Wallflower at the Orgy (20 page)

NICHOLS
:
I don’t think of it as, one, being about World War Two and two—perhaps I’d better change that to (a) being about World War Two and (b) timely or not timely. I think of it as a picture about dying and a picture about when you get off. It’s a picture about choosing at what point you take control over your life and say, “No, I won’t.
I
decide.
I
draw the line.” And also, “timely” is, I think, a dangerous word. You know, is
Grand Illusion
timely? It’s just a great picture.

Q
:
You once said you were laid out for years. What are your plans after you finish
Catch-22?

NICHOLS
:
I have an obligation to do two more pictures, but they can be whenever and whatever I want. I think I have found a play I want to do with Elaine May after
Catch-22
. There were three of us in Chicago—Elaine, Paul Sills, and me—and we started a theater together and then started the group called Compass that became Second City and we’re now talking about starting a theater again together in New York, to close the circle and get back to what we did. In that course of planning what we wanted to do, we found a French play that seems to me about what Elaine’s and my work has been about, and it seemed necessary for us to play it.

Q
:
Are you going to act in it?

NICHOLS
:
Yes. I hope. It’s very dangerous to talk about something that far away because
Catch-22
will probably take most of my life.

Q
:
Did you ever expect
The Graduate
to become what it has?

NICHOLS
:
No, of course not. It never crossed any of our minds.

Q
:
Was there a point when you began to think that it might happen? Was there one night?

NICHOLS
:
There was a night that we previewed it in New York, at the RKO 86th or the Loew’s 81st or the Loew’s 86th—anyway, a huge theater on the East Side that holds like twenty-six hundred or three thousand people. We were showing our work print, with all the splices in it. And I had a box in my lap, running the sound, because we hadn’t dubbed it yet. The theater was packed, and I spent—naturally, as I always do—I spent all my time saying to everybody around me, “Is it too dark? Is it too light? Is it too loud? Should I make it louder? Can you hear it? It’s too loud now, isn’t it?” and after a while, I stopped, because what the audience was doing was really rather shocking. It sort of sounded like a prize fight. I have never heard an audience make that noise before. Laugh like that. Shout like that. Yell like that. And for the last five minutes of the picture they began to cheer and they didn’t stop. And I was very taken aback, and in my own bizarre way, pleased. And then I ran the hell out of the theater.

Q
:
What did you do then?

NICHOLS
:
I went home and got mad at myself that I hadn’t stayed.

Q
:
When I saw
The Graduate
, I felt that it was totally about my life. It was such a California movie, and my adolescence there came rushing back at me.

NICHOLS
:
Well, have you ever had the experience of seeing something the details of which really had nothing to do with your life and yet you sit there and can say, “That’s my life”?
I’m not saying that that’s a quality that
The Graduate
had, because how do I know? But it happens with films and it happens with people. I mean, I can see
L’Avventura
or
8 1/2
and say, “That’s my life.” It has nothing to do with the details of my life.

Q
:
And one film has nothing to do with the other.

NICHOLS
:
That’s right. In fact, they’re almost opposite extremes. But that experience is possible. Somebody gets his own life on the nose, he really gets it the way it was for him, and we can sit there and say, “Yes, I remember that.”

Q
:
Once, when speaking about
The Graduate
, you said that when you were making it you didn’t think you were making a film about a generation but about a young man of a certain age. “We were that age once,” you said. “People forget that.” I thought that was interesting because it seemed to indicate you didn’t think too much of this thing called the generation gap.

NICHOLS
:
Well, it seems to me a mistake to generalize people. They’ve been generalized so much—“the middle class,” “the kids”—that a very odd thing has happened: they actually think of themselves as instances of a generality. Which I don’t think is a possible way to live. I think that there are gaps between people. But I find often as large a gap between me and somebody my own age as I do between myself and somebody nineteen, or fifteen, or, in the case of my daughter, five. But as soon as you generalize it, I think you lose particulars. Yes, sure, something is happening. But it’s been generalized so much and made into slogans so much that to undo the kind of magazine-propaganda aspect of phrases
like “generation gap,” it’s best to get specific and talk about things between individuals.

Q
:
I’d like to see
The Graduate
again.

NICHOLS
:
Me, too. I haven’t seen it since it opened.

Q
:
You should—although every time I see a movie six months after it’s opened, the film is cracking and the sound is bleeping.

NICHOLS
:
That’s why I don’t go. Because it’s so painful. Opening night of
Virginia Woolf
—that is, the first press night—Mr. Warner in his wisdom decided the whole world press was to see it all together on one night. And they all did, in fact, see it together on one night. And when they changed from the first reel to the second reel, the screen went black—not gray, not very dark, but
black
. And I went, in my calm way, and screamed at the manager. And he put his arms around my shoulders and said, “Mike, baby, don’t worry. We’ve got the best projectionist in the business up there.” And I had to comfort myself with the fact that he was the best projectionist in the business, although the screen was totally black. I can’t go to see my pictures in a theater because they’re always too light or too dark or you can’t hear them. I make such a pest of myself that the people in the theaters dread seeing me come. So I just stay away.

Q
:
Have you done that? Arrived at the projection booth and said, “Listen …”?

NICHOLS
:
I used to do that with
Virginia Woolf
. And they began to think of me as some kind of crank, you know, that they had to suffer, that had these illusions that the audience
should hear the dialogue and possibly even see the film. I finally decided that I was driving myself and them crazy, and I stayed away. It doesn’t seem to bother most people. I once went to see
Torn Curtain
and you couldn’t hear it and you couldn’t see it. But the audience didn’t seem to mind. They sat there very happily, laughing occasionally—I don’t know at what, because you couldn’t hear the dialogue. The cutter on
The Graduate
, Sam O’Steen, went to see it at a theater in Los Angeles, and it wasn’t out of focus—it looked like a psychedelic light show. There were vague, vague human shapes playing across the screen. And he went running to the projection booth—in which the projectionist was screwing on the floor with an usherette. So at that point you have to say to yourself, Life is more important than art.

