| Dustin Hoffman Takes a Magical Turn |
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| Written by Brad Balfour | |
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 Jason Bateman and Zachary Mills in "Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium"  Dustin Hoffman as Mr. Magorium and Natalie Portman as Molly Mahoney in "Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium" Q: Acting is essentially playing. This film gives actors a genuine opportunity to play. Is that a different experience for you as an actor, than working on a screenplay that is more serious and has more violence? DH: No. I work the same all the time. It's funny when you said "play." When I did this film with Johnny Depp ["Finding Neverland"], I had a couple of scenes with him and so before, he came over and we talked over the scenes. I'm a producer of his play which flops. He's a writer of the play and I was the producer. In talking about the scene, somehow Arthur Miller's name came up. I had worked with Arthur Miller on a "Death of a Salesman" revival. He said it's a play. A play. The critics just destroy the very meaning and essence. It's just play. They're the ones who put a serious stamp. And he loves that, in the film it becomes dialogue in the film. It's play. It's pretend, but my own feeling is that I don't think that I do, or actors do, anything differently because we all do that. We all act. We all play, we all put on a face for whatever it's for, whether it be our mother, or our boyfriend, or dentist, or what day it is, what clothing we're wearing. We're not our selves. Our selves are very private beings that we usually reserve for only a few. The rest is [mock cheerfulness] "Hey, how are you?" So I always think that what differentiates actors from everyone else is that we observe the way other people act and we try to find a craft in which we recreate it. That's what I do. I did have a lot of fun doing this [film], but not as much fun as "[Meet the] Fockers, "because in "Fockers," I could just cut loose. I could improvise. Here I had to say what the director had me say. In "Fockers," I would come home to my kids and they said that I finally played myself. And that's a side that I do at home. I'm kind of crazy. They say to people, when they ask them, "What's your dad like?" they say, "We have a great dad, but he's crazy. He's crazy." Q: What are those scenes you have described as "freebies?" DH: "Freebies" are just... Well, directors are directors and they have a vision. They want to hit the note they want to hit. You make sure that you are comfortable with hitting that note and you obliged to do their vision. But many times when you work with them and do takes, you get impulses and I always... I think it started with the second movie I did--"Midnight Cowboy"—and that is the "freebie." Sometimes a director would say, "Well wait a minute, what are you going to do?" Well, It's like writing, you know what you're going to write, but you don't know until you write it. So I would tell the director to let me just do the scene [the way I want to do it], I have this idea...let me just do it. And that's a "freebie." There's many examples of it. In "Tootsie," [director] Sydney Pollack wanted me to walk across the park—it was after I was disclosed and I wasn't a woman, and Charlie Durning's feelings are hurt, and I realize I have to apologize to Durning. So he had me walk up this bridge—there's mood music, and there's a mime in the background doing mime stuff. I say to [Sydney], can I have a "freebie?" And he says,"OK," so I said, "I don't need sound." I went up to the actor and I said, "The next take, I'm just going to come up to you and I just want you to fall over." And that was a "freebie." And it wound up being in the movie. I didn't know what was going to happen—it was a "freebie." Q: This film seems to be about mentors and proteges. During your career did you have mentors, and are you mentor? DH: This could be a long answer. I wanted to be a jazz pianist, but I wasn't good enough. I got into city college because I didn't have the grades to get into university. I took acting because it was a way to get three credits. I just needed three credits, and my friend told me to take acting because it was like gym--nobody fails you. I took it. And that's literally how I got involved in acting. In those days, the hero, the mentor, was indisputably [Marlon] Brando. I don't think there's an actor today that tilted that axis the way Brando did. [He affected] Gene Hackman, Rob Duvall, James Dean, a whole generation of actors. There was something that he did that no one had seen before. A lot of people had been natural in their acting, a lot of people had been gifted, but he did a couple of things that were quite new. He hit a private spot that was almost unbearable to watch sometimes. It was that private. There was a femininity in his masculinity that I don't think anyone had seen before. There was almost an androgynous sense sometimes in his acting. And it made him more masculine. He was the first mentor. And there was this teacher, Bobby Brown. He brought the method acting to Pasadena and they didn't like him. Those were the days of the [House Committee on ] Un-American Activities. They thought he was a communist. He had 25 students and I was one of them. I studied with him for two years and he took me aside, and said, "You're a theater person, you're a theater animal. This is what you should do." He said, "Go to New York, study in New York. Nothing is probably going to happen at least 10 years, so you've going to wait a lot of tables and you're going to get a lot of crap. You're a very strange type and you're going to have trouble getting work." He was absolutely correct, because it was 11 or 12 years later when I finally got