Special Coverage The Photo IssueThe Must List2008 Fall TV2008 Fall Movies2008 Fall Music
Page 3 of 4
mike-nichols-graduate_l
KEEPING PRODUCTION AFLOAT Filming The Graduate's pool scene
Embassy Pictures/Photofest

The weather was scorching, Bancroft fainted during the scene in which everyone was pushing to get out of the church and had to be given oxygen and sent home, and the minister who had agreed to let Nichols film there was ''very unhappy,'' says Hoffman, ''like they always are after they agree to have a movie come shoot and then see the reality after they say yes and everything starts to get the s--- beat out of it.'' When Nichols started to film Benjamin pounding on the glass wall, trying to get Elaine's attention as she stands at the altar, the huge pane of glass began to shake ominously, and the reverend yelled, ''Everybody out! Out, out, out!'' Trying to save the shoot, Nichols conferred with Hoffman — ''the only time during the entire movie he asked me to compromise,'' he recalls — and asked if he could think of any other way to get Elaine's attention. Hoffman came up with the idea of spreading his arms apart and just tapping on the glass tentatively with his open palm. ''The clincher was all the reviews saying this was Benjamin's Christ moment,'' says Hoffman. ''It was a fix. That's all it was. You gotta love critics.''

As production of The Graduate rolled through its third month and into its fourth, [exec producer] Joe Levine started pressuring [producer] Larry Turman to wrap it up. ''Levine may have chewed the producer's ass out,'' [editor] Sam O'Steen said later, ''but at that point he was biting the bullet and pretty much left Nichols alone.'' When the pressure got to Nichols, he rarely let it show, but few who worked for him found the production an easy experience. Nichols greeted each day with a serene opacity that, depending on what he was seeing and feeling as work got under way, could transform incrementally into warm affection or icy disdain without any dramatic change in his demeanor. (''Never let people see what you feel,'' he had learned growing up, ''because it gives them too much power.'') His crew, not his cast, felt the brunt of his anger when it came. ''One of the things in my life that I'm saddest about and most ashamed of,'' says Nichols, ''is that when we were shooting on the Sunset Strip, stealing a shot of Benjamin and Elaine walking toward the strip club, I said something snotty, as I often did to the crew. And I heard [cinematographer] Bob Surtees say to them — it wasn't meant for me to hear — 'It's okay. It's not going to be much longer.' And 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.''

When he had decided to make The Graduate three and a half years earlier, Nichols thought he knew exactly what his satirical targets were. ''I said some fairly pretentious things about capitalism and material objects, about the boy drowning in material things and saving himself in the only possible way, which was through madness,'' he recalls. But the deeper he got into the shoot and the more intensely he pushed Hoffman past what the actor thought he could withstand, the more Nichols realized that something painful and personal was at stake, and always had been, in his attraction to the story. ''My unconscious was making this movie,'' he says. ''It took me years before I got what I had been doing all along — that I had been turning Benjamin into a Jew. I didn't get it until I saw this hilarious issue of MAD magazine after the movie came out, in which the caricature of Dustin says to the caricature of Elizabeth Wilson, 'Mom, how come I'm Jewish and you and Dad aren't?' And I asked myself the same question, and the answer was fairly embarrassing and fairly obvious.''

Nichols — the immigrant, the observer, the displaced boy — finally understood why it had taken him years to settle on an actor to play Benjamin. ''Without any knowledge of what I was doing,'' he said, ''I had found myself in this story.'' And in Hoffman, he had found an on-screen alter ego — someone he could admonish for his failings, challenge to dig deeper, punish for his weaknesses, praise to bolster his confidence, and exhort to prove every day that he was the right man for the role. By the time the actor got into Benjamin's Alfa Romeo to shoot the montage in which he drives across the Golden Gate Bridge to find Elaine, ''I don't really think they cared whether I lived or died,'' Hoffman says, laughing. ''There was a helicopter and a remote, and the direction I got was, 'Pass every car.' Traffic was moving fast, and I would hear on the walkie-talkie, 'Just drive.' I remember thinking, I can't get hurt — this is only a movie!''

NEXT PAGE: A beleaguered Hoffman attends The Graduate's ''disastrous'' NYC premiere


Page 3 of 4