Christopher Goodwin Charlie Wilson’s War has been put in the Comedy and
Musical category by the Golden Globe awards.
Mike Nichols I’m uncomfortable in Comedy, and I’ll tell you why.
Millions died. I just can’t be comfortable with being a light, sophisticated
comedy about the death of the multitude. The whole thing has always bugged
me. People are always saying, ‘What do you do? Comedy or drama?’ And I say,
‘How do you know which is which? Aren’t they the same? Isn’t Hamlet a laugh
riot?’
Aaron SorkinIt’s just not a question I ask myself when I am writing. I
do think that if you can tell a serious story and tell it funny, you’ve
given yourself a good chance to succeed.
MN It’s the other way around, too: if you’re telling a funny story and
there’s something dark in it, then it’s 10 times better than any so-called
light comedy. I have a terrible problem with these categories and
distinctions. I happen to think that the deepest and truest, in some ways
darkest, of the great Hollywood movies are the Preston Sturges films. These
distinctions are just a silly thing, since it’s all about the Golden Globes,
and somebody else is making that distinction. But I don’t want to lose to
Hairspray. Because what are we then?
AS It wasn’t until years after I saw The Graduate that I realised it
was being referred to as a comedy. I had always laughed when you wanted me
to laugh in that film – you were always getting the laughs – but it never
felt like that. Movies like that made my generation of writers want to be
writers.
MN When The Graduate was going to open, Joseph E Levine, the producer,
sent us to colleges, and you will never guess what their big objection to it
was, why they were disappointed and didn’t think it was so good. It was
because it wasn’t about Vietnam. That’s all they could see, or say: the film
wasn’t about the topic of the moment, by which you could instantly prove
your value as a liberal, as someone who took these responsibilities
seriously. You would get laid tonight on the basis of your position on
Vietnam. Well, with the fashions here now – who knows who’s going to get
wiped out by the fashion?
CG A recent blog said the 9/11 resonances were more explicit in an
earlier version of the script, which ended with Charlie Wilson on September
11, 2001, in his apartment in Washington, seeing plumes of smoke coming from
the attack on the Pentagon.
AS It’s a whole new critical world out there, where it’s not just the
final product that is being judged, and it is being compared to various
drafts that were obviously only meant for Mike to see. There were many, many
hours of discussion about that scene, and I was the staunchest
keep-the-scene-in guy – I watch the movie now and have never been so happy
to be wrong in my life.
MN You know what we are really talking about, Aaron, the reason you
and I have a moment of confusion and discomfort, notto say killing rage, is
that we always have the problem that whatever we are working on is being
judged, which is no fun. The whole point is that the process is nobody’s
business. It would be like saying, ‘Thomas Mann stands at the mantelpiece to
write: isn’t that sort of a strange thing to do, and to do in front of the
rest of his family? He can’t sit at a desk like everybody else?’ Who gives a
shit?
AS Too many people are watching how you make the sausage now – and
there is an assumption that your motives, whether it’s overcutting a scene
or reshooting a scene or putting in a new scene or changing this line to
that, are somehow sinister or mercenary or motivated by fear.
MN I think that, along with Dancing with the Stars [the American
version of Strictly Come Dancing], something has really happened, which is
that the distinctions and qualifications in people have disappeared, so that
somebody who has gone to Oxford and studied the Poetics and Plato’s view of
what Aristotle thought ... that’s all over.
AS Yes – I am all for everyone having a voice, I just don’t think
everyone has earned the microphone. And that’s what the internet has done.
MN It is a strange thing that’s happened. We will have to see what it
does to kids. Talented and intelligent kids still turn to the past and to
real writers, because they desperately need a compass and a rudder.
