Nichols had not attended the Emmy Awards since 1959, when he and Elaine May had performed a sketch in which he took the stage, beaming, to accept a prize for never having done any work of value whatsoever. Forty-two years later, he was a triple nominee, for producing, directing, and cowriting Wit. He had planned to fly to Los Angeles for the September 16 ceremony, but after the 9/11 attacks, the show was postponed until October, then postponed again because of the start of the war in Afghanistan. When the ceremony finally took place, on November 4, Nichols stayed home. It was two days before his seventieth birthday, and he was in New York City holding auditions for Angels in America. The stars were on board; Streep had said yes during The Seagull, and Thompson earlier than that, and Pacino had agreed to portray Roy Cohn, the play’s vicious, droll, and profane embodiment of ruthlessness and self-deception. “I wanted Mike to cast Dustin Hoffman,” says Kushner. “I love Al Pacino, and of course I ended up thrilled with his Roy. My only initial worry was that when he was young, he was gorgeous. He was Michael Corleone—someone born into power. What I wanted for Roy was someone who’d had to struggle all his life for every bit of power he had. The day after Pacino was announced, I was at a party and I felt someone kind of hit me from behind. I turned around and it was Dustin Hoffman, and he said, ‘Al Pacino’s Jewish?! Fuck you, and fuck Mike, too!’”
Although Pacino, Streep, and Thompson were still finalizing their deals, their participation looked secure enough to get Nichols a green light from HBO, at a budget that would top $60 million. But when the network said it wanted big names for the remaining roles, he told them no. “People like Matt Damon and Reese Witherspoon were on the list,” says Angels producer Celia Costas, “and Mike said, ‘Movie stars are not going to be able to handle the language, let alone memorize as much as they’re going to have to in order to shoot what will be a normal day for us. I need people from theater.’” He also needed actors who were available to give a full year to the job. The Angels schedule was a marathon—preproduction in January and February, rehearsals in March, and shooting from April to December; Nichols’s insistence on a long summer break was the only concession he made to his age.
Jeffrey Wright had won a Tony for playing the fierce, morally exacting nurse Belize, and at thirty-five, he was still young enough for the role. “My thought was that no one was going to play Belize other than me,” he said, “and if they tried to bring that into being, some sets might mysteriously burn to the ground.” After rewatching the Broadway production and seeing him onstage in Suzan-Lori Parks’s play Topdog/Underdog, Nichols believed he was the only choice; no other actors were considered. Nor were any actresses called in for the Valium-addicted Mormon wife, Harper Pitt; Nichols offered the part to Mary-Louise Parker, who had won a Best Actress Tony for Proof a few months earlier. But to cast the remaining three roles—the reluctant visionary Prior Walter, his unfaithful, relentlessly self-questioning boyfriend, Louis, and the closeted Mormon lawyer Joe Pitt—Nichols, Kushner, and casting director Juliet Taylor spent several days in his production office on West Fifty-seventh Street, seeing dozens of actors.
“Mike would sometimes fall in love with whoever the latest hot person was,” says Taylor. “Hollywood actors did come up in conversation—‘What about so-and-so?’ But some of those monologues were two pages, and his first instinct was right. Most of them couldn’t handle it, and it was a revelation when somebody could.”
Not all the surprises were pleasant. After Adrien Brody read for Louis, his agent called to say he was uneasy about the role, which included intimate scenes with other men. Another actor was perhaps too comfortable with his body. “He auditioned with a scene that takes place at a urinal,” says Taylor, “and . . . I’ll just say he did it in very specific detail. We were all sitting there going, ‘What? You don’t need to . . .’” Then there was the television star who decided to make up his lines. “Mike stopped him and said, ‘I’d like you to do the script as written,’” says Kushner. “He said, ‘Can I see the script? I don’t really know it.’ That was the first time I saw that Mike could be scary. He had this smile where he opened his eyes very wide and his eyebrows went straight up. He was technically smiling, but also baring his teeth. You had the feeling that if he had been less charming and polite, he might have said something devastatingly nasty. But he just looked at him with beautifully performed shock and said, ‘Why not?’ And the actor said, ‘Come on . . . it’s film. Don’t you want to see what I can bring to it?’ And Mike said, still smiling, ‘I don’t know that I do.’”
