Mike Nichols: Becoming Good

Interview with Mike Nichols

Conducted by James Grissom

New York City

2000

The ability to ignore people and things--kindly, gently, silently--is essential to growth. A lot of your questions--and they're good questions--inevitably hinge on knowing where to look and to land. No, I am not brought down by the laziness of certain individuals because I don't work with them or frequent the halls that hire them. I wish them no harm, but I am pretty firm in not offering them my eyes and ears.

Look, far more people would rather be famous--noticed, affirmed, loved, admired, desired--than good. Accept that. Becoming good requires a great deal of work over a lifetime, and particularly heavy loads of improvement after a failure. There will always be failures--of your creativity, your will, your taste, as well as failures because people didn't sit down and look upon what you tried to do. The process of becoming better and stronger is persistent and, I truly believe, private. You share in classes, among peers, but the general public does not need to know how you're doing. It's monumentally boring to hear of a process. I do not give a shit about process, even if it it's Meryl [Streep]. I never want to hear how she did something: I just want her to do it. Discussion of process almost always comes from the unemployed or the untalented: They want you to believe that they are wanted, and they want you to believe that their creative genius is unparalleled. Avoid at all costs.

Self-improvement cannot become self-involvement. We improve by noticing the world, and applying what it has done to others and ourselves. We have to be tied in more often and with greater intensity to the planet, in every way. And this is done in silence, diligently, persistently.

©  2020   James Grissom