the break for "The Graduate." Mike Nichols became the next mentor. I was spoiled, and John Schlesinger followed on "Midnight Cowboy." Both those directors brought theater rehearsal into film. They got permission from the studios. These directors somehow got three, four weeks of rehearsal [time] before shooting started. We were able to rehearse. We were able to build like you build a play. It's quite frustrating while you're shooting, because you're trying to do this character in the third or fourth week, and you go to the director and say I've found him, he'll say, it's too late because it's not going to match up with what you did those first three weeks. So they were mentors. I read stuff. I'm always affected by what I read. It doesn't matter whether they're painters or authors. I [had] just read this interview with Mailer, and he just talked about being older and one thing that was wonderful about it. He said, "You just reach a point where you win some and you lose some and you're not expecting a reward for everything you do. It's going to hit or not going to hit." Now I'm at the age where the mentor for me is the artist that survives. When I hear about a director like Sidney Lumet, who, at the age of 81, makes a film ["Before The Devil Knows You're Dead"]... I mean that's all you can ask for. There's this Portuguese director [Manoel de Oliveira] who came out with his latest film ["O espelho mágico"] at 97 years old. They are automatic mentors [laughs]. It has to do with that. Q: Jason Bateman talked about how he admired you as an actor and a parent. What are your favorite memories of your kids? DH: Parenting. The first thing I would advise is that you learn very quickly that they can out-argue you. They start to understand your logic. They come back with "But why? But why? But why?" you cannot win it. It can go on forever. And one day, I just said, in great frustration, "Hey this is not a democracy. This is a dictatorship. There is no why. You're in bed by 9 o'clock. No discussion. I'm the dictator. When you get out of the house, you can have your democracy." I advise, as soon as you have your kids, you tell them this. [laughs] I mean that. You really start to hate them when you realize that they're brighter than you. Q: How was your experience working with Natalie Portman? DH: I met Natalie Portman years ago. I think she's about 26 now; I have a son about 26. The first break I got was in a Class Z summer spot, which meant there was no more than a hundred spots in New York. I got to play Peter in the "Diary of Anne Frank," which was {Anne's] boyfriend. When they did it on Broadway [in 1997], I went to go see it. I took my wife and saw Natalie Portman in it. So we went backstage to meet her. It's an image I won't forget—there she was in this room with her mother, who was deciding whether to even let me and my wife in because she had Natalie sitting down doing finals. She did let us in, and I did a very bad thing. I called up my son in Los Angeles and said, "I got her" [laughs]. He's hated me ever since, but I put him on the phone with Natalie and later he said, "Dad, don't pimp for me anymore" [laughs].And they talked and met a few times. But this was the first time I met with her, and Natalie's very bright, coming in every morning to makeup doing a New York Times puzzle. She could do Monday and Tuesday very rapidly, but when you see her do Wednesday and Thursday and Friday...she strikes me as someone who belongs in that league, that short list of actors who try not to be seduced by stardom. I called her up after [I saw her in] "Goya's Ghosts." It's a flawed film, but everything is flawed. There's some great stuff, some visually wonderful scenes between Javier Bardem and Natalie, and I saw a depth I hadn't seen in a work before. I called her up and said, "Holy cow!" It was kind of painful for her, because the film didn't really open and she put in all this work. She thanked me. She stays grounded, she tries her best. She's a professional. She's fun to work with. She really has a need for privacy. It's genuine. She has friends that she's kept since childhood, people that she hangs with since she was eight or nine years old. I wish her the best. Q: You're making a film in London now? DH: I did a film a year ago called "Stranger than Fiction," with Emma Thompson [which incidentally was written by "Mr. Magorium" director Helm]. We had never met before, and we only did a couple of scenes in the movie. The director [Marc Forster] had to cut our scenes in half because he thought it distracted from Will Ferrell and Maggie Gyllenhaal. So I said, "Can I see the scenes you cut out?" I saw them and thought, "Wow, Emma and me are cooking," so I sent her a copy and we vowed to find a way to work together. She found somebody that she knew over there, a filmmaker, who wrote a script with us in mind. Now we've got about two weeks left [to go]. It's a love story. Need I say for the boomers? [laughs] You never know if a film is going to be good or not, but you know if it's working day to day. It's called "Last Chance Harvey" about an American who's not in great shape. He writes jingles and the jingle days are over. It was big in the '60s, and '70s, and then, in the '80s, it kind of faded out. He's holding on with his fingertips, it's a new generation. So he goes to the wedding of his daughter that he's estranged from and meets his ex-wife that doesn't like him, and as he goes there, he meets this woman on the airline: Emma. He asks her some questions and it becomes like a week-long relationship between the two. Emma is easily the most wonderful person to work with. She combines an intelligence with a rare gift, which is an intuitiveness. She's a very bright woman. She's exceptional and I'm lucky to work for her. © Brad Balfour 2007 |
