Mike Nichols
Mike Nichols
Mike Nicholswas a German-American film and theatre director, producer, actor and comedian. He was noted for his ability to work across a range of genres and an aptitude for getting the best out of actors regardless of their acting experience. Nichols began his career in the 1950s with the comedy improvisational troupe, The Compass Players, predecessor of The Second City, in Chicago. He then teamed up with his improv partner, Elaine May, to form the comedy duo Nichols and May...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth6 November 1931
CityBerlin, Germany
CountryGermany
As a little kid in a sometimes hard place, I went to the movies as often as I could. Movies - making them, seeing them - is not something that could ever lose its pleasure for me. That puts them on a short list of things that eternally give me joy - love, family, food, movies.
If you're fleeing Nazi Germany in 1939 and you're a Jew, you don't think so much about relationships. People didn't have a lot of divorces during the Holocaust, for instance.
I think a director can make a play happen before your eyes so that you are part of it and it is part of you. If you can get it right, there's no mystery. It's not about mystery. It's not even mysterious. It's about our lives.
I don't know that a political climate - as long as it's still a free country - makes much difference in the film world.
Here's the most mysterious thing to me. I look back at those first plays I did and the first movies I did, and I only have one question, which is, 'What was I so confident about? Where did I get that?
A play, after all, is a mystery. There's no narration. And as soon as there's no narration, it's open to interpretation. It must be interpreted. You don't have a choice... Each play can become many things.
I keep coming back to it, over and over - adultery and cheating. It's the most interesting problem in the theater. How else do you get Oedipus? That's the first cheating in the theater.
We've all heard those fatal words in a relationship where someone says, 'Just tell me. I promise I won't be mad. I just want the answer,' ... Clive Owen asks his wife that question in 'Closer,' but he really doesn't want the answer because it's just a slide into great pain.
Whether something is a success or not has never had much to do with what you do next.
A movie is like a person. Either you trust it or you don't.
I love the editing process of making movies. I just wish that life had one.
The unconscious is our best collaborator.
I was just trying to make a nice little movie... It wasn't until I saw it all put together that I realized this was something remarkable.
Nerves provide me with energy... It's when I don't have them, when I feel at ease, that's when I get worried.