version of the British play “Closer,” which happens to be the encounter where their characters begin to get, well, close.

Law is playing Dan, the journalist who has come to the rescue of Alice (played by Portman), who has been hit by a car. As the two are on their way back from the hospital where she has been treated for minor injuries, Alice takes off Dan’s glasses, blows on them in a gesture of gentle seduction, wipes them clean, and hands them back, pausing to mention seconds later that she has worked as a stripper.

Leaning into him, Alice looks right at Dan. “I know what men want: men want a girl who looks like a boy” -- which the androgynously coiffed Portman on this occasion sort of does. Racier dialogue ensues before director Mike Nichols shouts “Cut!” Nichols is sitting toward the front of the bus, as is screenwriter Patrick Marber, on whose 1997 play this film is based. And before doing another take, Portman gives a liberating laugh. After all, when you’re working with Mike Nichols on material this sexually unfettered, it must be good fun playing bad.

“Natalie’s not been seen like this before,” Nichols is saying several days later. “She’s known we were going to do the movie for a long time” -- dating to their collaboration on an al fresco New York stage production of Chekhov’s “The Seagull” in summer 2001 -- “and I think she’s ready.”

But the phrase “the readiness is all” seems in this instance to apply even more fully to Nichols than to any of this film’s four stars. (Besides Law and Portman, the “Closer” cast includes Clive Owen and Julia Roberts, who was recruited only after Nichols and producer Cary Brokaw’s original choice, Cate Blanchett, became pregnant.)

After a varied career that includes such comedies and dramas as “Working Girl,” “Heartburn,” “The Birdcage” and “Primary Colors,” the 73-year-old director could be forgiven for wanting to put his feet up.

But Nichols is instead returning to where he began in film nearly 40 years ago, which is to say, with movie versions of tough-talking plays.

And they don’t come much more bruising, or brilliant, than “Closer” was on stage; filmgoers can decide for themselves when the $36-million movie opens Dec. 3.

It was in 1966, of course, that Nichols, already an established stage comedian as well as a director of plays such as “Barefoot In the Park,” announced himself as a film talent to be reckoned with. That was the year he took Edward Albee’s corrosive play -- “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” -- and turned it into a witty yet ultimately wounding film that won Oscars for two of its four stars, Elizabeth Taylor among them.

And here Nichols is all these decades later working from another play that is also about four carnally and often cruelly intertwined people who seem not to exist in any world beyond a sexual gamesmanship of their own devising.

The trend continues: In recent years, Nichols has strengthened his theatrical ties, directing for HBO two Pulitzer Prize-winning plays, “Wit” and “Angels In America,” both to great acclaim. And what is the central architecture of Tony Kushner’s “Angels”? Two young couples -- one gay, the other straight (OK, not entirely) -- who weave in and out of each other’s life.

Sound somewhat like “Closer”? You got it: a theme is there.

“Here it is again,” sighs Nichols, smiling in acknowledgment of what is a discernible thread to his distinguished career. After all, the director worked in a scarcely less similar vein in his 1971 film, “Carnal Knowledge,” based on a screenplay by Jules Feiffer that, perhaps unsurprisingly in context, had been originally thought of with the stage in mind.

AN INTEREST IN FOUR-PLAY

Of his career-long interest in the foreplay (and more) among foursomes, Nichols says: “I think it’s an interesting configuration, both geometrically and sexually. What happens with a quartet, especially when they’re all of the same sexual preference, is that you’re immediately putting competitiveness into the mix, certainly men’s competitiveness.

“The question both in ‘Closer’ and maybe in life is, which is the stronger drive in a man: the sexual drive, or the drive to kill the other guy?”

“This quartet [in ‘Closer’] is as much about competition and the need to win and the need to beat and most likely kill the other guy as it is about irresistible desire. The competition to the death is very much nearer the heart of ‘Closer’; it’s a battle.”

As is getting a film made these days, or so it often seems, which must be one reason why Nichols’ theatrical roots have been so particularly important across the years. It’s not just that the stage has always been a first home of sorts to Nichols, who, indeed, is returning to Broadway this season to direct the Monty Python musical “Spamalot” -- Nichols’ first Broadway directing venture in 13 years, since “Death and the Maiden,” for which Glenn Close won a Tony.

But the point is, if you’re looking for material, where better to find it than the stage?

“You can make a movie of anything if you have the idea,” says Nichols, who won a Tony Award in 1983 for directing the Broadway version of Tom Stoppard’s play “The Real Thing” but cried off a talked-about film version because, he says, “I haven’t had the idea for ‘The Real Thing’ ” on-screen, “though very likely someone will. People have made wonderful movies of plays that you wouldn’t have thought [possible] just because they heard something or saw something that allowed them to do it.”

What did Nichols see in “Closer?”

Probably a version of what critics in the U.S. and the U.K. did: an honesty about human relations so strong and scabrous that it almost hurts.

