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
The unconscious is our best collaborator.
Being with an insanely jealous person is like being in the room with a dead mammoth.
A movie is like a person. Either you trust it or you don't.
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.
Any good movie is filled with secrets.
I love to take actors to a place where they open a vein. That’s the job. The key is that I make it safe for them to open the vein.
There’s nothing better than discovering, to your own astonishment, what you’re meant to do. It’s like falling in love.
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.
Improvisation has to do with exploring something like two brothers in a room together. You find out things about situations by discovering the things that they aren't saying. It's a way to explore scenes. Sometimes it's more useful than others, but it's always there to see if there's anything that you might improve.
The greatest thrill is that moment when a thousand people are sitting in the dark, looking at the same scene, and they are all apprehending something that has not been spoken. That's the thrill of it, the miracle - that's what holds us to movies forever. It's what we wish we could do in real life.
A great thing is happening on cable TV. You see characters change in stories over years, like in Tolstoy. That's a whole, thrilling new form that I really enjoy. They are Tolstoy-an in their endless character development and narrative changes... a show like 'Breaking Bad' is astonishing.
All movies are pure process. A commercial movie isn't less process than an art movie. You can't make your decisions about a film on the basis of, 'Is it important enough? Is it serious enough?' It's either alive or it's not for me. If it's alive, I want to do it.
You could say that it's in talking movies that inner life begins to appear. You can see things happen to the faces of people that were neither planned nor rehearsed.
I believed early and still believe that everybody who can act can do it already, just they don't know how and don't want to talk about it.