Mike Nichols | Interview | TimesTalks

good evening everyone i'm carol olson day of the new york times and i'm delighted to welcome you to this exciting times talks tonight we are enormous ly pleased to have as our guest today's leading director of stage and screen he holds the distinction of being one of the very few people ever to score the Grand Slam of Entertainment Awards an Oscar for Emmys eight Tony's and a Grammy and his current play on Broadway the hit revival of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman is the most Tony nominated play of the year with seven nominations including one for Best revival three for best performances two for Best lighting and sound and for tonight's guest Best Direction in just a moment you will meet him and hear about his work but first I'm delighted to introduce our interviewer you know his byline from the paper and nytimes.com he is the New York Times writer at large and his articles appear everywhere from arts and leisure to the book review and from Sunday review to sports recently he wrote a cover story for the Sunday magazine about biographer Robert Caro for five years he was editor of the book review and before that spent 23 years as the fiction editor of The New Yorker please join me in welcoming chip McGrath and our very special guest Mike Nichols it's a great honor to have you here thank you very much thank you sir pleasure let's start by talking about Death of a Salesman was it your idea to put this on was about you yeah well well that raises the next question which is presumably you're at a point in your career where you could say I want to put on just about anything and they would welcome you're doing it so why salesmen and why salesmen now well I contend I'll argue with the first first assumption I couldn't say any play I'd have to say a play in a star or two for it to be on Broadway that's where we all find ourselves because we're all forgive me salesmen what was the second part the second part is is why salesmen why why well because I think this odd thing has happened which tends not to happen with even most great plays namely it's about right now it's more about now that it was about them it's not only prescient if that's how you pronounce it but it's is it how you pronounce it yes it's it's startling if you think about all the obvious things like really talks all the time about being known well the company that lets you be known is is now one of the biggest companies in the world everybody is known on Facebook and so on and so on you could you could trace it right through our entire civilization so that's I thought it would might be a good moment for it right and the for me the main the main reason was that Phil would do it because I always knew that I would want to do it eventually with Phil but it took a while for him to face it because it's not fun to do it it's very expensive the you know beforehand there was there was a certain small controversy people saying well well Philip Seymour Hoffman great actor though he is he's not old enough to do this part now I think if you go and see the play that question disappears in the first 10 seconds but what was it that you knew that he could well let's talk first about not is not old enough to do which part of this part there are two parts in the part one is 43 the other one is 63 so which one are you casting either way you'd have to play the other half by acting you're stuck you can't find a forty or forty three-year-old 63 year old man Liege a cough as many of you know when he played it was 37 is that right I did yes music so this is an imaginary problem you know that people raised because Willie says or rather Linda says his age by the way she says it two ways when she's talking to Willie she says but you're 60 years old and when she's mad at his sons she says he's 63 years old so we can assume he's 63 years old and she was being easy on him at my age I liked her for that I said I think that the point is that Phil can do both and that let's not forget it's not a literal play they're not in a real house there there's no flame on the stove it's a metaphoric house it's a metaphoric play I don't think matching one of the two ages of a character is that important I think can you play it or not the what you were saying about that about it's not being a real house that brings up an another issue which is the interesting thing to me and I think to a lot of people was that you chose to use to go back to the original set and the original music yeah and was that just an amaz or you thought that there's no I don't think that you can do a play from the past which includes Shakespeare and Aeschylus and that whole crowd that without knowing how it started what the impulse was what it meant then why it was written that's part of doing a play when Arthur Miller finished Death of a Salesman he wrote at the top it is the the scene is inside the skull of Willy Loman that's what he wanted the set to be that's where he wanted the play to take place and then over Kazan and mil Xena said well alright but why not look at this house because they were thinking very specifically about the following thing in the first place Arthur Miller I think was the first playwright not the first writer but the first playwright ever to make use of the fact that in our minds we're in two or three places at the same time most of the time yes Joyce did it various writers did it no one did it on stage O'Neill did an inner monologue Who am I and what do I want but that was just people turning out and saying things like that it wasn't that they were somewhere else and they took us with them that's a very important part of this play that's said when he had started out wanting to take place in Willie's skull that's set excited him very much and he changed the play to fit the set so that you could dissolve from one scene to the other as in a movie that was also a first the fact that those dissolves not only to somewhere else but most crucially back from somewhere else if