Interview: Mike Nichols

'The past is the present and also the future'– Time Out spoke to director Mike Nichols about his new film 'Charlie Wilson's War'.

Time Out: 'Charlie Wilson’s War’ is the second film about US politics that you’ve made in a decade (the first being 1998’s ‘Primary Colors’). Why make this now?

Mike Nichols: Well, the political climate changes so radically from day to day. Just look at Iowa! I don’t know that a political climate – as long as it’s still a free country – makes much difference in the film world.

I think that in my country and the UK, fashion has begun to take over. It’s more about: will the fashions of the moment permit some thoughts and ideas about something that’s not yet the fashion of the moment?

Things come in waves, and I’m always more interested in places like, for instance, Chicago where people don’t follow fashion. They’re not galloping past your window on the way to the latest anything. They’re living their lives. You do a play, they come and see it and say, 'That’s nice', and then they go home. They even drive slower. In short, you have to find a Chicago in yourself to forget what happens to be fashionable this week – and then make films or plays that explore what is really happening.

The story has a contemporary relevance to it even though it’s set in the 1980s. Did you make a conscious effort to draw parallels between then and now?

Of all the great lines in ‘A Long Day’s Journey Into Night’, my favourite is when Mary Tyrone, late in the play and very stoned, says ‘The past is the present and also the future’. I think that is the best thing that anybody said about what you just said. The past is the present and the future and it is the thing that concerns us most immediately.

In fact, when that concern about the past flags, as education suffers more and more in our country, the interest in the past flags and the interest in fashions rises. You can always tell gifted and highly intelligent people as they always turn to the past. Any young person who knows anything that happened before 1980, or 1990, or 2000 for that matter, is immediately someone who is intelligent, probably creative, maybe a writer. Nobody who is drawn to the past and learning about the past is not gifted.

How did you come to work with Aaron Sorkin on the script? Are you a fan of his work on ‘The West Wing’?

I'm an enormous fan of ‘The West Wing’. It was one of the very few shows I would watch every week. I had never met him. Tom Hanks chose him to do the screenplay before he’d ever called me to direct the film. The first thing I read was Sorkin’s screenplay, and from then on I was pretty much on board.

Then I met Charlie and that clinched it. He was so unusual and so ‘un-prerecorded’ which isn’t what politicians that I had known and seen before were. Charlie was so much the opposite that I knew he was going to make the movie.

Was Charlie present on set?

He was there a lot. We had experts for everything, but the real expert was Charlie, and when he wasn’t on the set I would call him and ask him about stuff and he would write me emails all the time. He was very much part of this film. Only last night, Bill Bradley who was our senator and who had run for president, he called my wife after he had seen the movie and said ‘I was there, I was there! I was Charlie’s friend through all of this, that’s really how it was!’, and that was the best praise we have received so far.

With Charlie so close to the project, did that make you want to tone down of the more potentially scandalous elements of his career?

No, that was the whole thing about Charlie, he never made any bones about that. He was the first to tell you ‘I chase women and I drink all the time’. He just called how it was. Immediately it made him unique. It made him alive and ‘not prepared’. You watch a debate now and people just heave these large concrete chunks of prepared statement around with them that have nothing to do with the question. Charlie wasn’t like that.

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