..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..RJ Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

Love in four letters (or five)

Love: the foremost four-letter word.

Or at least it is in Mike Nichols' glossy yet stormy adaptation of Patrick Marber's 1997 world-weary worldwide hit play, Closer, which collates the most intense moments in the romantic lives of a quartet of modern-day men and women who meet, part, obsess, fixate, avenge, revenge.

The story covers the most emotional moments of meeting and parting in the lives of four Londoners: self-pitying obits writer Jude Law, photographer Julia Roberts, brash dermatologist Clive Owen, and still-formative life force Natalie Portman. The dialogue is blunt and the emotions even more so, capturing all the things you've thought and felt but never put into precise and profane language at the moment you're most wounded: that's the black heart of the scarring, scarily funny events these actors enact with eager intimacy.

Nichols, 73, has said he believes civilization begins and ends at a man and woman's breakfast table, has been here before with movies like Carnal Knowledge (1970) and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). "Anything worth fighting for is worth fighting dirty for," is one of the many epigrams he repeats about the stories he's attracted to. And why do actors trust him? "I love to take them 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." After opening weekend's seriously mixed reviews, I considered writing a longer piece, but instead, here's a few thousand words with Nichols, after a mere few hundred with Marber.

Why do writers like Tony Kushner (Angels in America) and Marber, 40, trust Nichols? Marber, who directed the original London stage production, meant to direct the movie, unwilling to his play fall into Hollywood's studio development hell. Why Nichols? He bats the predictable answer out of the park: "Well, he made Carnal Knowledge and made Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"

And? "And he's just very charming and hilarious and smart. At the first meeting we had, at his apartment, we had breakfast together, and he was just someone I knew would be fantastic to spend a couple of years with working on something. He had a passion for the material. He didn't talk about it in some high-faluting, intellectual way. He just said, 'I know who these people are, I've lived it, I've been there.' He had no moral problems with it. He had no worries about likeability or all the things that are problematic in the material. He just cared for it instantly and passionately."

And he simply wanted to be involved in its filming. "He was quite happy to produce it if I wanted to direct," Marber continues. "But obviously, I was sitting in a room with Mike Nichols. I'm not gonna say, 'Yeah, I want to direct it and you can produce.' I wanted him, the full experience. I also knew, he came from the theater, he was respectful of the material, he wanted me around. That was part of his, how to put it, not his pitch, part of his conversation was, 'Look, the way I work, I have the writer in the rehearsal room, I have the writer on set. We work on the screenplay together.' He was absolutely true to his word. We're still collaborating as we do screening [introductions] and q&as. We're a double act!"

They both came from comedy backgrounds. "Mike and I were doing a q&a last night and a question was asked about that. I said that the difference between Mike and I is that Mike, in his twenties, was rich, famous and successful, and I was poor, desperate and unknown. Other than that? We had exactly the same background."

Marber did standup for five years after leaving school in 1986. After that, a TV and radio career lasted five years. "So I was a performer for ten years before I wrote a play. I think it gave me an ear for an audience, an ear for a certain kind of rhythm of speech. As a playwright, you just want to control silence. Either with laughter, or you want the silence to be very, very intense. With film, of course, silence isn't your concern, really. But for a playwright, the way the audience retags is essential. Mike's got that ear, too. He came from an improvising background, and we share that. We like things tight and quick and punchy, and those are comics' instincts. The one thing you fear as a comic? Silence."

As well as reserve. "It's very important to me that there's no nudity in the play. It's all about words, and the words we use, I wanted the audience to always feel like they'd seen all this sex, but they hadn't seen a damn thing."

But around the world, a percentage of critics invariably see Closer as something misanthropic and cynical. "I'm really used to that as a criticism of the material," Marber says, shrugging. "People who didn't go with the play would say it's cynical and misanthropic. Mike has inherited that criticism. Of course, I don't think I'm misanthropic, I don't think I'm cynical, I don't think the material is. I think it's true, I think it's dark, I think it's how it is, and some people aren't going to like that, and they're just going to say: 'That's not how it is at all.' I see films that are very well reviewed, they're underscored with violins, they're directing you how to feel and Mike Nichols doesn't do any of that shit. And I love him for that. He just presents it and just goes, 'How do you feel about this? I'm not going to tell you how I feel.' I love the integrity and the courage of that. I think it's about love and I think it's about how people behave in the grip of terrible passion."

Nichols seems calm, less than passionate, until his sentences between to loop and lope back on themselves. [Some plot points are given away below.] So does Closer fit in the lineage of his earlier work? "The answer to the question about the line from Virginia Woolf to Carnal Knowledge, I figured it out, talking about it. Patrick Marber and I both started out as comedians. All the best people started as comedians. Surprising people: Maggie Smith, Emma Thompson, Harold Pinter, to name but a few. I started out in a group called Compass [Players in Chicago in the 1950s], which became Second City, and so on, and so forth. I worked with Elaine May, and we did, I wasn't very good at it at first, then I got good working with Elaine, and we did what the people in the group called 'people scenes.' And because we were a man and a woman, we did scenes about men and women. It's what we were best at and what interested us most, and it went on in our work. Elaine's movies - The Heartbreak Kid, A New Leaf - they are on the same subject. It's sort of how we started, it's how we went on. It's what interested us, not particularly sex more than anything else, it was just living in a relationship. Or in the case of Carnal Knowledge, a series of relationships. I think that's what it came from and why it continues to interest me."

