An actor graduates behind the camera
“I’m doing, finally, what I’ve observed was being done wrong for 45 years. And it’s tragic in terms of movies.”
ACTOR-DIRECTOR DUSTIN HOFFMAN
TORONTO — Dustin Hoffman won’t stop talking: memories, rants, stray thoughts. The publicists who have lined up interviews for Quartet — a movie he directed about a home for retired musicians — have asked journalists to keep it short, but Hoffman is unstoppable. He’s a 75-yearold dynamo.
He would hate to read that. “I’ve seen a couple of articles and it’s the first sentence: ‘Dustin Hoffman, 75 years old,’” he says. “Like it’s news. Why? I don’t mind if somebody says it. I just don’t like seeing it in print. And the math. You can’t get away from the math.”
He seems as young as ever, however, and bursting with ideas. He has been a movie actor for 45 years, since his breakout in The Graduate in 1967, and he developed a reputation as a perfectionist who fought with directors.
His character in Tootsie (1982) who gets a job as a tomato in a commercial but refuses to sit down because it isn’t logical for a fruit to sit is not far from the real Hoffman. Now, as a director, he gets to fix all that.
“I’m doing, finally, what I’ve observed was being done wrong for 45 years,” Hoffman says. “And it’s tragic in terms of movies. We’re supposed to trust the director, but you don’t after a while if they’re not using your best takes, because you’re not in the cutting room. You’re asked to build a performance, but you’re not there when they put it together.
“So I always think you shouldn’t see bad acting on the screen, because they could protect you if they know it’s bad. They could put the camera on the pigeon or put it over your shoulder. Or have you come in and dub it differently. Or if you’re really bad, fire you and put somebody else in.”
Hoffman can talk for hours about the sins of filmmakers. He compares actors to prisoners in old black-and-white movies who plot an escape and then whisper, “Here comes the screw,” when the guard walks by. In this case, the guard is the director.
“There are crimes committed in the so-called art of filmmaking, and that is: Why is it that the acting is given the least amount of time?” he asks. “They’re patient, they light and the director’s so scared of the cinematographer they can’t say ‘hurry up.’ They’re gods, some of these cinematographers. And they’ll light for an hour because they’re going for perfection. And then you’ll do one take and they say, ‘I just want to fiddle with something.’ And you’re starting to get something going as an actor and they’re fiddling for 15 minutes and you’re waiting. And then they want to get it, boom! They want to move on. He’s got a list of what he’s got to get done that day, and he’s only looking at his watch when you’re acting. He’s not looking at his watch when they’re lighting.”
In 1978, Hoffman began to direct the film Straight Time, but he says he fired himself after three days. Why has it taken so long to get restarted? “I think the safest, honest and yet personal thing I could say without being too personal is, my demons stopped me.”
Quartet, the story that brought him back and had its premiere at the Toronto film festival last fall, is based on a play by Ronald Harwood. It stars veteran British actors Tom Courtney, Michael Gambon, Patricia Collins and Billy Connolly as retired opera singers in a home for superannuated musicians. Their lives are turned upside down when an old diva, played by Maggie Smith, arrives to reignite old memories and rivalries.
Hoffman has a particular interest in opera singers. When he was young, he lived in New York City’s East Harlem with Robert Duvall, whose brother was an opera singer. “And they were a particular breed of people,” he says.
“And I thought they were very much like actors were, except exaggerated. We think we’re horny?”
He surrounded the stars of Quartet with actual retired musicians, playing other residents of the home, and he is delighted with the mood it created. “These people were so extraordinarily excited to get the job,” he says. “And I see a tape of an 83-year-old guy blowing trumpet, and no one has asked him to work in 10 years, and he’s in the movie, and he plays beautifully? Well, that’s moving.
“They loved that they weren’t dead, and I think that’s what Billy Connolly said once. He said, ‘I know what the theme of this movie is.’ I said, ‘What?’ He says, ‘Don’t die before you’re dead.’”
For his part, Hoffman says he just tries to rescue actors from the place he calls “bull s--tland,” to ease the humiliation that can come with doing things that are false.
In the case of Quartet, he was trying to capture the reallife feeling of the older musicians in the film, men and women who weren’t getting work because of their ages.
“Something’s wrong with us, that talent becomes invisible. ... I mean, you can lose your top notes, but at its heart, talent doesn’t need cosmetic surgery.”