Dustin Hoffman

Interview By: Rocco Passafuime
RoccoPassafuime@TheCinemaSource.com

It goes without saying that Dustin Hoffman has pretty much done it all. He's gone from playing an aimless young man fooling around in The Graduate, to a gender-bending out-of-work actor in Tootsie, an autistic in Rain Man, and this is just scraping the surface of the many films he's worked in a career that has now spanned over 40 years.

Now, at the age of 71, Hoffman is out to show he's not too old to dazzle audiences on screen as he does in his latest film, the romantic comedy Last Chance Harvey. He stars in the film with Oscar-winning actress Emma Thompson. Dustin discussed for us, as only he can with a mix of both dry-witted sarcasm and earnest truth, the importance of his chemistry with Thompson in this film, whom he has worked with previously on the film Stranger Than Fiction.

'It's not just professional intimacy. I thought it was,' Hoffman jokes, 'The truth is that these things are not believed by anybody that sees them. These interviews, these press conferences, these junkets. Because everybody is talking about their movie like they are selling used cars and you don't believe it. It's like those candidates running for office, they'll say anything. So, when you suddenly want to speak the truth, you figure no one's going to believe it.'

'Emma and I had this kind of connection that the only way to describe it is that you meet somebody at a party and the next day you go, jeez, I don't know what it is, but what is it'' he continues, 'You're like, I don't know, just something happened and that's what happened and it still exists. And I begged her to go to a doctor that I had for her in New York. But she's British, she's stubborn, and they're very antibiotics and it's going to cost her her career.'

His praise of Thompson extended to discussing our very own interview we did with her.

'Emma did something in this interview that didn't get past me,' Dustin believes, 'She did something quite unusual that she speaks, I think, volumes for her and the movie that we were attempting that Joel [Hopkins] wrote and directed.'

'It's that she talked about working with someone, I think, and said what year it was and what year she was and all you had to do was add it up to 49,' he adds, ' And she not only willingly admits her age, but does it with a grace and pride and that's unusual and that says more about Emma than anything else. Anyways, she's a classy lady who's a broad underneath. That's Emma.'

The romantic comedy Last Chance Harvey is rare as it's a romantic comedy centered on more older and mature characters. Dustin shared for us how he believes the film is similar to the European New Wave films of the late 1950's and early 1960's.

'I think we've always been behind Europe, when it comes to film,' he says, 'When I came here to study, it was late fifties, early sixties, and we'd run to see Trufolo and Antolioni and DiCicca and Bergman and Fellini. These new films, I don't know who has taken over these positions, I'm not sure that's even happened, but there was the Italian new wave after the Second World War, in which nobody had any money, There was no Italy, there was no actors, and you came out with The Bicycle Thief, with non-actors, this extraordinary work.'

'Then you had the French New Wave,' Hoffman continues, 'And I remember in those days going up to the Thalia in upper Broadway and I'd see stories about so-called middle-aged romance, Senioree, Eve Montagne, Roman Schneider, so maybe we're just finally getting around to what they were doing 40 years ago, maybe. But we did have our Hollywood version of it. We have Bogart, at forty-something, bedding down Lauren Bacall at 17, and really bedding down for the next forty years, but now we're finally, you know, that's my feeling.'

Hoffman's character in Last Chance Harvey is a n'er do well who's daughter chooses her stepfather over him to walk down the aisle at her London wedding, who ends up staying and falling in love with Emma Thompson's character. He discussed for us the themes in the film as it relates to the relationship he has had with his own parents, starting with his father.

'I was doing The Graduate and my father was always, he had no boundaries, and I didn't want to invite them to the set because I knew they would be trouble,' Dustin recalls, 'It was almost my first real film. Mike Nichols, the most successful director of his time, I don't think anybody's really replaced him of that or maybe [Steven] Spielberg. It was like my second movie and they're like when can we come and I'm like you can't come, it's closed, makeup and all that stuff. We were going to shoot at the Coconut Grove at the lobby where I come to get the room for Anne Bancroft. And I knew there was going to be a lot of background people and ropes there, everybody's safe and I invite them that night and that day they come.'

'And we're doing the scene and I finished the scene and now they're going to lay a track out for me coming in and going into the wrong room, looking for whatever,' he adds, 'And I'm going to the bathroom and I come back out of the bathroom and Mike Nichols is behind the camera looking for the editor, Sam O'Steen, the cinematographer, [Robert] Surtees, brilliant people. And they were laughing as I near them and I know there's something, and I look and there's my father. And they didn't want to tell me at first. But when my father saw that I was gone, and I wouldn't tell this had he not passed on because it would embarrass him, he's blushing now, and I went to the bathroom and I climbed over the rope and he went over to Mike and he watched and he introduced himself. And he literally said to Mike Nichols, 'I think you're lining up this shot wrong.''