What's different now?

NICHOLS: I think that Carnal Knowledge was really about the Hefner generation; it was about something that's over. It was really, y'know, thinking of women as objects and encouraging women to think of themselves as objects, because of the way they were treated. It was a time that's passed. I think that closer is indeed about the dangers of closeness, that you can go too far. If you get too close, or want to get too close, you can get into trouble. I think that things are a lot better, at least in many countries, as far as the equality of the sexes is concerned, but it's still going on. And since Closer is also about men's aggression and men's need to compete with each other and ultimately kill each other, it's the two working together.

Did you read or see the play first?

NICHOLS: I read it before I saw it and I think that the central scene, which upset me very lot when I read it, it had a very strong effect on me, of Anna telling Larry that she was going and him forcing her in his way to tell him about what she did with the other guy. I thought that was very much at the heart of all relationships. There's something we've all heard, namely, "I promise I won't be mad, I just want to know". And everybody above, say, the age of 11, knows that you don't answer that question! [Laughs] But to answer the question is to start a slide into pain for both people. I think in some ways, it's about that. My wife said that one of the things Closer is about is about the importance of lying in a relationship. Or withholding. It's about the definition of closeness. Do you really have the right to know what's in the other person's head? Do you have the right to protect what's in your head? I thin the answer is yes, of course. Love involves leaving each other intact rather than trying to be absorbed, or absorb the other person. Two people can't be one person. In my experience, happiness comes from being together but always maintaining enough separateness. My wife, for instance, does not answer the question, 'What are you thinking?' She simply doesn't answer. Which, I think-I've tried it, it's very interesting. I'm not as good at not answering as she is! But it's important, I think, to remember that you don't have to answer. The point is what you're thinking, not what you're saying. It's yours.

Do the modest changes from the play, including the ending, constitute a kind of softening?

I don't think of it as softening. I also don't think that, I think the whole idea of likeability is a kind of Hollywood concept. That of the past, but not particularly of the present-I mean, the Macbeths were no sweethearts, yet we don't condemn the play because Lady Macbeth is not an adequate role model for young women. It just doesn't work that way. I always used to use Macbeth as an example of, in the old studio days, somebody from the studio would call you in, away from your work, to say, we would like Lady Macbeth to be more of a role model. Not so terribly unpleasant. And then you would have to explain that character is plot and that her character is the plot, that her ambition is what causes everything to happen. And that's why we call it… theater.

If everybody's adorable, you can't go anywhere, you can't have any events. I didn't think of the characters [in Closer] as needing to be softened. I'm different, also, from the audience. I'm startled that many people are shocked by it. Because, to me, either for other reasons, or because in order to do this work, you have to love the characters, you have to consider them as you consider yourself and the people you love. You can't make a division, 'We're okay, but they're terrible and I'm going to show you how terrible they are.' They are us, we are them, there are parts of us that are not so wonderful. There are parts of these characters that are wonderful. In fact, as Elaine May put it, they don't put any spin on bad news. They never make a case for themselves. Anna doesn't say, "My god, if you told me about one more case of bad acne, I was going to lose my mind. You did this and you did that. That time at the party with So-and-So, you talked to her all night, you never looked at me." They never do any of that. They don't spin. They just give the news. And the bad news, they have the guts to just impart the bad news. At the same time, it's very clear that we've left the good parts out.

There's a year and a half, Dan and Alice have a year and a half of happiness together before he even sees Anna. So because of the deliberate foreshortening, in the skipping of the "good" parts, because what we're really doing, you know the long lens effect of looking back when you remember acute beginning, y'know, two months in bed, and then a middle that somehow you can't quite recollect, and then a painful ending, that looking back, there is a foreshortening. In being interested by that foreshortening, and going for it in the structure, first in the play and then the movie, the good parts are skipped. So they probably seem more terrible. If you put all our crises together, and all our leavings and being left, you get a picture of a very different person from the person who says, "Honey, I left the plums in the icebox, I should be home around 10.' That part of life is deliberately left out [of Closer].

Casting seems a joy for you.

I love casting. That's the job. That's the job, and insofar as opening veins is concerned, they're safe. That's the beauty of doing it, you do these scenes… take Natalie and Clive doing the scene in the strip bar, they had a great time. it's not you. It's not about you. The feelings are the feelings. Y'know, I had a stress test because I had a disk problem and I couldn't on the treadmill, so they gave me a chemical. That speeded up my heart, chemically. Which was extremely unpleasant and weird. But. It reminded me a little bit of what it's like to work on this stuff, for the actors. You gotta get it together for the scene. Those feelings come up in the scenes. And then I say 'Cut.' And they're, they're okay. And they laugh. They laughed all through this. We all laughed all through it. It's not your pain.

