You don’t really want someone laughing at you when you’re nibbling on their neck! They were so attracted to each other intellectually, comically, and artistically, I think they thought, as you said, “Dayyenu! It’s enough!”Īs I watched this film, I wondered if you’d considered interviewing Elaine May and other people Nichols worked with over the years, and then I heard about Elaine’s own American Masters tribute to him that just came out on PBS. He said that they had a brief flirtation at first but it just didn’t work for them romantically because they found each other too funny. You know, that was briefly touched on in the interviews we did but we ended up cutting it for pacing. This is a dumb question, but hearing the way he talked about meeting her in the film, were they ever a couple? I don’t remember ever reading that. I am such a fan of Nichols and May, I must have listened to their routines hundreds of times. Whatever his health issues were, he didn’t speak of them. When I went to meet with Mike about doing this film he did look a little frail but he did not seem frail, he seemed energetic and vivacious and strong. We certainly didn’t know he was going to die so soon. Were his ongoing health problems a motivator for making the film? It’s so sad that he died not long after you shot these interviews. He’s really a fantastic example for anyone. I’m going to milk it for all I can!” But he never did that - he kept learning, he kept growing, he kept trying new things for the rest of his life. At any point, with Elaine, or Neil Simon, or so many of the things he did he could have said, “Okay, I found the formula, I’m just sticking with this. That’s one of the things I most admire about Mike. Watching this film, I kept thinking, “If Mike Nichols had JUST done that brilliant work with Elaine May: Dayyenu! If he had JUST directed those Neil Simon plays on Broadway: Dayyenu! If he had JUST made the films Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate: Dayyenu! I spoke with the talented McGrath (who wrote screenplays for films such as Bullets Over Broadway, Emma, and Nicholas Nickleby, and whose Tony Award-winning Beautiful: The Carole King Musical is currently on Broadway) about this riveting documentary.ĭanny Miller: Are you familiar with the Jewish expression we chant during Passover: “Dayyenu” which means “It would have been enough?” With disarming candor and wit, Nichols delivered a master class on his craft in what would be his last in-depth interviews, for the Douglas McGrath’s documentary Becoming Mike Nichols, debuting Monday, February 22, exclusively on HBO, following its world premiere at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. Just four months before he died, in a set of final, historic interviews, Nichols opened up to his close friend and colleague, theater director Jack O’Brien, about the storied beginnings of his career, including his comedy collaboration with Elaine May, his direction of two Neil Simon stage classics, and his acclaimed feature-film debut, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and its follow-up, The Graduate.
Mike nichols american masters movie#
And while it probably won’t be easy to catch them all, it’s worth making time for this last memorable Nichols-May collaboration.Mike Nichols wowed movie and theatergoing audiences for more than six decades with a rich and deeply varied body of work. King, Carole King, Fats Domino, Loretta Lynn, Janis Joplin and The Highwaymen. The Nichols documentary kicks off another busy 30 th-anniversary season of the “American Masters” franchise, with films devoted to B.B. And it’s all garnished by snippets of interviews with the likes of Streep, Tom Hanks, Dustin Hoffman, Alec Baldwin and Paul Simon, who more than anything convey a sense of how they genuinely treasured Nichols as well as the joy they derived from working with him. Nichols is such a gifted raconteur – and clearly so at ease with Schlossberg, who produced an earlier “American Masters” devoted to Nichols & May – that the hour flies by, offering fascinating insights about everything from a director’s role in the collaborative process to the alchemy of casting. And that’s giving relatively short shrift to his stage work with Neil Simon, directing “The Graduate,” what he learned from the perceived failure that was “Catch-22,” and a relationship with Meryl Streep – on “Silkwood” and later HBO’s “Angels in America” – that just talking about brings him to tears. After that, though, the special is a virtual who’s who of gaudy name-dropping, from how influenced he was by seeing Marlon Brando on stage in “A Streetcar Named Desire” to counsel received from Lee Strasberg and Elia Kazan to assuring Jules Feiffer – the author of “Carnal Knowledge” – that a young actor named Jack Nicholson would become one of the signature talents of our time.