you've seen the play quite often in the play there's a oh my God we're back in the kitchen or we're in the men's room of the restaurant I forgot well that's Willie's experience and the audience experience is that too that's very important because we're not just listening to words we're experiencing a man who's having a breakdown who is in the past all the time even when he's in the present and dealing with people in the present thus the set and I don't know that anybody could write better music than Alex north and because he was the composer on the first movie I made and I loved him very much it was a kind of hello for me and I knew the score very well and I thought I really can't imagine anything better because again I think it was the first time anyone ever wrote a movie score for a play and it it fits so well with the dissolves and the never stopping that you know when somebody doesn't make provision for that like in Cosi Fan Tutte when you just wait the opera stops will they roll the next set on because motor I didn't care if I was Mozart I wouldn't care either but we have to care because that's the experience of the plane let me let me ask another which make another what may prove to be dumb casting question I had I had no doubts at all about Philip Seymour Hoffman when when I heard that you had cast into Garfield I was curious and I will confess that when he first came on I thought nah he's not right by the end believe me it's completely one of them but what made you think of him I mean he's he this was the first time he never really acted in a big play isn't it oh no no he's a big actor on the stage he played Romeo when he was I don't know what 18 at the National Theatre okay well I guess I only know him as this well we only know in that way in this country but in in England he's a very powerful and well-known stage actor and as we saw in social network he has enormous emotional equipment he saw that instantly and in that movie and you could buy him as a quarterback he's an athlete all three of these guys are athletes it was one of my great joys while we were working on it was the day I gave him a football and they were still holding their pages and from that day to this none of them has ever missed the pass but what they soon did was to start throwing the ball Willy and and Biff started throwing the ball over HAP's head and he was jumping higher and higher and then we saw his whole life up to that point and that's the kind of actors they are and that's what happens when you are looking for the things that aren't just the words one of the things that his performance made me realize is that the play is is more about Biff than I under ever understood that and was that part of what you wanted to bring out that that when we well Biff is very important for all the obvious reasons but for one more reason I'm twisted enough to think that the play has a happy ending because Biff is saved it may even be a writer and Willy is free there's nothing else will he could do there's nowhere he can go he's not equipped to live in the real world by that point certainly and it's terrible for Linda although she does have Charlie all these things are there in the play and I think one of the reasons that people crying a lot is in fact that that Biff is saved and Willy is saved in so far as finally understanding that his son didn't not love him he loved him too much like he loved Biff too much all fathers and sons are glad to hear this if we can switch showers briefly if that's okay I'd like to talk a little bit about your movie career which which has gone on for so long and so many of your movies or the movies at least in my life those movies you remember who you were with they're they'll sort of lit when you saw them they're linmark movies I remember exactly where I when I saw the Graduate remember exactly where I was when I saw Silkwood but and we can go on your primary colors bird cage working girl this is huge body of to use a word that's misused a lot iconic work what interest me is is if you talk about these movies with a lot of people I think they would remember the movies it might not they might not spring to mind that these were Mike Nichols movies that you have amassed this body of work in which the stamp is just that they're good it's you know you don't have it you don't have a recognizable style the way say Scorsese has or De Palma or is that deliberate or by accident well both in other words it's it's it depends on what interest you or what draws you first of all if you wanted a giant reputation then do one thing you know be a master of suspense or whatever and then that you're the master you're the master of suspense and we all know it and Hitchcock was great and then he wasn't and then he was like all of us you come and you go but I'm more interested in I don't think careers matter because we're gonna be dead and forgotten what's that what does that for i I think it's more like what kind of a time you're having when you do it does it is it does it feel good are you are you glad to be doing it and I think the whole point is to to examine different situations the those which you can grasp and to which you can maybe contribute something but the whole thing that comes with the movies and I think it comes came back when it was happening with little magazines which movies really needed because there were different kinds of movies and there was something we don't hardly have anymore they were art movies and all the people who made commercial movies me included would imitate the art movies because they were the startling ones and they were the ones from which you could learn something and then they died because they weren't enough of us and because we are as as Arthur Miller is always reminding us pure market forces that denieth things nothing ever leaves forever will have Radio forever so that must mean we'll have art movies forever that gets smaller and smaller and more and more static and always interesting but the market forces are making movies