the last book I ever read (Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, excerpt ten)

from Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Philip Gefter:

On the set of Virginia Woolf, “I certainly wasn’t confident,” Nichols said during that television interview. “I didn’t know how to shoot a movie.” Nichols agreed with Lehman about shooting the film in sequence—not unlike a play—and they were setting up the production schedule toward that end. He later reflected that “you can actually watch me learning as I go.” In conceptualizing the first scene, for example, Nichols planned to introduce George and Martha as they came through the front door, with the camera positioned inside the house. But he couldn’t figure out where the camera was supposed to be to get opening shots that zero in on their faces. “Won’t the front door hit the camera?” he asked his good friend Anthony Perkins, who was staying with him before production began. Perkins explained that that’s what long lenses were for, a revelation to Nichols. He had so much to learn about the technical aspects of shooting a movie; the even greater challenge, though, was how to conjure a performance out of an actor for the camera versus a live theater audience.

In the weeks before the actors arrived, Nichols embarked on his own tutorial in moviemaking. He took over one of the Warner Brothers screening rooms and summoned more than half a dozen films to watch in a series of afternoon screenings. One, A Streetcar Named Desire, had been shot by Harry Stradling, the veteran cinematographer assigned by Warner Brothers to shoot Virginia Woolf. Nichols also screened his beloved A Place in the Sun, which starred a much younger Taylor. “It depressed Mike because he realized that one cannot become George Stevens on one’s first attempt, no matter how hard one tries,” Lehman reported in his journal. “What I think he forgets is that he can become Mike Nichols on his first attempt, and that might be more interesting, particularly for this picture.” One afternoon, Mike asked Ernie to see if he couldn’t get the studio to pay the $350 necessary to obtain several foreign films: Francois Truffaut’s Jules and Jim and The 400 Blows, and Federico Fellini’s 8 ½. “Hacks only imitate,” Mike explained. “We artists steal.” Lehman and others joined him for these screenings. Another film that Mike selected was Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, which takes place entirely in a single apartment, just as Virginia Woolf takes place almost entirely in George and Martha’s living room. Mike wanted to understand how Hitchcock handled such a limited set, which was not unlike shooting an entire movie as if it were onstage.