MIKE NICHOLS - DIRECTOR NICHOLS HELPS CLOONEY PERFECT HIS GERMAN

DIRECTOR NICHOLS HELPS CLOONEY PERFECT HIS GERMAN

Moviemaker MIKE NICHOLS had to be drafted in at the last minute to help GEORGE CLOONEY perfect his German in new period thriller THE GOOD GERMAN. The CLOSER director is fluent in German and assisted Clooney when it was clear the lines he'd learned phonetically from a dialect coach were nonsense. Clooney, who also learned to speak a little Farsi for the STEVEN SODERBERGH film, explains, "We had this dialect coach on the set who clearly didn't speak a word of German. "The dialect coach said, `Perfect, yah that was gud.' Then he went away and I recorded the dialogue. "The months passed and Steven called me up and said, `Listen, the German doesn't make sense, nobody understands it.' "Mike Nichols speaks fluent German, so Mike and Steven and I went into a looping stage and I had to redo all of my German with Mike Nichols as my German coach."