bigger and bigger and bigger till most of us can't grasp them anymore because we don't know all the superheroes and are they all in this one or they and which and so forth it's it's just two different markets I don't know what my point is when I interviewed you a couple years ago for the paper on the occasion of the year the retrospective of your movies at MoMA I think you told me that this movie was made for almost no money Syrena half a million bucks yeah and so that was a different you were able to do that I mean you couldn't make a movie like that for that today not only were we able to do it but we had months and months and months to prepare it and there's no such thing anymore unless you make a movie for one or two million dollars and and just take the time to prepare it but that was an enormous luxury then and it's much greater luxury even now and we were very happy doing that because it's what you can do with a play again not if you're in rehearsal one of the smart things we did and Scott Rudin the hero of the whole production and that he ever thing we needed he wanted and needed to and we did it together and he made it possible but he what we did I said the ideal way to rehearse a play is to do a workshop and not show it to anybody and never perform it and then stop and go away and let it ripen for 3-4 months and then come back and that's based on experience in which you maybe do a play in Chicago and some half a year later somebody says you know what would you like to get everybody together and you do and they get to what they used to do and they think I don't have to make that face why don't I just say it everything gets simpler gets simpler and that was what happened with the Graduate we spent what Dustin used to say is we could have gone on Broadway with it we spent so much time with it but we weren't so much rehearsing as improvising we did their childhood we did all sorts of things but we also looked for things that illustrate the theme I decided because the authors certainly didn't agree of the novel and the first two guys who wrote the screenplay didn't agree but buck understood what I meant Mark Henry and he did agree and we did it together and he I said I wanted it to be about not becoming a thing in a world of things and and that's what we did and that's why that's what we're doing all the time at the party when he says plastics when he escapes when he gets with mrs. Robinson it's all to avoid becoming a thing because everything is pushing him a world of things into being a thing and if you have if you found a theme like that in a story that actually can support that as a center you do need time you need to explore all the aspects of it in all the ways it can be expressed certainly with a camera but by the actors and the actor with each other and the set and the things that happen and what we see and it's it's the greatest happiness is to have found or chosen whichever way you want to look at it a core of something and continuing to explore it and not being obligated the horror of preparing a play now is that out-of-towners no use you have five weeks of rehearsal or God to help us for and then you start previews and you're performing and everybody comes from New York to see it out of town and often writes about it you've had no time that's why I'm I'm in love with the workshop idea and keeping something your own why you explore it to go back to the Graduate another dumb casting question I read somewhere that that Robert Redford wanted the part yes and so you went and I believe at this time Dustin Hoffman was completely unknown yes so what and again a brilliant choice but what made you and and the character in the book is is a Redford character he's not at right he's of yes right so what means well I can answer your question Robert was a friend of mine we had done our first play together well his second my first and when they said would you like to try doing a play directing a play I said maybe because I read this play called nobody's fool and I said why don't we do it in summer stock so we'll find out if I'm any good at directing and if it's any good and can we have that actor I saw on playoffs 90 last week he was a Nazi that was Redford and on the first day of rehearsal I knew two things one is that I was meant to direct because I had no problem I told everybody where to go on what to do and to is it Redford was great I could say to him what if you have a cold it's a good idea and he was amazing and we did the play and we had great time when we became very good friends and now I'm doing they graduate and he wants to test and I test it with another an actress who's a friend of mine and and he's great and then we were playing shooting pool at my rented house and he I said you can't play it he said why I said because you're you can't play a loser look at you and he said yes I can of course I can play a loser I said really I said when did you last strike out with a girl and he said what do you mean so it wasn't a hard decision because he had to be a loser that's what it was going to be about and had to be a stressed inward loser has no meaning and in a movie so and then finally after having seen every guy that age that it was an actor in America I remember this guy who I had seen in a play called I think the journey of the fifth horse he was playing a Russian transvestite fishwife and that would be Dustin and we brought him out and tested him and he was very good but he was not only very good while we shot it he was much better on film and he was one of the few people that I ever worked with that had that deal with Technicolor that overnight in the chemicals they get better he was one Elizabeth Taylor was the other you'd think wow that's take 32 I guess that's his best we can do and they see the next thing you say oh my god I didn't have to do 32 she had it on three but you could only see it on film and that's why it had to be Dustin the if we back up for a minute you you talked about how you you you you took to directing