Ben Shenkman had played Roy Cohn in a student production and later played Louis in San Francisco. “I’d just been in Proof with Mary-Louise and I knew Mike liked it, so I was terrified,” he says. “I thought, I want to have this great experience of auditioning, but I don’t want to get it, because I’m not up to it. But I wasn’t going to deliberately tank the audition!”
“When he read Louis,” Taylor says, “we wanted to weep.” Nichols liked Shenkman so much that he asked him to stick around and read with potential Priors and Joes. “I knew I was connecting with Mike,” he says. “I said, ‘Of course!’ and then I had an hourlong break and I stood on the sidewalk thinking, The world has changed. And I immediately played out all that anxiety.” He said to Nichols, “To be totally honest, I’m not sure I can do what I did in the audition again, and I think you should know that I might not be able to duplicate it in front of a camera.” Without meaning to, Shenkman had, in his confession, perfectly embodied a character about whom Prior says, “Watching him stick his head up his asshole and eat his guts out over some relatively minor moral conundrum . . . was the best show in town.” Nichols laughed and told Shenkman, “The thing I’ve finally realized after all this time is: You have to not care. Sometimes it’ll be there and sometimes it won’t. The potential is all.”
“For him to say, ‘The thing I’ve finally realized . . .’ was so generous,” says Shenkman. “As if he was saying, ‘Yes, my boy, we’re all artists. This is what we all think about. Everyone is like you.’” He got the part and ended up reading with the two other actors Nichols went on to cast, Justin Kirk and Patrick Wilson. Kirk had come close to working with Nichols before—he was almost hired to play Robin Williams and Nathan Lane’s son in The Birdcage, and he’s fleetingly seen in a photograph in Wolf as Michelle Pfeiffer’s late brother. “Nice face,” Jack Nicholson says in the movie. Nichols agreed. “He looks like religious art,” he said, “like a quattrocento painting. That’s what I want Prior to look like.” And Wilson, cast as Joe Pitt after Billy Crudup passed on the role, was “very, very new,” says Taylor. Like Kirk, he was rising fast in New York theater and getting regular work on Broadway. “But I don’t think I had ever been in a film or even in front of a camera before,” he says. “I didn’t know about lights, angles, lenses, where to look, anything.”
“They were all young, all very raw,” says Costas. “Mike embraced that innocence. He wanted actors whose core he believed in. If that was there, he felt the rest would follow.”
By January, the screenplay was almost finished. “I had gone to his apartment with the script for the first hour of Millennium,” says Kushner. “I’d put in language about point of view, this angle, that angle. We had lunch, and he said, ‘Have you ever worked on a movie?’ I said, ‘No, I’ve never even been on a set.’ He said, ‘I can sort of tell that. The good news is, you don’t need to know about making movies. I know how to make movies. You just have to tell me what you want the actors to say and what you want people to see, and you don’t have to tell it in any kind of fancy way.’ Later I learned how to write with the camera in mind and do other things that screenwriters do, but that was the moment when Mike made it possible for me to become a screenwriter.”
Nichols had not asked for the play’s sexuality or politics to be toned down; the cuts he wanted—most of which were in Perestroika—had more to do with anything that pulled attention from the core characters (a speech by an elderly Russian revolutionary that opens the second play was jettisoned) or that violated his sense of the supernatural acts in Angels as hallucinations. He told Kushner to eliminate a scene in which pioneers in a diorama at the Mormon Visitors’ Center come to life, because its objective leap outside of reality broke the rules the play itself had set up. “I can’t do . . . Mormons coming across the desert without snapping [the thread of the narrative],” Nichols said.