Q
:
This is a naïve question, but film is a very mysterious thing to me, and I don’t understand how you just went out there and made a movie. How did you find out about all those mysterious sound devices and mysterious words like “looping”?

NICHOLS
:
I just held my nose and jumped in.

Q
:
But did you feel like an imbecile?

NICHOLS
:
I still do.

Q
:
You do?

NICHOLS
:
Oh, of course. All the time. Don’t you?

Q
:
Oh no, because I’m not doing anything terribly hard. It’s just me and a typewriter. It’s not me and a million technicians and budgets and deadlines.

NICHOLS
:
Well, I’ll tell you two stories. One is about the first
day of shooting on
Virginia Woolf
. The scene was Richard and Elizabeth coming through the front door, going to the living room and turning on the light. And her saying, “Jesus H. Christ,” or whatever she said. And it was not only my first day on the picture, it was my first day on a movie set. I had thought and thought about it and had drawn little pictures and made little plans, and Richard and Elizabeth were all made up and ready to go and there were a hundred and fifty men standing around with their arms folded, and I suddenly thought, How do I get them through the door? If the camera is facing the door, won’t the door hit the camera when it opens? And if it’s far back enough, won’t they walk into the camera when they come in?

Q
:
But you knew cameras moved, right?

NICHOLS
:
Well, I did know that. But didn’t know where to put it because I wanted to see them close. And then I thought, If it’s too close, the door will hit it. Well, everybody had all sorts of suggestions. I mean, it was clear that I was in naked panic. And I had special advisers. And finally the cameraman said, “See, we’ll do this and they’ll come in and we’ll move and we’ll pan them and they’ll disappear momentarily behind the wall as they walk toward the kitchen and we’ll see them reappear again and it will be very interesting.” And I said, “Well, what’s it for?” He said, “Well, it’s interesting.” And I thought, Oh, Christ. Now I have to do this very hard thing. They know more than I do, but I have to decide what it’s going to be because I know what I am going to tell and they don’t. That was a terrible minute. And I just said, All right. Pull yourself together and do it. And I did. And then, you begin to learn it. You begin to discover what it is. There are various sorts of mysteries that are cleared up
by accident. The cameramen are always saying—and this is absolutely their domain—they are always saying, “Two-eight.” Or, “Three-five.” Or, “Four-eight.” And I would think, Well, they know why they want it at two-eight. It’s not my business. We’ve talked about the mood of the scene and how I want it to look. Weeks and weeks of the cameraman’s saying “two-eight” and “three-five” had gone by. One day, I happened to be looking through the camera at a stand-in, and he said, “Two-eight.” Then he said, “Change it to three-five.” And as I looked, it got brighter. “You mean that’s it?” I said. “That’s all it is? It’s just a diaphragm that opens up or closes down?” He said, “Of course, you ass. What did you think it was?” And you begin to discover that most of the technical things are rather like that—they can be explained, they can be understood, and they can be dealt with. The big decision, the hard decision, is how to use them. To understand them is not that rough. You know what it’s like? Do you remember in kindergarten when you had subjects like shoelace tying?

Q
:
Yes. Only we had apple cutting.

NICHOLS
:
We had French. When I was five I couldn’t tie my shoelaces yet, but they started teaching us French from playing cards. We never cut apples. We did tie shoelaces. And it’s very much like that thing where you think, I’ll never tie this shoelace; I don’t understand. And then after a while you are tying it and then you forget about it and then you know how to tie a shoelace.

Q
:
There was a long piece in
The New Yorker
on
The Graduate
which I had a little trouble reading.…

NICHOLS
:
I couldn’t finish it, I have to admit.

Q
:
Well, in the end, the writer said of you that you had thus far attempted nothing that strained at the limits of your talent.

NICHOLS
:
Well, I think that’s a difficult thing to know about someone else. As far as he knows—what if I have exceeded the limits of my talent and there is nothing more I can do? It’s very hard to know that about someone else. As to the article, the writer was more interested in the picture than I am. He wrote so long—I have never seen such a long piece on a movie.

Q
:
The other night I met a man who told me he was writing a book on how to write movie criticism and how to judge a movie. And I thought, Oh, God, no. I find it horrifying that people take these things so seriously.

NICHOLS
:
I couldn’t agree more. It’s like writing a book on how to judge a person. You know, first you must size up the appearance and size of the breast. Then you must watch very carefully how she eats her dinner. A movie is like a person. Either you trust it or you don’t. That’s all. You’re not going to watch the person very carefully and say, “Well, I liked her very much until the last course. But then, frankly, I thought the way she handled her silverware was influenced by Sue.” I’ll tell you one thing. Agnes Varda (the French director) and I were sort of friends. We met a few times and we liked each other a lot. Then I saw one of her pictures and I thought certain things about it but I thought, Well, she knows what she is doing and I like her and that’s that. Then she did a public interview about The Film—about Films, you know, that religious way that French people have—and she put down
The Graduate
. Which was fine with me. You
know, anybody can put it down and I’m best of all at putting it down. But what I kept thinking was, Does she
really literally
think that films are more important than friendship? What an odd way to think. I mean, if you’re going to make a religion of something, why make it of films when there are better things to make it of? And therefore I agree with you about books about film criticism.