very naturally and you found it suited your in dictatorial impulses but I'm curious how you got there because because my understanding is you began and and you had your first success with Elaine May as a sort of brilliant improv duo right and I mean it's so you were an actor of sorts but you weren't you had you did you ever appear in real stage stuff so I mean someone came time to be a director how did you know how to be in direct well here's what happened first of all if you were improvising and we we started at Compass with their big idea was let's all improvise yeah and that was it and those of us who went out on stage had nothing except that idea you don't have any lines so improvise and you're gonna need rules any ideas for what no just do it I mean I'm simplifying but that was basically the idea so the first thing is that you're terrible for a long time it's the main thing about improvising and then not suddenly but slowly something begins to happen and what you're really doing is because you've night after night you've been a catastrophe and and you've been so unhappy and then we were in Chicago so and we were near the lake and sometimes we would actually go jump in the lake after a show because it was so humiliating but slowly slowly your unconscious is waking up and ultimately it comes to save you if you do it long enough and I always remember the night where I was working with Elaine because I always somehow was better with Elaine and they all ran into the bar with the actors hanging out and said come quick mike has a character from that I got pretty good and Elaine was always better and that's what it was about with the two of us she could go on forever as a character I could not I my only choice was to move it forward to have a plot and that's when I learned it's very interesting to learn the rules of drama viscerally inside yourself to save your ass because then you really know them and what we learned especially Elaine and I because we hit it off and we thought somehow the same way and we began to build a group of scenes which is why we eventually were able to do what we did but we discovered something really interesting is that if you're making up scenes I don't know what it's like for a writer but I think it's not that different there are only three kinds of scenes and I'd love to hear some more if somebody's got them Elena always said when in doubt seduce it was a great rule because immediately something is happening you have to have something happening that's what a scene is so if you seduce whoever it is it could be the mailman it could be a passing dog it doesn't matter seduce and you have an event the other is of course a fight most scenes or fights in some places like Virginia Woolf or entirely fights and one or two seduction as it were to spring a trap and so you got seductions you got fights and you got negotiations most of Shakespeare is either a fight or a seduction and negotiation once you know that you know what to do with the scene and you'd be amazed in rehearsing plays how often scenes turn out to be fights and you've wasted all this time not knowing it and the day you realize it's a fight it's all done all the lines make sense you understand at last why they're saying these things and these are the things that improvising teaches you it's to save yourself you're out in front of all these people with drinks and you've got to do something and then you know them in your bones and then a place seems somehow more attainable because you can do that with scenes and then what you can do in plays which you can't do an improv because you don't have sets bottles glasses beds is business business is my best friend and that's what barefoot was all about my first play is a friend of mine dick Benjamin replaced Redford after a year and a half or something and he said I can't do this he said there's so much business I'll never learn it you come home you undress you put your tie in the dictionary you go to the refrigerator you take out it never stops because they were more in the course of their lives when they did that and then they did what's necessary with Neil Simon who writes very funny lines if you don't punch them if you don't play as if they're comedy but are living if you're in the course of your lives undressing and grabbing a bite out of the refrigerator the Lions will take care of themselves if you sell them god help you and that's what we discovered very fast and that's what can be lost if there's no old fetch to say no don't do it like a comedy line that's the whole point so all these things it seemed that by accident that improvising teaches you some of the most useful things so so you learned that and then you and then you made the switch to movie so I believe the first time was was Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf yeah so that's a whole other step and what I mean will you so you all of a sudden you're on stage you're on a sorry you're on a set you're directing Elizabeth Taylor Richard Burton you've never directed a movie before in your life right what's that like well I'll tell you in a weird thing I thought about this obviously because even I was a little surprised I didn't know if it would look like a movie or not is what I had forgotten was that when we were in New York I mean I came from Europe and everything we were growing up in New York and my parents were not happy and they fought a lot and I would think who needs this I'm going to the movies so every day after school I would go to the Lodz 83rd of the RKO 81st Street I would go to the movies sometimes I wouldn't understand it and I'd say to somebody else in the row is he is dreaming is this a dream I remember doing that but the thing about reading or watching movies is if they excite you you begin to learn things about how they're done and store them you don't know how to categorize them or describe them but you know what they are and you remember I remember details of movies oh I always do but I did from when I was like however