And the more brilliant they are, the more instantly they recognise: ‘Here’s a
compass, Tolstoy’s a compass, I’m going to go and follow him; Eugene
O’Neill’s got it, okay, I get it, I know that direction now.’ But those
people are more and more rare; the rest are in this sort of oatmeal of
everybody saying, ‘Get a load off your chest.’ ‘Correctness’ has basically
destroyed colleges. Not only because a guy was actually fired for using the
word ‘niggardly’. But that is what has happened.
On the one hand, there is this blight of correctness, which teaches you to lie
about everything that is your instinct and your feeling, and to take a dip
of the pabulum and dish it out, because at least it’s correct. At the same
time, you’ve got shit on television such as Dancing with the Stars and
American Idol. What’s going to happen to young people? I don’t get it.
CG Do these changes in the culture affect your ability to tell the
stories that you want?
AS When I am setting out to do something, I don’t consider the state
of the culture. I can’t possibly conceive of what the most people are going
to like. Honest to God, I write something that I like, that I think my
friends would like and that I think my father would like, and I keep my
fingers crossed that enough other people are going to like it that I can
earn a living.
MN I don’t know that there is another way if you are any good at it,
because how are you going to write for imaginary people? You know what it
is? It’s economics. It’s market forces. It’s the fact that everything has a
special audience, yet you are supposed to make something that doesn’t have a
special audience. That’s the end of the world.
If somebody said to Mozart, ‘But you really have to appeal also to the people
in the bars singing the drinking songs – it’s no use if you just keep
writing about your countesses.’ Nobody ever had this stricture – I’m not
comparing myself to Mozart – there were not these strictures. Nobody was
ever required to make something for everybody. It’s just not a possibility.
CG Charlie Wilson’s War is partly about politics, and that is
obviously a world that has interested both of you.
AS For me, there are just a lot of stories there. I am not
sophisticated politically at all, and I certainly don’t have an agenda. A
story like this was a real gold mine. It was a great story populated by
very, very entertaining people.
MN The reason The West Wing had so many people in love with it – me
foremost – was that it was so much larger a canvas [than television lawyer
shows or hospital dramas]. It was the same conflicts and the same, if you
will, Aristotelian situations, but it could go so much wider and deeper and
further.
I’m a political idiot, but I can recognise a more complex and interesting
pattern than ‘Will the patient die? Will her husband f*** the nurse?’ With
politics, you can pretty much go anywhere – which you did, Aaron.
CG When you read George Crile’s book on Charlie Wilson, what were the
difficulties you foresaw in adapting it as a movie?
AS Aside from the normal fear I have that this requires somebody
better than me? The book is fantastic. George Crile spent nine years
researching and reporting and writing it, but it is about 550 pages long,
and it’s a series of very different interviews. I needed to find the
train track. There are some things I knew I didn’t have a lot of experience
with, and wasn’t sure I was going to be comfortable with. For instance,
decadence I’ve never written before. And I had never written an action
scene. Here, things were going to have to blow up.
MN This was everything I fear and everything I think I’m no good at,
all in one picture. Mainly because of the strictures of reality, so called.
I find it extremely painful that you can’t make anything up.
Movies and novels and poems and paintings are metaphors. They are not what
happened. That’s the point: you have to leave what happened and do something
else to evoke the feelings and things that have to do with what happened.
I’ve done it three times. With Silkwood, you could make quite a lot up because
nothing was known of their personal lives. With Primary Colors, Joe Klein
did something completely brilliant. He changed [Bill Clinton’s press
secretary] George Stephanopoulos into an African-American, which was a way
of saying, ‘It’s not the Clintons, calm down.’
CG Could you talk about the scene in Wilson’s office, which tells us
so much about him but is also fantastically farcical?
MN That’s Aaron’s masterpiece, the very centre of the movie, and it
came full-blown from his head.
AS Yes, it did, and I will take the glory for that, except that I
think there are a lot of directors who would have said, ‘That scene is about
nine pages long, right? We can’t have nine pages of talk.’ You turn the
scene in to Mike, and it’s essentially a scene from a play, and he gets very
excited about it.