“Other than Mike, no director has ever called me on that,” says Kushner. “But also, he wasn’t interested in the ooky-spooky stuff at all. He was not going to make the play New Agey. I never wanted the play to be that, but it didn’t bother me that some people did. It bothered Mike. He was not interested in creating fantasy. Mike’s version of the play strips away a lot of the bells and whistles—he was interested in telling a story of people who love each other and betray each other and themselves and construct lives based on lies, and sometimes they find their way back to each other and sometimes they pay a terrible price. That was an important lesson for me: that that is fundamentally what the main event of Angels is.”
In March, Nichols gathered the cast in New York, where almost all of the shoot would take place, for a month of read-throughs and rehearsals, wardrobe and makeup tests, and immersion in the world of Angels. Most of them needed no education about the toll AIDS had taken; nonetheless, he arranged for them to visit his friend Cynthia O’Neal’s charity Friends In Deed to learn more. “The rehearsals were hugely digressive and seminar-y. We rarely stood up,” says Shenkman. “We’d be in a room with some incredible table of snacks and we’d read the scenes and talk about them.” Some actors felt their way into their roles gradually; others were ready to go. “I was amazed at how prepared Pacino was,” says Kushner. “He had two old paperback copies of the play, filled with notes, all splayed open—they had obviously fallen into the bathtub at some point.” By the first day of rehearsal, Pacino had done weeks of preparation with his own team of colleagues and coaches. “Al works very hard before we ever see him,” said Nichols. “He needs a long time to familiarize himself with the words and make them his own.”
Nichols carved out extra rehearsal time with Shenkman and Kirk. “He wanted to give Justin and me a shot to flesh out what the relationship between Prior and Louis had been,” says Shenkman, “because the structure of the play is, you meet them and immediately the relationship explodes. So it was a backstory kind of thing.” It was also the moment at which both young actors realized how hard Nichols was going to push them. “At the first rehearsal, I said the last line of the play, and Mike turned to me in front of this table and said, ‘Well . . . you’re the prophet,’” says Kirk. “I suddenly had Al Pacino looking at me! I felt like: I’m cooking! A couple of weeks of rehearsal go by and I get a message saying, ‘Mike wants to see you at lunch. Come to his office.’ I went in, and the gist of what he said was ‘It’s not working. It’s not landing. And I talked to someone who said that during rehearsals you need a kick in the ass.’”
Kirk’s head started to spin. “My first thought was: Who can it possibly be?” he says. “I found out later that it was Joe Mantello,” who had played Louis in the Broadway Angels and recently directed Kirk onstage. “I couldn’t decide whether to be angry or not, but that was the kick in the ass. From that day forward, I was terrified. On the first day we shot, Mike came over to me and said, ‘We got it. It’s great. What you’re doing is perfect.’ But for the whole shoot, I never lost the fear. I went home every night thinking, You didn’t hit it.”
On March 20, Nichols went to Washington, D.C., to receive a National Medal of Arts alongside Johnny Cash, Kirk Douglas, Helen Frankenthaler, and Yo-Yo Ma. Three weeks later, he was shivering in Central Park on a chilly April night, about to film two men starting to have anonymous unprotected sex. What the fuck am I doing here? he thought.
The first week of production had not gone smoothly. Nichols had begun with two days of shooting in a cramped Queens diner—a difficult scene described on the call sheet as “Louis’ diatribe on race in America,” a long monologue that he later said was exactly the wrong place to begin nine months of filming. He would end up unable to use most of the footage. Now, standing under banks of floodlights placed along Central Park South, watching extras in black leather cruise one another as production assistants used smudge pots to fill the park’s lamplit walkways with fog, he felt lost. Streep would not arrive to begin work until the following week, and Thompson and Pacino would not start until a few weeks after that.