old I was 8 9 10 12 so that in a way I'd been and and by the way when I knew I was going to do Virginia Woolf I i studied the guys who meant the most to me like George Stevens and A Place in the Sun was pretty much my Bible really yes I think I must have seen it a hundred fifty times and I learned from it and if you look you can see it it's not that I copied it but I learned what a shot is and what a shot expresses and what you can do with the camera to tell the story which is entirely different from how you do the scene which is a whole other thing and the movies are different from carnal knowledge which is one of my favorite films even though it's it's it's not the one that comes to everybody's mind first it comes to mind second after the graduate I think part of why I like it so much is it's it's the one movie in your whole body work that that's to me stands out because it's so much darker than the rest am I right about that yes this goes someplace that you except maybe in Virginia well if you never went again no is that because you've never wanted to or or the material didn't come along or or I think once was enough I think once was enough for some feelings I had in thoughts I had don't forget it was very much Jules Feiffer Jules when Elaine and I came to New York he was our first friend he was our first person in the audience I mean soon we got New York we got confident in green and Bernstein and so forth but first before anybody we got Jules who rightly felt that we were on a similar track and he said he'd seen us on television been totally stunned that we were people on television who were actually petting in a car and talking about sex real sex like in life and that he associated with that because that's what he wrote about so we became very good friends and then I was getting ready I guess to do catch-22 or something maybe it was while we were working on the Graduate I can't remember where it was but what I remember is that he was a friend and he sent me this play carnal knowledge and it's pretty much what was on the screen and I read it and I called him and I said I don't think it's a play I think it's a movie static though it is I think it's a movie because I want to see the women who aren't talking I want to see the reactor rather than the actor which you can only do in a movie and I have to say also that I think it wasn't a universal truth it was certain generation of men don't you think yeah yeah I think that's right yeah I think it end with that generation it's not that it was single it was maybe two or three but it was so hopeless and they were so much about getting laid and not about any kind of human connection it just couldn't it couldn't last and it was particularly despairing for all of us for everyone and when you were partly part of it then when it was over he was so relieved because you didn't I was into a friend of mine I said we actually have the same feeling about sex that middle-class girls do and we did you know who say you wanted a relationship and somebody you cared about everything but there was nowhere you could say that without sounding like a and then it was over right Candice Bergen is wonderful in it Nicholson is tremendous in this movie and Margaret is tremendous she's forgotten about I think when people talk about this movie and at the end there are these two astonishing performances from each of them they're these long rants what was I mean it was that hard to get that out of them or was that just part of that was just well nothing was hard to get out of Jack because Jack was this was before Easy Rider came out oh really I saw Easy Rider before it came out and I said that's who I want for carnal knowledge and we immediately got to be very good friends and then we got to Vancouver where we could do everything in wall in one place except a couple of days in New York and I said Jack the only thing you have to do for yourself and for me for the length of shootings you have to give up grass because you have to speed up your rhythm I said oh okay Nick and he did he did and because he is and was a great actor part of what great actors do is give a tremendous gift to their partners and that's what began to happen in rehearsal Artie Garfunkel had never acted so what did Jack do they moved into the set on the stage and were roommates I mean they spent a couple of nights there and then he had already over a lot to his house where of course he had a hot tub in various young ladies and he formed a friendship with Artie he went after candy he was horrible to Ann Margaret when we rehearsed and when we shot the big fight we shot her side first for days with him saying unrepeatable things to her and he upset her no end and when we turned around on him his voice was gone he had given his all for her performance and done it with her that's what happens with a great actor is also a great guy and it was tremendous gift - everything - and Margaret of course and she knew it and she loved him and and it was not that she isn't great - she was great and it's great but she simply hadn't done anything like this he knew how to help her and what starts to happen whether it's a movie or a play is that the the experience the emotionally facile that the actors for whom it's second nature are part of what they're doing is is is creating the atmosphere Thea for the others so that if you're in a movie with Meryl you're just the main thing to do is just keep looking at her sadly we have to skip over Merrill the we're gonna skip over a lot of movies we could I wait this is so and should we be all night oh that's okay we could do it but Charlie Wilson's War was that the first time you ever worked with no I had done a play with Phil's the seagull that's right that's right and what we were doing this he's entirely different on a movie from a play entirely we're doing this ego and for a few days you couldn't hear him and then he yelled all through and then he wasn't where you blocked him where is he he was all the way over there and it was