Dustin Hoffman is busy making sure that everyone who wants some gets a slice
of pizza. The actor sports a natty pale suit with colourful vertical
stripes, a pastel shirt and a bright-as-sunshine tie. The kooky ensemble is
finished with a wild bouffant hairdo and startlingly voluminous eyebrows.
We’re in Toronto, on the set of Mr Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, a film written
and directed by Zach Helm, who scripted Stranger Than Fiction (also starring
Hoffman). This time, Hoffman plays the title character, an eccentric fellow,
proprietor of a magical toy shop, who is preparing to hand over his emporium
to a worthy recipient after his death. And, right now, he is enjoying
himself hugely: today’s scene is set in a bed showroom, and he and his
co-star, Natalie Portman, are bouncing up and down on the mattresses. He
looks like a big kid.
But then Hoffman has always been young for his age. He played 21-year-old
Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate when he was turning 30; pushing 40, he was
still convincing as a student in Marathon Man. As Edward Magorium, however,
the tables are turned: at 70, Hoffman is playing a character who is 243
years old. Still, there’s nothing frail about him: he practically skips over
for a chat between takes. “Sit down,” he entreats. As there is only one
chair, I politely say no, then — not so politely, perhaps — point out that,
seated, I’d be staring up his nose.
“I don’t mind,” he smiles, unfazed. “Is it clean?” Then he suggests, with a
grin:“We can lie on the bed. That would be a first: you want to do it that
way?”
Talking to Hoffman is akin to engaging in mental gymnastics. He’s so hyped and
happy and downright gregarious, you find yourself drawn into any number of
tangential conversations or random observations, without realising that, if
you’re not careful, you will have had a perfectly pleasant time talking
about nothing much at all. He would be the perfect dinner-party guest.
I try to pin him down about his get-up. The hair was a big problem while he
was developing the character, he says; moreover, he couldn’t figure out how
to portray Magorium at all, until he consulted his wife, Lisa. “I love
telling jokes,” he offers
as a preamble. “I think they’re the closest thing to poetry — and I understand
them better. I’ve been telling this one joke for 30 years, and Lisa asked me
if I’d ever told it in front of the mirror, because it kept popping
into her head while she read the script.”
And so we segue into a full rendition of the ostrich joke — a hilarious, if,
for the purposes of this feature, frustratingly visual and mildly vulgar gag
involving two male and two female birds. He tells it well, but then he has
had plenty of practice.
Hoffman would banter away the entire day, given half the chance. But maybe he
finds it good mental exercise; it certainly keeps him on his toes on set.
“Dustin brings lots of energy,” Portman notes in passing. “He always says,
‘Remember, this is the last time we ever get to do this scene.’ It makes you
feel so excited about it.” Hoffman nods acceptance of the compliment and
counters with his own. “When I was Natalie’s age, my choice was whether to
wait tables or drive a taxi.”
Consensus has it that age has mellowed Hoffman, that he doesn’t agonise over
script choices any more; that the actor who famously turned down both
Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman now sleeps at night, rather than
worrying about whether scripts are good enough. He harrumphs loudly at the
very idea. “I think that notion has come from a misquote,” he asserts. “The
truth is, the older you get, the less variety of parts you are offered. If
you’re a star and you’ve spent most of your career being able to take your
pick of the litter, you notice when the offers start to diminish. You’re too
old to play leads, so you’re offered the supporting role — but many stars
don’t want to make that transition. They see it as a sign of symbolic
impotence. And that the audience will no longer regard them as a star.”
Hoffman prefers to see it as a challenge: “I love acting, and I’m not going to
determine what I do based on what I fear other people might think. I do what
I want to do.”
Competition apparently remains rife among the elder statesmen of Hollywood.
“You look around and say, ‘What? Morgan Freeman is God? Again? Why didn’t I
know about that part?’ ” He’s only partly joking: the truth is that the
veterans have effectively come full circle and are back competing for roles,
just as they did when they were starting out. The difference this time is
that they know how good they are.