He and his cinematographer, Stephen Goldblatt, were also off to a rough start. “He was so obnoxious and difficult at the beginning that I finally told him, ‘I quit,’” says Goldblatt, “and as soon as I did that, he apologized profusely and we were fine for the rest of the shoot.” At the moment, Nichols was working with the cast’s least experienced actors; he had not contended with so many novices in major roles since directing Hoffman and Katharine Ross in The Graduate. He had envisioned a shot in which the camera would push from the bar at the Plaza Hotel, where Roy was trying to seduce Joe professionally, across Central Park South and into a different jungle with its own rites of male negotiation and persuasion. But nothing was coming together. At 10 p.m., he called Kushner and said, “You’ve got to come! I don’t know what I’m doing! I don’t know how to get a performance out of these actors—they’re baby narcissists!”
Kushner was also worried. Early in the production, he wrote in his diary, “Everything still feels glum and depressed and second-week-of-rehearsal-ish.” When he got to the park, he told Nichols, who had calmed down, “You know they’re extraordinary actors, so if they’re stuck on something, there’s a reason.” But Nichols was also stuck. “When Tony wasn’t there,” says Trip Cullman, who served as Nichols’s on-set assistant, “I was, shockingly, the only gay guy on the production most of the time. So Mike asked me to teach him and the actors what cruising looked like. Which I have to say was a lot of fun.”
After that night, Nichols started to unclench, and so did his actors. “Patrick Wilson was astonishing,” he said. “He never looked down for a mark, never did anything phony, always looked in the right direction . . . He walked right in, like a little kid sometimes does in a movie, and knew how to do it. But as the play asked more and more of them, they all grew.”
A month later, when Pacino showed up, the production kicked into a higher gear. Pacino, all of whose scenes were to be shot in a five-week sprint in May and June, did not like to act in front of writers and had Nichols boot Kushner from the Kaufman Astoria Studios set the first morning he got into costume and makeup. (“When can I come back?” Kushner asked Nichols. “When he’s done,” came the reply.) His arrival changed the rhythm of the filming. Nichols and most of his actors preferred to move on after a few takes of each scene, and sometimes not even that. “Mike always fell in love with the master”—the start-to-finish shot in which all the actors are visible, which is usually filmed before close-ups—“and I would have to beg him to do more takes,” says Goldblatt. But Pacino never wanted to quit, even after the twelfth, sixteenth, or eighteenth try at a scene. “Yeah, he likes that,” says Streep. “Everything he did was always interesting, though—even in a late take, he’ll throw you a curve. He’s like De Niro. Some actors just don’t want to go home!”
“He kept cursing Ron Leibman [who had played Cohn on Broadway],” says Brian Markinson, who shared a scene with Pacino. “He would say, ‘That fucking guy had all those performances and so much time with the text. It takes time to get it in your belly!’”
“I’d say to him, ‘I can’t imagine anything better, I’m very happy,’” said Nichols. “And he’d say, ‘I’ll give you one more for free.’ And it would be better. He was working toward a facility with the whole thing. The words he had, my God, the long speeches. They were completely digested, and came out in music and fire.”
Pacino and Shenkman had no dialogue scenes together, but Shenkman came to the set anyway. “It was the day they were shooting the scene when Roy’s doctor tells him he has AIDS,” he says. “Pacino was a hero of mine. It was the only time I said to Mike, ‘Would it be okay if I watched?’ I sat there and watched him act, and I watched Mike direct. They did the scene a bunch of times. Mike turned to me and said, ‘So what have you learned?’ I said, ‘Keep it simple?’ And he said, ‘No. That’s not the right answer. The right answer is: See how hard it is? Even for the master, even for your idol? See how many times he has to try it? You’ve just watched ten takes, and I know you can see it was great here but not there, and then great again but not great right at that important moment. That’s what film acting is. We’re not trying to draw the perfect line. You do whatever you need to do—be real, be fake, be quiet, be loud—and then leave the rest to me. I’ll know it when I have it, and I’ll put it all together.’”