always sweet and we never had any words and and after the about the fifth day of this I said Phil he said I know I know I'm sorry I have to do all the things I'm not going to do so I'm not gonna interfere whatever his process is I'm good with it but in the movies he's entirely different the movies you say okay Phil you want to run through it no let's do it okay I would say that's great for me I'm happy already he says can I see you one more then he'd do it it's even better sure okay that's okay God knows what he does I have no idea I never will but whatever he does and it's the same with Meryl it's the same with great actors I don't think they know exactly what they do they certainly are not going to talk about it ever to anyone and I think that's a very important part of it is whatever their process is please don't even ask well we were rehearsing salesmen they invited us all a show like this it was a radio interview in front of an audience don't ask me why and we had warned the guy that there in rehearsal they're not going to be able to talk about their process but of course he asked and like Linda would go like this lalalala just the questions she didn't want to hear never mind the answers and they all just shut up completely because they can't and when you're working and preparing something like that scene or like any of these things are like the play we're doing you certainly don't talk about what they're going to do that's their business you talk about what's happening and what the activities of the scene are and what's really what the events are but you never never talk about how you do anything or what their emotion should be because that's that's personal that's their job I'm also curious what made you choose this material I mean it's a it's a very unlikely story this sort of renegade Texas congresswoman gets himself involved in supporting the the and maybe we wish now that he hadn't this is supporting the Afghan he's against the Russians what what was it that that made you think yeah that's a movie I want to do I was well it came to me from Tom Hanks who had bought the book okay and he said would you want to direct it and I said I'd like I've read it and I said I'd like to meet Charlie Wilson and I had lunch with Charlie Wilson in the arc and I was stunned by his well his power he was a beautiful tall benign person who was friends with everyone on the block anybody who came by and he was a very rare man and I realized that what had happened to him was that he learned about this situation with Afghanistan and US and Russia and he fell into it and became another man and I thought for all of us who are reading this stuff all the time and trying to keep the countries straight no I'm sorry I'm in Syria we spent a lot of time to begin with saying things like that and the story of him getting drawn in getting passionate falling in love and dedicating his life to this hopeless war what about that this war that has gone on forever this nation that has never been defeated in war not by Russia which has never been defeated and there are certain individuals and countries that some how did he get it we won't say anything now but it it it seemed worth doing and like it would be fun and it was that I was struck by I also think it has a very smart script by Aaron Sorkin and when I was thinking earlier today about about talking with you tonight and and thinking about the question I asked you earlier that the Nichols movies don't have in some ways this recognizable element that runs through all them and then I occurred to me yeah they do which is they all have very smart scripts by smart screenwriters you look down the list of people you worked with Elaine May buck Henry Aaron Sorkin it's funny though that's a very interesting G that you should say that because when I got the AFI thing when I get an award I'm always so ashamed that I'm sort of paralyzed because I should have said no is my feeling always and it always is the operative word here and you know Elaine came out at that one and said I thank you so much for the emotions that I hope you like my dress I bought this dress 35 years ago from Mike's first Lifetime Achievement Award so I'm what we're sitting there in shame and I thought I can't sit here like this I've got to give myself something to do so they did all these clips and I thought why don't I see if the good movies have a principle that separates them from the knot and I did and I found it which is that every good movie I made I had a buddy I had the person you call up 3:00 in the morning and say I think we're wrong I think what we could do is and they say well that's good but I was thinking I'm they've been asleep and everything they go right into it you have I have to have that I don't know what what author is do I don't know what they do because I'm not an auditor but to to do whatever the hell I do I do need that buddy or those buddies when I have them the movies usually okay when I don't it's not with the exception of Virginia Woolf because I had although he wasn't there I had all be always I knew him I knew what he meant we had talked about many things because we sort of started in New York at the same time he landed me in all the so I he was my buddy in a strange way but other than that I think that it is about being buddies movies are and you need them to make them the TV version of angels in America which is is after all a movie of a play what interested me about this was was the the task of taking angels which is one of the great blaze of my time of most of our times and and putting it on the small screen must must have been a challenge and then it's magical in a movie way with all these special effects and then if you think back to angels if you were lucky enough to see it on stage and the magic was all visible and this is this is the real difference isn't it between movies and and one of them between movies and plays yes it is certainly one of the differences it it's I I think that when you turn you about Kushner and