Rassegna stampa di Mike Nichols

MIKE NICHOLS, the subject of a two-week retrospective starting Tuesday at the Museum of Modern Art, is not an obvious choice for a place as artsy and highbrow as the MoMA film department. MoMA retrospectives tend to be awarded to brooding European auteurs — Bernardo Bertolucci and Milos Forman were the last two — and not to commercial Hollywood directors who include on their résumé pop hits like “Working Girl,” “The Birdcage” and, just recently, “Charlie Wilson’s War.”
Except for a puzzling string of duds in the mid-’70s, almost all of Mr. Nichols’s movies have made money, and a few, like “The Graduate” and “Carnal Knowledge,” have been recognized as cultural landmarks. But because of their commercial shimmer, their way of eliciting exceptional performances by top-of-the-line stars, it’s sometimes hard to say what makes a Nichols movie a Nichols movie. They seem like vehicles for actors, not the director, whose stamp is in leaving almost no trace of himself.
“If you want to be a legend, God help you, it’s so easy,” Mr. Nichols said the other day over coffee in his Times Square office. “You just do one thing. You can be the master of suspense, say. But if you want to be as invisible as is practical, then it’s fun to do a lot of different things.”
If his movies have a common denominator, it’s probably their intelligence and, though Mr. Nichols doesn’t think of himself as a writer, their writerly attention to detail. They’re almost invariably based on good scripts, from which he extracts extra layers of nuance. The organizer of the retrospective, Rajendra Roy, the chief curator of film at MoMA, said: “Here is a guy who is in some ways quintessentially Hollywood, and yet you can see in his movies a consistent through-line. He’s an example of how popular cinema can be vision based.”
Nora Ephron, who wrote the script for Mr. Nichols’s movie “Heartburn” and co-wrote his film “Silkwood,” said recently: “It’s supposed to be a given that Mike doesn’t have the visual style of, say, a Scorsese. But that isn’t fair. Mike doesn’t use the camera in a flamboyant way, but he has a style just the way a writer who’s crystal clear has a style. He has an almost invisible fluidity.”

She added: “One of the main things about Mike’s movies is that, with a few exceptions, they’re all really smart movies about smart people. They’re about something. And he’s funny. You’re certainly not going to lose a joke. And if there’s one hidden, he’ll find it.”
Mr. Nichols is now 77 but hardly slowing down. Among the possible projects on his plate are movies based on scripts by David Mamet and Tony Kushner and a theatrical revival of a Harold Pinter play. He is beginning to think about simplifying and de-accessioning, though.
He’s unloading his horses, for example. He used to own 150 but is now down to 6, and they’re “on the way out,” he promised. He also doesn’t listen much anymore to his classical record collection.
“As a young man I got to a bad stage where I knew every recording of every piece,” he said. “But I spoiled it. I was a pseudo-expert without any real knowledge.”
“Until about a week ago I thought ‘Vesti la giubba’ meant ‘clothe the Jew,’ ” he added, referring to the famous aria in which Pagliacci sings about putting on his clown costume. “So I came to love silence, because it’s so rare, and it’s now my favorite aural condition.”
Still boyish looking, Mr. Nichols retains an impish grin and the deadpan, quicksilver wit that for a while made him and Elaine May the most innovative comedians in the United States. Paragraphs spill out of him as if outlined: the three reasons for this, the four most important examples of that. And Mr. Nichols’s greatest improvisation is still himself. He wakes up every morning in his Fifth Avenue apartment, collects himself and, wearing a wig and paste-on eyebrows, plays a character called Mike Nichols.
He was born Michael Igor Peschkowsky, the son of a White Russian doctor who emigrated to Berlin after the Russian revolution, and he arrived in New York in 1939, at the age of 7, permanently hairless (a reaction to whooping cough vaccine) and with almost no English. All he could say was: “I do not speak English” and “Please, do not kiss me.” He enrolled at the Dalton School, where an early classmate was Buck Henry, and set about cultivating what he calls his “immigrant’s ear.”
