Mark Harrisis trying to seduce us.
Or at least, the new subject of his biography is.
Harris, a former columnist and executive editor of EW, has built a career writing about Hollywood history.
Credit: David A. Harris; Penguin
Someone whose life and work would never bore me.
I would have no opportunities to cut away.
His story would be the story.
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That all seemed like a fascinating challenge to me.
Because of that, did the writing process differ for you at all?
Did you find it harder to grasp the story of one person versus broader social and cultural trends?
Everett Collection
It was also important to me to always remember what age Mike was at any particular time.
You have different priorities and different levels of energy and different passions.
What was it about him that made you choose him for this?
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Was it something you had percolating from the time you met him?
No, not at all.
He had thrown away papers and any future biographer was going to have a hard time telling a story.
HBO
You knew him socially.
So, did that make it more challenging or give you better insight?
It was definitely a challenge.
I’d never written about someone I knew, [and] I’d never written a biography.
For my first book, I interviewed a ton of people.
For my second book, I interviewed no one because it was all set in World War II.
I was dreading that.
Do I switch into first-person?
Do I call my husband, Tony?
Do I start referring to Mike as Mike instead of Nichols?"
With his quips about it being impossible, did you find that to be true?
Were there interviews you did that were key to counteracting that?
I talked to about 250 people and I only stopped because it was time to start writing.
I could have kept going.
I, by no means, exhausted the list.
In some cases, I got really lucky.
In many cases, they saved diaries or letters.
Her name is mentioned in maybe 32 out of the 35 chapters.
She was that important to Mike’s life and career and development.
There is no other Elaine May.
She’s a remarkably thoughtful and insightful person.
I got a lot of insight from him over the years.
Would you say that Nichols appealed to you as a subject because his work does that particularly well?
I did not go into this with a working theory of Mike Nichols.
What is the life of a director in that context?
I wanted to understand the life of a creative artist that way.
What surprised you the most?
How much and over how long a term he wrestled with depression.
That was nothing that I really felt about him when I knew him.
I think his worst years of it were well behind him by the time I got to know him.
That was a big surprise.
It wasn’t something I discovered all at once.
It was something that kept coming up in interviews about different periods of his life.
Which of his four films would you recommend as essential viewing to pair with the book?
You have to pickWho’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which was his first movie.
He said that you could see him learn to make movies as you watch that movie.
But it must have been a very quick learning curve because he already seemed completely at home.
It’s consummate movie-making.
Three and four get trickier and are more a matter of personal taste.
If you want to understand Mike’s career,Silkwoodis the restart.
It’s when he came back to movie-making after many years away from it.
And it’s not really made in the style of any movie that he made after it.
It’s his own thing.
[You get] all that and Cher.
He never wanted to rest.
If you had to sum it up, who would you say Mike Nichols was?
He was an artist with astoundingly, unusual fluency in different forms.
There are great movie directors; there are great stage directors.
Mike was both and a groundbreaking performer as well.