working with Kushner all rules are suspended because he's not like anyone else and to join him and and what he's doing is it as a rare and wonderful experience and he became somebody I I need to go on living I loved him in that way and he he he's very he's not like anybody else because he knows everything which is daunting but he also has the secret of staying not only creative but the thing that he is a great writer which is never to be satisfied and to to never ever look at what he's accomplished or what we all think of him he doesn't want to hear he doesn't want to know he manages to block it successfully because as we were talking about certain other writers and everything it becomes a terrible problem when you are a reputation and you have to keep doing it he has no problem with any of your life and to to understand what he did and to carefully try to get in there and say well maybe for the screen even though this he did an amazing thing he's not like anything brighter ever I told him at one point I think I can do all of this and I want to do all of it I have to tell you there's some there's a section where I think the string will snap and that is the Mormons endlessly crossing the plains and he was like 30 pages I can't do it I can't keep that string from snapping I want I need that woman in the covered wagon and the greatest speech in the whole play about what God does but could I please just skip that he said of course course no problem and then he did an amazing thing he cut it out of the printed version because he liked it too and when you I watched I saw the play when they did it recently its signature and it was wonderful but the chain he kept changing it he kept working on it there is no playwright I've ever heard of I mean what you hear about Shakespeare maybe he used to hand things to writers from the pit but but he he's never finished and which is both ennobling for actors and also a nightmare because he's never vented they have to keep relearning new things and relearning new things but you're part of something so astonishing that it's worth it and that's what happened to us in in queens shooting and for a year we shot this thing for a year every day I'd go to work and we'd shoot some more I actually forgot that people would ever see it and I was completely happy we all were we were in a kind of paradise because we're doing Kushner and we were all together and every day was joyful and then the end I thought oh my god it's gonna be on television but and that was okay too but I didn't we didn't think stage screen we thought here are the things we haven't that we can do how do we accomplish these scenes and then we had some ideas this is probably an unfair question which do you like more theater or movies well I like both there's a point I think that each teaches you something about the other I think that each is the thing that you lose scary when you return to either of them you're scared and scared is the first thing you lose when Elaine and I were a comedy team and we were on TV a lot as guests things I got to the point where they say five four I sorted to not literally go to sleep but just zone out I was so on the scared and therefore not good you have to be good scared to be good but if you switch back and forth that you're you're scared forever I'm not good for a play until I've heard it until like they're actors in the room and I hear it and I see them with an alcohol interact I don't I'm not very good at text by itself I mean I know when I like a play and I know when I like what it's about and what the events that seemed to be but I I need to see some human beings in a room saying these things to each other then I immediately begin to see what it's about and what the scenes really are about and begin to figure out how one could make this manifest movies or something else movies are a dream movies are so much about to whom any given moment is happening if that the camera has to choose whose experience is this moment and the next who's and so forth so that movies are more about the script and looking at where the movie would take place finding a location finding a location can transform everything a good example is Elaine and I loved Cosmo for years and years because it's one of the great plots it's not about gay people at all it's about family and we couldn't get the rice and we couldn't get the rights and there we did and I had worked on the stage version and that didn't work out and there was going to be in New Orleans and that didn't seem quite right and and then the art director said have you ever been to South Beach and I said no actually I haven't and we went the first 10 minutes I said here we are and I felt a whole movie South Beach was the movie and in Elaine and I in working on making American events instead of South of France events knew that to bring a congressman a very straight-laced congressman into South Beach was to be in comedy heaven and it's different things on different movies but there's always some physical thing that tells you ah that's what it is when I said objects and the Graduate I thought well let's just do it let's just say it let's make him an object let's put him on a belt just like his suitcase and we'll intercut him on the belt the suitcase on the belt two objects get it both the point is no nobody gets it which is correct I mean you don't to be sitting there thinking I think he means that humans are objects but the point is you get it done because you're telling a secret story as well as an open story a clear story so it's very different from a play plays are about we're on stage everybody is when you have everybody in the right place on stage the scene can happen and by the way if they're in the wrong place the scene can't happen that's partly what rehearsal was about thank you thanks very much you

Channel: New York Times Events

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Id: IrDXX32A2gY

Length: 56min 21sec (3381 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 12 2016