“Semiconsciously I was thinking all the time: ‘How do they do it? Let me listen,’ ” he recalled, and added: “I’ll tell you the most extreme example of immigrant’s ear in all of Western civilization. My grandfather, Gustav Landauer, was quite a well-known writer in Germany. He was also very political, and he was part of the two-week provisional Weimar government after the kaiser fell. When the government fell, he was taken to the police station and beaten to death. His best friend, who was also in the government, escaped, made his way to Sante Fe, changed his name to B. Traven and wrote ‘The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.’ That’s the ur-immigrant story.”
Mr. Nichols’s story is scarcely less dramatic. His father died when he was 12, plunging the family into genteel poverty. Lonely and self-conscious about his looks, he found solace in the movies and theater, thanks in part to the generosity of Sol Hurok, who had been one of his father’s patients.
He attended the University of Chicago, floundered a bit, and then was heaped with undreamed-of success, first with Ms. May, whom he met in college (along with Susan Sontag and Ed Asner) and next as a theater director. His string of Broadway hits (including “The Odd Couple” and “Spamalot”) may be even more remarkable than his movie record, and Mr. Nichols is one of very few in the performing arts to score the grand slam of major American entertainment awards: he has a Grammy, an Oscar, four Emmys and eight Tonys. He is a shrewd dealmaker, and he has been rewarded like a foundling prince, so that along the way there were countless girlfriends, multiple wives (Diane Sawyer, to whom he has been married since 1988, is his fourth), paintings, cars, a stable.
The only thing he doesn’t have enough of anymore is time. He used to love to develop a play out of town, then close it down and put it aside for a few months. “Everything gets simpler on the shelf,” he said. He also recalled, with amazement, how long he was allowed to work on “The Graduate,” which he directed when he was in his mid-30s.
“We prepared that film for about a year,” he said. “They gave us a little bit of money — about three million bucks — and we rented some space out at Paramount and went to our bungalows every day. I remember one day the art director came and said that when Mrs. Robinson got undressed maybe we should see the marks from the straps of her bathing suit. That was a day’s work — time just spent soaking yourself in a subject.”
He and Buck Henry, the screenwriter, spent three or four weeks working just on the famous montage sequence in “The Graduate,” he said, and he added: “It’s painful and hard to remember now how long and how carefully we worked. I really do think it’s important to sit with a text for as long as you can afford to, reading and talking and doing what I call ‘naming things,’ which is just explaining what happens in every scene. Now you have to do it all in your head, and you have to do it pretty damn fast, because nobody’s going to pay you to do prep. You’re going to have to do it on your own time. It can be done, of course, but it’s just much harder — unless you’re Buñuel, and I think about him pretty much every day. You have to look for a way to free yourself, and he had the best conceivable way: he just jumped to the surreal.”
Ms. Ephron compared Mr. Nichols’s way of preparing to psychoanalysis. “You sit there for days and days,” she said, “and he keeps asking questions. What is this scene in the movie about? What does it remind you of? You free associate. And eventually you figure it out.”
Mr. Nichols is a great believer in the single big idea, the controlling metaphor or idea that defines a picture — the notion that Benjamin in “The Graduate,” for example, is on a conveyor belt, just like his suitcase. But he is also like a psychoanalyst in that he trusts a lot in the unconscious. The point of all the preparation, he said, is to get to the point where you’re surprised. And, he added, “You want to keep doing it until you get to the thing nobody could have planned.”
The famous ending of “The Graduate,” for example, came about because as it came time to film the scene where Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross get on the bus, Mr. Nichols found himself growing unaccountably irritable. “I told Dustin and Katharine, ‘Look, we’ve got traffic blocked for 20 blocks, we’ve got a police escort, we can’t do this over and over. Get on the bus and laugh, God damn it.’ I remember thinking, What the hell is wrong with me? I’ve gone nuts. The next day I looked at what we’d shot and went, ‘Oh my God, here’s the end of the movie: they’re terrified.’ My unconscious did that. I learned it as it happened.”
