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DUSTIN HOFFMAN With his Golden Globe for The Graduate, 1968
Michael Ochs Archives/Corbis

In the course of a single day, Nichols could both reinforce the confidence of his hypersensitive star and demolish it. ''I never had the feeling he was happy with what I was doing,'' said the actor. ''He'd throw out a cookie occasionally, but I always felt like a disappointment. He'd walk around the entire time saying, 'Well, we'll never work together again, that's for sure.''' Sometimes his direction to Hoffman was as simple as, ''Act less. What you think is nothing will, on the big screen, be something.'' At other moments he was brutal, using the ear for perfect delivery he had honed in his years onstage to withering effect. ''One time, I tried something in a scene and he said to me, 'What are you doing?''' says Hoffman. ''And I said, 'Well, I made a choice....' And he said, slowly, 'I see. Well, the next time you get a thought, do the opposite.'''

The day he was filming the sequence in which Elaine slaps Benjamin in the face, Nichols didn't like what Katharine Ross was doing. At several points during the shoot, he struggled with the young actress's inexperience, as well as with her natural reserve. ''She's driving me f---ing crazy,'' Nichols complained, ''she can't do it, she doesn't have it.'' Patiently, he filmed take after take. Fifteen hard slaps later, Hoffman felt a stinging pain in his ear. The next day, he got into his deep-sea-diving gear for the swimming pool scene; when he jumped into the pool, he felt as if his head were going to explode. He emerged from the water, blood pouring from his ear. When the doctor examining his torn eardrum asked how he liked making a movie, he replied weakly that the food on the set was good.

[Anne] Bancroft's mood also darkened as the shoot went on. There were mornings she was hung over, and on some days she had such painful menstrual cramps that she couldn't get out of bed. ''She would just lie there in agony,'' says Elizabeth Wilson. ''And we'd reschedule around her.'' The self-loathing beneath Mrs. Robinson's glacial exterior wasn't a completely foreign emotion for the actress who, before her success in The Miracle Worker, struggled to make it as a Hollywood ingénue and had essentially been washed out of the movie business for a few years. Sometimes the role seemed to come naturally to her; on other days she'd keep the character at arm's length, almost refusing to connect with her. The scene in which Mrs. Robinson and Benjamin lie in bed and he begs her to have a conversation with him took days to film; in the draft of the screenplay that Nichols shot, it was almost a one-act play in miniature, 15 minutes of uninterrupted dialogue (much of it straight from Charles Webb's novel) in which Benjamin almost cruelly forces Mrs. Robinson to open up and learns that she was pregnant when she got married, that she once loved studying art, and that she wants him, above all, to keep clear of her daughter.

In rehearsals, Nichols and Bancroft had talked extensively about what the scene meant. ''When Benjamin says, 'Art, huh, I guess you kind of lost interest in it over the years,' and she says, 'Kind of,' that's the key,'' he told her. ''That's it. She just hates herself for having gone for the money, and she's punishing herself with everything she does.'' Bancroft understood him completely, but weeks later, when they were ready to shoot the scene, ''she just tossed it off,'' says Nichols. ''I said, 'Annie! Don't you remember our conversation about this beautiful, crucial moment?' She kind of casually said, 'Oh, s---, yeah, I forgot.' And then she did it perfectly. For me, it was central. For her, it was just a line reading.''

By June, when Nichols and his cast and crew drove to La Verne, Calif., to shoot the film's climax, they were so happy to get out of the studio that the several days on location felt almost like a field trip. Hoffman acquired his first groupie, a local girl who would hang out near his trailer and flirt with him between takes. ''Beautiful, thin, a real shiksa goddess,'' he says. ''I think Nichols took that as a sign — at least somebody found me attractive. And it didn't get past me, either!''

NEXT PAGE: ''I thought, oh man, how could I have been such a s--- that this man I revere feels this way about me? But I was,'' says Nichols


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