Nichols summoned every bit of technique he had learned over the decades for Angels in America. He took a two-minute scene with no dialogue that is only referenced in the play—the ornate funeral of a beloved local drag queen who has died of AIDS—and turned it into a wordless essay on grief and celebration, filling the pews with real drag queens, and capturing Prior’s despair and alienation, Belize’s concern for and impatience with him, the quiet heartbreak of a family out of its element, the affinity between a gospel choir and a drag performer, and the way the stricken gay community used excess, spectacle, and song as a bulwark against endless loss. For a late-night scene in which Belize talks a dying Roy through his hallucination as Ethel Rosenberg watches, he had Goldblatt use a swaying, almost hypnotic camera to suggest that Roy was drifting inexorably out to sea, or perhaps being rocked to sleep by Belize’s evocation of the afterlife. He filmed a slow dance between Prior and a spectral version of Louis with a romantically spinning camera that moved in from the two men holding each other in a close embrace to Prior’s face, then pulled back to show him alone, a piercingly sad moment that could not have been achieved onstage. And when Shenkman and Kirk struggled with their first scene together, in which Prior tells Louis he has AIDS—“Like Justin, I always went home feeling I screwed up,” says Shenkman—Nichols took both actors to his trailer and choreographed their interaction beat by beat, working through every line and telling them how to time each physical gesture. At one point Shenkman said, “I feel like I’m pushing.” Nichols said gently, “It’s only bad to push in comedy. In emotional scenes, sometimes it’s okay.”
“Angels can get really tough for actors,” says Kushner. “If they go deep inside the characters to find the terrible things they’re feeling before they’ve internalized the language, it can get very teary and become an exercise in bathos.” Nichols fought against that. “The idea that acting is feeling . . . is such nonsense and so useless and leads us into a corner of unintelligible people muttering,” he said. “It’s the ultimate perversion of Lee Strasberg and the Method.”
Throughout the shoot, he worked to keep the playing field level. He did not want a set on which newcomers felt intimidated by movie stars. “He didn’t differentiate that way,” says Cullman. “He put Ben and Justin and Patrick right on the level of anyone else. He made everyone feel like they were his best friend, receiving the juiciest tidbit of gossip or theater history or lore or keen observation. It was absolutely strategic. In order for them not to go mad with anxiety that they were working with Emma and Meryl, he made everyone part of the gang. And he knew exactly what each actor needed, whether it was a lot of takes for Pacino or for Mary-Louise to be left alone so she could be focused and internal in her prep work.”
The sheer duration of the filming was more punishing than anyone involved could have imagined. Production had to shut down briefly when Thompson got sinusitis after days of “playing an angel having an orgasm while hanging eighty feet up on a wire. The wind machines were blowing all the studio dust up my nose,” she says. “It was one of the highlights of my life, but it stretched us all as far as we could go. At one point, I came in and Mike said, ‘It’d be great if the angel were a lot taller than Prior, but it’ll take us two hours to raise the floor she’s standing on,’ and I just burst into tears.”
But a deep sense of comradeship usually prevailed. Streep knew just when one of the actors needed a few murmured words of encouragement about how much Mike liked them, and often the actors would hang around on set even during their downtime; one morning, Thompson, who was off duty, snuck into the back of a funeral-chapel set to watch Streep, almost unrecognizable as a rabbi, deliver a eulogy. “Emma and I talked about this,” says Streep. “Angels was like making three movies one right after another. Usually when you worked with Mike, you said goodbye to him after a couple of months and that was it. With this, we kept coming back.”
Nichols’s health began to suffer, and the respiratory problems that had afflicted him for years began to flare up into a terrifyingly protracted racking cough. “When I first worked with him,” says Mary Bailey, “I read Cocteau’s diary in which he talks about being in the hospital and says, ‘The person next to me had this horrible cough, and sounded like’—it’s translated as ‘a lacerated orchid.’ That’s what Mike’s cough sounded like.”
“He would sneak cigarettes with Mike Haley behind the scenery,” says Costas, “which was terrible, because he was very susceptible to lung infections, anything pulmonary, and then he would get sick and take steroids, which are not good for the personality. You just wanted him to take a few days and slow down, but it was very difficult for him.”
