Mike Nichols on Three of His Biggest Hits: 'The Graduate,' 'The Birdcage,' and 'Working Girl'

Mike Nichols, who passed away on Wednesday at the age of 83, had a career as a film director that spanned four decades and encompassed some of the most entertaining movies in Hollywood history. Here, in the words of Nichols and his collaborators, is a brief behind-the-scenes history of three of those films: The Graduate, Working Girl, and The Birdcage.

The Graduate (1967)

“I don’t know of another instance of a director at the height of his powers who would take a chance and cast someone like me in that part. It took enormous artistic courage,” Dustin Hoffman has said of Mike Nichols casting him in The Graduate. As hard as it is to imagine anyone else playing Benjamin Braddock, the decision to choose the unknown Hoffman over a more conventional leading-man type — like Robert Redford, who gunned for the role — was extremely controversial at the time. For Nichols, it came down to a personal connection. “I kept looking and looking for an actor until I found Dustin, who is the opposite [of Redford], who’s a dark, Jewish, anomalous presence, which is how I experience myself,” the director told Film Comment. “So I stuck this dark presence into Beverly Hills, and there he felt that he was drowning in things, and that was very much my take on that story. When I think of Benjamin, there are many things that come from my personal experience.”

Nichols made the similarly bold choice to cast Anne Bancroft, only six years Hoffman’s senior and best known for The Miracle Worker, as middle-aged seductress Mrs. Robinson. “We didn’t offer the role to anyone else except Annie,” Nichols told Vanity Fair. “Everyone cautioned her to turn it down. How can you go from the saintly Annie Sullivan to the Medusa-like Mrs. Robinson? Too risky.” In retrospect, Nichols’ casting instincts were impeccable, as was the sophomore director’s work behind the camera. “I needed everything I had learned in the last 30 years to shoot The Graduate,” veteran cinematographer Robert Surtees has written. Hoffman recalls that Nichols was ruthless when it came to getting the footage he wanted. “He was never satisfied; he was always looking for the exquisite take,” says the actor. “I was dubbed a perfectionist for years, and all I could think was ‘I learned from Mike Nichols.’”

A groundbreaking social satire, The Graduate went on to inspire a generation of directors like Steven Spielberg, who said in a statement that he found Nichols’ film “life altering — both as an experience at the movies as well as a master class about how to stage a scene.” For Nichols, whose experience until that point was mainly in theater and stand-up comedy, The Graduate confirmed his future as a film director. “There’s nothing better than discovering, to your own astonishment, what you’re meant to do,” he told Vanity Fair. ”It’s like falling in love.”

Watch a trailer for The Graduate:

Working Girl (1988)

Surprisingly, Nichols took inspiration for this romantic comedy, about a working-class Wall Street secretary, from his roots as a German immigrant. “When I started working on the script of Working Girl, the most important thing to me was the combination of immigrant and slave ship image,” Nichols said. “The slaves, as usual, are imported from somewhere else — because nobody can afford to live in Manhattan.” The role of Tess was a breakthrough for Melanie Griffith, who praised Nichols’s direction in a 1988 interview with Roger Ebert. “Mike Nichols let us rehearse for two weeks for Working Girl. That was a wonderful luxury…. And I really do think I’ve done my best work ever,” she said. Sigourney Weaver, who played Tess’s rival in the film, was similarly complimentary. “You’re granted admission to a very special world when you work with Mike,” she told The Hollywood Interview. “ We loved [my character] Katharine Parker and modeled her after people that we knew. Mike is so smart and really understand the structure of a script… He’s able to give you one direction that liberates you for the whole piece.”

Watch the theatrical trailer for Working Girl:

The Birdcage (1996)

A contemporary remake of the 1978 French comedy La Cage aux Folles, The Birdcage is about a gay show-biz couple (Robin Williams and Nathan Lane) whose son becomes engaged to a woman with ultra-conservative parents. The blockbuster comedy marked the first significant film collaboration between Nichols and his former comedy partner, Elaine May, who wrote the screenplay. Williams recalled that the first time he and Lane read together, “Mike Nichols laughed so hard, he had to bite his hand so that we could finish reading the script aloud.” During filming, said Williams, “Mike finally threatened to bring in an acupuncturist to numb our laugh centres or a traffic policeman to fine the next person who broke up.” Despite all the laughter, Lane, who had never starred in a feature film before, told Premiere that he never stopped being nervous around Nichols. “He’s the most charming man in America, and whomever he’s with, he makes you feel like the most important person in the world, and the most interesting,” said the actor. The movie was a comeback of sorts for Nichols, who realized immediately after watching the final cut that he had a hit on his hands. “The film was so good, so strong,” he told a friend, as quoted in The New Yorker. “I realized I had no inkling of my anger at the people who had written me off… You thought I couldn’t do this anymore. Well, look at this.”

Watch at trailer for The Birdcage:

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Photo credit: Embassy/The Kobal Collection