During the filming of “Angels in America” for HBO, he recalled, he was amazed by Meryl Streep. “I said to her, ‘How did you ever think of making Ethel Rosenberg funny?’ And she said, ‘Oh, you never know what you’re going to do until you do it.’ That’s it. That sentence says it all, and it’s what happens when you’re in the very highest realms of this stuff. The director can’t make it happen. It’s about all being in the same place and being moved by the way each of your imaginations kindles everyone else.”
Ms. Streep said: “What makes Mike so great is one of the hardest things for people temperamentally drawn to directing. People who direct tend to want to be in control, and Mike’s gift is knowing when to take his hands off and just let it happen. A lot of directors are still dealing with the text when you’re on the set. Mike has done all that beforehand, so when you get on the set you feel it’s a secure world where all the architecture is in place. You can jump as hard as you want and the floor won’t give way.”
Mr. Nichols said he had to keep reminding himself how new his profession was. “Movie acting was invented less than 100 years ago — movie acting with sound,” he explained. “You know how Harold Bloom says that Shakespeare invented us? It’s a fascinating idea, and you can go quite far with 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. This is what Garbo was such a master of: actual thoughts that had not occurred before that particular take. And you can see this taking tremendous leaps with Brando and Clift and then with Streep.”
He added: “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. We all see something and understand it together, and nobody has to say a word. There’s a good reason that the very best sound an audience can make — in both the theater and the movies — is no sound at all, just absolute silence.”
Da The New York Times, 12 Aprile 2009

Figlio di ebrei tedeschi immigrati in America quando aveva sette anni, Mike Nichols è stato forse il più giovane passeggero del famoso e famigerato treno Vienna-Berlino-Hollywood. Michael Igor Peschkonsky - questo il suo vero nome - ebbe una giovinezza molto dura: suo padre, medico, morì quando Mike aveva dodici anni e solo a prezzo di molti sforzi Nichols riuscì con una serie di borse di studio e di lavoretti a frequentare l'Università di Chicago, studiando quindi da attore con Strasberg.

Con Elaine May, Alan Arkin, Barbara Harris e altri diede vita alla fine degli anni cinquanta a un gruppo che mise in scena con successo spettacoli di teatro e di cabaret, come il celebre An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May. E dal suo trionfale de-butto cinematografico con Chi ha paura di Virginia Woolf?, nel 1966, il nome di Mike Nichols è stato per anni un marchio di garanzia: di uno spettacolo intelligente, attuale, divertente. Nel 1967 è stata la volta di uno dei memorabili film del decennio, Il laureato, con cui Nichols vinse l'Oscar per la regia. Nel 1970 il successo si chiamò Comma 22. Nel 1971 Conoscenza carnale, che portava sugli schermi tutto il carico di provocazione del testo teatrale di Jules Feiffer.
Ma non è continuata così, e dopo la serie aurea l'unico film a suo modo pienamente riuscito tra gli altri dieci che finora Nichols ha realizzati è Una donna in carriera (1988), che ha segnato il linguaggio e l'esempio per una generazione di fanciulle ambiziose. Più interessante resta quello strano, cupissimo film d'impegno civile che è Silkwood (1983). Il suo film più recente è un brillante remake di Il vizietto, Piume di struzzo, con Robin Williams e Gene Hackman nei ruoli che già furono di Ugo Tognazzi e Michel Senault. E a sessantacinque anni Nichols sembra ancora un ottimo artigiano alla ricerca dei suoi materiali perduti: quelli, forse, di un momento particolare suo e americano che si chiamava anni sessanta.
Da Irene Bignardi, Il declino dell'impero americano, Feltrinelli, Milano, 1996