Mike Nichols: A Life

by Mark Harris

“You must learn to hear people thinking. Just in self-defense,” he said, “you have to learn, where is their kindness? Where is their danger, where is their generosity?”

At times, he said, he felt like a human seismograph, recording “a thousand tiny victories and defeats in an ordinary conversation.

“Elaine and I had a rule,” Nichols said. “Never try for a laugh. Get the laugh on the way to something else. Trying for it directly is prideless and dangerous, and the audience loses respect.”

Eventually you forgive him and you forgive yourself. Because what’s the point? We were young, we were stupid, and we were unsuited. That doesn’t mean you can’t be nice later.”

What was Virginia Woolf if not the story of a long and dangerous improv?

“Don’t forget to leave some string for the pearls.” Nichols never forgot it. “It was the most useful thing anyone ever said to me. He meant, connect your masterpiece scenes—tell the fucking story!”

“Here’s the thing about black-and-white,” he said. “It’s not literal. It is a metaphor, automatically . . . and that’s the point: A movie is a metaphor. If it’s in black-and-white, it’s partly solved—it’s already saying, ‘No, this is not life, this is something about life.’”

‘You kids think relating is the icing on the cake. It’s not. It’s the cake.’”

“Why is it,” Maury Yeston asked him, “that the richest people are the greediest?” “Because that one extra dollar is just a little more insurance that they’ll never have to return to the time in their lives when they didn’t have it,” Nichols replied.

“You have to prepare like a maniac,” he told Cullman. “Research and research and research. Know everything there is to know. And then, on that first day, be willing to throw it all away.”