After several months, production fell slightly behind schedule, and for the first time since the beginning, his spirits started to flag. “I walked over to his office on the set in Queens,” says Brokaw, “and he was at his desk looking despondent, with his chin in his hands. I said, ‘What is it?’ He said, ‘I’m tired. I’m just tired. I don’t want to do this today.’ And I took a breath and said, ‘Mike, there are 165 people outside on that stage, so pull it together. What would cheer you up?’”
Sometimes it was a visitor—Maurice Sendak spent a day on location in a cemetery, playing a rabbi, alongside Kushner, and Natalie Portman would drop by just to hang out and watch Nichols work. But most often, the answer was food. “I would get in his chauffeur-driven car and go to Peter Luger’s every day to get him and the cast burgers for lunch,” Cullman says. “Part of my job was to de-stress him with snacks or cigarettes or candy, or a joke, or a conversation, which is what he really wanted. Sometimes his anger would flare up, but it wasn’t often, and it was never about something stupid or petty. It was always about incompetence, someone not doing their job as well as he knew they could or as well as he was.”
The shooting of Angels went on for so long that at one point or another, almost everyone involved was given a birthday party; thanks to HBO’s very free spending, each one was more elaborate than the last. Nichols’s, thrown on an Astoria soundstage, featured a performance by the singer Diana Krall, ten Rockettes, and a guest appearance by Whoopi Goldberg in full angel raiment. “It was all accomplished in an hour and twenty minutes,” says Costas, “because we had to get back to work.”
In November, production moved to Hadrian’s Villa, outside Rome, where Nichols had decided to film the scenes set in heaven, in which Prior tells a council of angels how much he wants to live and excoriates God for abandoning the world in the face of human suffering. The scene was particularly arduous for Kirk, not just textually but physically; he would spend much of one day wading through a pool of hip-deep dirty water in a hospital gown that concealed a wetsuit.
“I feared for Justin when we were in Italy,” Streep says. “That was really hard. In the theater, you can make the scene work with lighting, production design, and the momentum of everything that has carried you to that point. But it’s different when you’re trying to speak those words in the middle of a daylit tourist area with people milling around.”
“Justin had got really thin, and he worried a lot,” says Thompson, who mentored Kirk throughout the shoot and worked closely with him in Italy to help him through the scene. “He may have worried even more than Ben. I adored those boys—they threw every ounce of themselves into it. I’d tell them, ‘Don’t worry so much,’ and they’d say, ‘Oh, yeah, easy to say,’ and then we’d go and drink in an Irish pub.”
“Believe me, it was overwhelming,” says Kirk. “It was a baptism by fire. It’s possible that all the insecurities I had served the character, who was always off balance, and the story. And I always felt that Mike was in my corner. But after that, I was a changed actor. I was never intimidated by material or co-workers again.”
The cast and crew returned to New York, and on a cold late-autumn morning, Streep, Wright, Kirk, and Shenkman gathered at Bethesda Fountain to shoot the scene that ends the film, an epilogue set five years after Prior’s return from the celestial world. Although there was still a month of production to go, it felt like a goodbye of sorts. Parker had already filmed her last scene as Harper Pitt and had burst into tears as soon as she finished; the actors and Nichols felt they had been through something epic together. Sawyer came to Central Park to see her husband film the send-off, as did a number of Nichols’s friends. “Justin had gotten better and better and better,” said Nichols, “and then he had had these difficulties with the stuff in heaven. And then, at the end, he suddenly relaxed. And we were all extremely moved. You could see that something important had happened to him. He trusted me, and he trusted Tony, and he trusted the place we were in. And he was amazing.”
That day, as Kirk spoke Prior’s last lines—“I bless you. More life. The great work begins”—to the camera, Nichols found himself weeping. “He was always living the scene with you, whatever it was,” says Streep. “It was so wonderful to feel there was someone in the same groove. And yes, he liked to cry. He was an easy crier. And no eyelashes, so there was no place for the tears to hide and nothing ever to stop them.”