MN I’m fascinated by this whole thing of things being talkie or not
being talkie. Nobody ever thought that All About Eve or Who’s Afraid of
Virginia Woolf? were talkie. It’s not about the words. It’s: ‘Is something
happening or not?’ If something’s happening, you can talk all you want and
you’ll never think of it as talkie.
CG The New York Times links you, Mike, to ‘that great generation of
Central European émigrés whose style and sophistication imported both
classicism and modernity to Hollywood’s studio era’.
MN We are talking about refugees, which we all are, one way and
another, in this country. I had a bunch of acquaintances and friends who
were, in some ways, exactly like me – including Renata Adler [a journalist
with The New Yorker] and Henry Kissinger – and we were sort of the same
person, but with a completely different moral sense in each case. What we
all had in common was that we could hear people thinking. You have to when
you are seven years old, you have to hear: ‘How are they doing it here? How
do I hide among them?’ Kissinger – before he turned to wood – could hear
what you were thinking and give it back to you, which is why he was the
world’s greatest negotiator.
I have it too, and it’s not so far from hearing an audience thinking and
knowing what they are thinking. The experience of people sitting in a dark
hall, all thinking the same thing; the joy of something in the room during a
play that’s not spoken . . . that is the reason Chekhov is the best. He
invented all this. He said, ‘He loves her and she loveshim, and he loves
her, and so on and so on. None of the characters knows this; you do. Now
watch.’ It was such a great idea. Because they can sit around saying things
like ‘Cook doesn’t know how to boil rice’, and it doesn’t matter, because we
know who wants to f*** who, and who never will.
Modern theatre was invented that way, and I am heartbroken when those things
are erased, effaced, ignored – and happy when they are not.
Charlie Wilson’s War is out on January 11
The dream ticket
Teaming Mike Nichols to direct and Aaron Sorkin to write Charlie Wilson’s War
was a deliciously inspired Hollywood mash-up.
For more than 40 years, Nichols, 76, has been Hollywood’s most sophisticated
dissector of America’s sexual, social and political mores.
In the past decade, Sorkin, 46, with the political series The West Wing,
single-handedly recalibrated the language of modern television drama with
his idiosyncratically snappy, walkie-talkie dialogue.
Sorkin, who had his first hit when he was 28, with the Broadway staging of A
Few Good Men — later a film starring Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson — traces
his love of theatrical language to a childhood outing to Broadway to see
Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. In 1966, a screen
version of the fearsomely verbal marital drama, starring Elizabeth Taylor
and Richard Burton, was the first film directed by Mike Nichols.
Born in Berlin, Nichols emigrated with his German-Russian-Jewish family to New
York in 1939. He became famous in the mid-1950s as a comedy double act with
Elaine May, then went on to direct on Broadway. Virginia Woolf won five
Oscars, including best actress for Taylor, and Nichols followed it with The
Graduate (1967), starring the then unknown Dustin Hoffman.
Like much of Nichols’s work, it was a wry but unnerving critique of radically
changing American values. The Graduate got seven Academy Award nominations
and won one: best director.
Although Nichols has been one of the most significant directorial presences on
Broadway for nearly half a century — including Spamalot — here, he’s better
known for the films that followed: Catch-22 (1970), Carnal Knowledge (1971),
Silkwood (1983), Heartburn (1986), Primary Colors (1998), the HBO film of
Angels in America (2003) and Closer (2004).
Talk the "talk", walk the walk.... we are human beings after all, and we communicate with words, besides body language, and action. Young filmmakers need to learn the compelling quality of a great scene, with a great script, how words bring the electricity between characters, connecting them with how they're delivered-- words that move us (the audience) and move them into action.
What "happens" between the word exchanges can be electric if the DP knows how to shoot powerful dialogue! It's a combustible, communion of visions: writer, director, DP, and sound/score.
B. Rosson Davis, Greensboro, North Carolina