Watching Marber’s own Broadway production of the play in 1999, with Anna Friel and Natasha Richardson as the distaff leads (the same characters are both American in the movie), Nichols was struck by a central scene where “a guy asks a woman the question everybody asks” -- about another partner’s sexual abilities -- -- “and she answers it, which we’re not used to. It really got to me; it made me sick.”

Stepping back to take a more dispassionate view, Nichols says he was struck by the realization that the master of all drama, Chekhov, could be found in so modern a text as “Closer.”

“The essential Chekhovian invention is one that has animated the theater ever since, [and] which turns out to be a particularly suitable one for movies: Where A loves B who loves C who loves D, E, and F, and none of them knows it but the audience knows all of it. Now, let’s set them loose, and see what they do.”

In “Closer,” says Nichols, “there’s an almost Hitchcockian danger underneath it all because of the Chekhovian strain of what’s really happening under the words.”

It makes sense, then, to have a cast itself experienced in theater, with the exception of Roberts, who freely admits that she wasn’t entirely convinced at first whether she ought to sign on to play the photographer, Anna.

“Neither one of us,” i.e. she or Nichols, “was sure I was right for this,” recalls Roberts, who nonetheless had seen the play in London. “I just remember the impact of it on stage, and its complexity, and I love the fact that it’s four people. Three are complicated in an obvious way, but four people are complicated in a complicated way.” (Adds Roberts, giggling on the phone: “With five, it becomes a circus.”)

Roberts said the ensemble nature of the project was appealing too. “My early movies were all like this; I didn’t understand the idea of going to work by oneself.”

Portman, in turn, got Nichols’ Chekhovian analogy first-hand, having played the young actress Nina in this director’s New York Shakespeare Festival production of “The Seagull,” which starred Meryl Streep.

“Mike sent me the play to read first because it wasn’t in script form yet,” says Portman, who was struck by writing, she says, that “is really strong. It deals with the way people often are in relationships, which is what everyone encounters at that age.” (The waiflike Alice is the youngest of the four characters). “It can be a big shock after your sweet high school relationships when people then become pretty horrible.”

But might the film soften the play’s impact? Portman isn’t worried, speaking at the end of that March afternoon shoot. “If anything, the film is going to be harder; it’s going to be hard for people to feel, like, there’s Julia Roberts being harsh. You can see the blood move under her face when the emotions change; it’s really amazing.” (In fact, the ending of the film significantly blunts the last scene of the play, as far as Portman’s character is concerned.)

A CHANGE FOR OWEN

Owen has the advantage of being the only one in the film who appeared in the play, in the very first National Theater staging in the tiny Cottesloe auditorium, well before its subsequent West End and Broadway transfers. But in that initial production, Owen played Law’s current part as Dan, while Ciaran Hinds played the more imposing, even frightening role of the doctor, Larry. (Hinds repeated the same assignment on Broadway.)

“It was very weird,” says Owen. “I remember in my initial meeting with Mike him saying, ‘Of course, you know all that; you have all the experience [of the play],’ but I realized while we were talking that in a play, you see the piece through that character’s perspective, and my experience had always been through Dan’s eyes. Playing a different part, as far as acting goes, is starting again; you see the whole piece from a different perspective.”

Did Law, meanwhile, feel strange having the actor who originated his screen part on stage right there with him on set? “I look at myself in the mirror and feel like I look like Clive did then anyway,” says Law. “There’s such a sense of Everyman in these roles that Clive passing through Dan to get to Larry seems a natural evolution.”

The one who might have felt most unsettled, for self-evident reasons, is its 40-year-old author, Marber, since it isn’t always easy letting someone else have at the screen version of something you wrote and then directed various times on stage. (There have been close to 200 stage productions of “Closer” worldwide, though only a few, obviously, were directed by Marber.)

In fact, he says, “I don’t think of [the movie] as a distortion; I think of it as a relationship -- there’s a play and there’s a film. The medium changes it automatically, and wherever the film is different from the play, I love that. And wherever the film is faithful to the play, I love that as well.”

All of which explains why, during a journalist’s visit to the set, Marber looked on quietly as numerous cumbersome takes attempted to synchronize a crucial line of Portman’s with the bus traveling under a bridge. “Really, once Mike was happy with the script, I was just there to eat bagels and nod and make the occasional remark,” the writer explained. “I’ve seen the play all over the world, and seeing it on screen isn’t that different, except that this is Mike Nichols’ version. And because it’s Mike, it has his stamp, and his stamp is mightily impressive.”

Nichols, for his part, is sounding like someone who is on creative terra firma.

“It’s what I feel I’m good at,” he says of the process of transcribing plays to the screen, whether large or small. “It’s a wonderful thing to engage in because so many things are spoken in plays that you don’t have to speak in a movie because looking into someone’s eyes is so different from seeing their profile on stage.”

All of which suggests that if the film of “Closer” lives up to expectation, this will be one reason why: That in a way not even managed by Marber’s dazzling play, Nichols’ camera has taken us that much closer to the heart of human darkness.

Matt Wolf is London theater critic for Variety and wrote the book “Sam Mendes at the Donmar: Stepping Into Freedom.”