How do you direct of actors on screen?

Part of my job is finding the physical circumstances, literally, the activities for the actors during the scenes that it possible to do and say the things in the scenes. When we got to that scene and that language and the things that Julia had to say, we found that neither could they just stand there and yell them at each other, because it was horrible. You couldn't do it, you couldn't watch it. And also, it wasn't truthful. It didn't seem like people in the course of their lives. So, as we were getting ready to shoot, I said, 'Well, why don't you, instead of that, Julia, why don't you just go upstairs and get your coat and leave, rather than tell him these things. And you, Clive, why don't you chase her? And force her?' He has to force her to say those things, because he wants to be free. He wants the wound cauterized. He says… He says, 'Thank you. Thank you for your honesty. Now fuck off and die.' [laughs] He has goaded her until she said unsayable things, the things that you never want to say, and God knows you never want to hear, so that he could go on. And not only does he goad her until she has to do it, but it works. He gets through and he forms his plan, and then he puts his plan into effect, and then his plan succeeds, and he bests the other guy, and does him severe harm, forever, and then he gets his girl back. So, that's the plot. But in order for them to get there… it's more a question of finding out how and under what circumstances. That's our job. Marber gives us the sort of tip of the iceberg, how it comes out. Our job is, 'What are you doing, what have you done, how do proceed so that the tip comes up above the water and you can see it?" A lot of time it's a choice of how you stage it, who's where, what's happening, what are they doing? And that's more important than goading the actor or making them 'dig deeper,' any of those things. These people have no problem digging deeper. Julia is like, I don't know… She blushes in scenes. Her battle is to stop it from happening to her, not to make it happen. She's got to control her strong feelings.

And Portman?

Natalie and I were friends for a long time before. We did a play together, "The Seagull" with Meryl Streep in the Park in New York, and she was about 19. She was a great Nina, and you're not supposed to be able to do Nina when you're 19, but she did. She and I had been talking about making a movie of Edie Sedgwick. We both thought that was an interesting movie and a good part for her. You know that book, Edie, it's a very good book, very interesting. This is a book of people just talking about her, brilliantly edited by George Plimpton. It looked to us like a movie, but there were complicated rights [issues], reasons why it didn't work out. When I started to think about [Closer], Natalie was the first person I thought of. She's a real actress, a remarkable actress, and what Closer needed, which is, well, I had a thing I wanted to do. I wanted to start with a beautiful young girl so adorable that Audrey Hepburn would worry. And that's who we got. And then, you think, there's nobody cuter, nobody more loveable, and then Julia comes on and blows her off the screen, because she's a woman, and not a girl, and a very beautiful woman, and intriguing. And Natalie comes back [into the story]. She's changed, she's increased, she's not just adorable, she's a great beauty. That was one of the stories I wanted to tell. It seemed like these were the actresses who would enjoy doing that. Natalie's ability to be four or five different women, consecutively, always, of course, the same woman, but different facets, and they're startlingly different. I'm very interested in the aspect of her in the club. Because we've just seen her be mortally wounded. And now she's a cold bitch. How interesting to know why she's acting like that. And to what degree she's not cold, and not a bitch. All of that interested me and that's what Natalie was able to deliver.

So we won't be seeing any additional naughty footage?

I've never understood that aspect of DVDs, where you suddenly put back the things you took out that could go. Why ruin your movie? With material that you've taken out? I never get that. I don't have that impulse. It's very interesting, when you're cutting a movie, and towards the end, you take out little dead places. They really are like turning on and off a light. The living places are living and there are little places you wait until you're back to light. When you take them out, everything sort of fuses and [is] lifted one rung higher. To put them back seems very unpleasant to me. And pointless. It's like when you've written something, when you cut a paragraph, doesn't it seem dead to you? Doesn't it look like something you'd never want to include, because the point is, it could go? You'll never see anything in my pictures, the stuff that came out, stays out. Somebody makes the DVD. I'm not part of creating a DVD. There's the usual, the EPK, the actors talking about their characters. I suppose having something hot and interesting on the DVD that nobody got to see is useful.

So this is the stuff of life, heightened, and not just artifice?

Did you see that book, "The Rules"? I love "The Rules." Not for dating, in my case. But for business. I think "The Rules" are excellent. Of acting like you're not interested, codified into a bunch of rules. And that aspect of people that we all play on, all the time. How many people pick up the phone on the first ring? Very few people. It's everywhere, just the game that is being played. How many guys say, 'He owes me a call'? Women in the office just pick up the phone and call him again. It's in everything. Competitiveness is in everything and games are in everything. 'Owes me a call'? We're all nuts. It's in the fabric of everyday. So that when you heighten it in a story, it may seem like, 'I don't know these people, I'm not like these people.' But we are. I don't think we're as tough on ourselves as we might be. The people we've left have another story from our story. That's what it really is about. It's always so startling when somebody says, 'She says you were a real bastard, you were cold,' and you think, really? These things strike us differently. That's the whole problem. So I think we give ourselves a clean report card too easily in these matters.

December 11, 2004

- Email Ray Pride