He continues with an equally embarrassing, yet no less intriguing story of an incident involving him and his mother during a trip to the London premiere of one of his most heralded films, Kramer Vs. Kramer.

'I blocked out my mother and it's worth telling,' he says, 'In 1979, Kramer Vs. Kramer, we're getting all the awards, we're going to London and they have a big premiere. And I brought my parents and they never been to one. They stand in line and there's the Queen and someone next to her that always whispers to her who's next and then she talks to like she's an old friend. The guy just said, 'This is so and so and blah blah blah' Anyway, my parents were standing right behind me and the rope is there. It's a rope and I'm standing in line with Meryl Streep and Bob Benton, the producer, and everything. And they're standing right here, they're shorter than I am. I mean I am the tallest one in my family, including people that have married other people. I mean, my mother was like 4'10' and she says, come on, can I stand up' She wanted to stand up in front of me.'

'She kept whispering, please!' Dustin continues, 'And I'm like, you can't, they said you can't. I'm saying, you can't, you can't, the tuxedos in, and he's like, literally, you're not allowed to. I said, there's no other parents here in line. It's absolutely a true story. I'm not editorializing this, don't steal this. They get to one person before the person next to me, and I'm nervous, it's nerve-racking for Americans, and I hear behind me, honey, honey. She turns right over to me and goes, try to come over the rope, and because she's so short, she got stuck and the rope is literally where her crotch is. And she had one foot over and one foot back and literally, she's like, I'm stuck, and she couldn't go forward or backward. It was a true story and I said, dad, dad. And we had to get her and hoist her up and put her back down. It's not as funny as you would see it.'

Writing and directing the film is Joel Hopkins, who has previously worked on the films Jorge and Jump Tomorrow. Dustin claims it was Hopkins who set the key tone for what Last Chance Harvey was to be.

'He wanted to write something for us and that's what we are,' Hoffman recounts,' We had an agreement, the three of us, that we would not to do so-called 'character parts'. We wanted to recreate that thing we had when we met in Chicago, we didn't want to lose that. I never talk about a movie because you can't talk about it you're in that's open, I mean, you can't say it's a good movie or a bad movie.'

'It either it works or it doesn't with an audience when it opens,' he adds, 'I must say, at the screenings we have had, with the Q&A, I had never heard this statement before, and I hear it continually, and it's high praise for all of us because we set out and accomplished what we tried to do. And we've heard the same thing, they feel like they're eavesdropping. That's what we wanted to do more than anything else.'

He also goes on to praise Hopkins' directorial style, which he describes as documentary-like.

'Joel had a documentary talent which I didn't realize existed,' he claims, 'Because I had seen the film he did before and it really wasn't documentary-ish, called Jump Tomorrow. And I had seen Medium Cool years and years and years ago, that docudrama. And only after I saw this movie did I realize that a certain side of him has a real documentary talent. I think the scenes that Emma has in the pub, which I wasn't there for, that has a real close to a documentary-ish filmmaking as you can see, with expert casting of the other people.'

'And I can't tell if they are improvising or saying words that he wrote,' Dustin continues, 'I think that's the hardest. One of the hardest things to do in films as a director is to do parties or pubs. It's very hard to write them and have a sense of that real, I applaud him if he fucked up every seen that we did. High praise, sir.'

Another aspect of Hopkins that Dustin also praises it requires the audience to sometimes draw their own conclusions.

'A movie is interesting sometimes when it's not laid out,' Hoffman believes, 'And I credit Joel here because we were there during the shooting, that the director allows the audience to be a collaborator and answer some of the questions that the director hasn't even answered.'

'One example is Liane Balaban and I when we have our second scene together and she's going to tell me that she wants her stepfather to give her away,' he adds, 'And that took up shooting time as to did she decide at that moment or did she decide before and I don't remember how that was resolved. I think it's in the audience's hands.'

Hopkins' environment, he also claims, was one where nothing was held back, not even with the film's sex scenes.

'There's two frontal several scenes and eight cuts,' Dustin says, 'I mean, my God, we went all out. We did it! And I agreed to do full-frontal if you do a little computer graphics afterwards.'