Hoffman’s back catalogue stands tall. When we speak again, he has just wrapped
up another film, the British Last Chance Harvey, co-starring Emma Thompson.
I tell him there is a new DVD box set just out of six of his movies, and
then I list them: Papillon, Kramer vs Kramer, Tootsie, Stranger Than
Fiction, Accidental Hero, The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc. By the
time I get to that last one, the Luc Besson entry, Hoffman can’t help but
snigger. What does he think?
“Well, my first reaction is that those are the ones they got the rights to,” he
laughs. “They tried the others, but, you know — like Einstein when he tried
to prove the existence of God mathematically and wound up with the unified
theory — they settled for what they could get.”
Not sure he can come up with six films for his own fantasy Dustin Hoffman box
set, he manages half a dozen and then some: “The Graduate, Midnight Cowboy.
. . I thought Straw Dogs was interesting. Lenny, I think, is a good film,
and I do think Papillon is good — and one of the best things McQueen had
done. All the President’s Men, Kramer, Tootsie, Rain Man, Wag the Dog. . . I
do like Meet the Fockers, because my kids [Hoffman has six] say it’s the
closest thing I ever played to myself.”
He pauses for a brief aside: “They know me in a way that the world doesn’t.”
Back on track: “A film I made that nobody saw — and it’s one of my own
personal favourites — called Straight Time. . . ” It’s my turn to interject.
Straight Time (1978), based on Edward Bunker’s novel, was recently released
on DVD. It was a project very much of Hoffman’s making: he plays a career
criminal, newly released from jail and struggling to keep out of trouble.
Also starring Harry Dean Stanton, Theresa Russell and Kathy Bates, it’s an
excellent film, and definitely up there with his best work. “You saw it?” He
seems genuinely surprised. “Thank you.”
But he’s concerned he’s missing a title that will come back to haunt him. Not
that I think it’s a likely contender, I submit David O Russell’s I .
Huckabees. “Ha!” he responds. “That’s one of my kids’ favourite films. It’s
in their top two or three, and I think it’s because it appeals to an age
group just entering their first existential phase — a phase most adults gave
up on long ago.”
He is in his second existential phase right now, he tells me. “Kierkegaard
thought — and I use this as an example when people say the man has no
humour. I mean, Kierkegaard is a funny guy. Prove it, you say? Okay —
Kierkegaard’s metaphor for life, and I’m paraphrasing, is that it’s like
being suspended over the ocean, arms and legs akimbo. You’re suspended by
wires above the ocean, and it’s, like, 50 fathoms deep. And that’s life.” He
shrugs. “What is there to do but laugh?”
Way, way back, Hoffman was quoted as saying — and I’m paraphrasing — that once
you’re a star, you’re dead already, you’re embalmed. He tuts, irritated once
again by something he says was taken out of context and has haunted him ever
since. “What I was alluding to,” he sighs, suddenly serious, “is something
not dissimilar to when you look at a photograph of yourself 10, 15, 20 years
after it was taken. There you are, but really, there you were.” That’s where
the mortality comes in, he argues, the death. “It’s like memory, but with a
punch to the stomach, because you want it back. Because you want to do it
again. Because, you say, you could do it better.” What would he want to do
again? “The whole banana.” Really? He proffers a sincere “Sure”.
Having done press for Mr Magorium in both America and Britain, Hoffman says he
has been struck by the cultural differences surrounding death. The Americans
have balked, in a way the Europeans haven’t, at the discussion of death in a
film for hildren.
“I’m, like, ‘Hey, go look at the kids’ movies already
out there.’ Because here’s a film, whether it succeeds in it or
not, that attempts to embrace mortality as a part of life and explain it at
a level that is not terrifying.”
According to Hoffman, the concern is unfounded. He sees children as being in a
state unadulterated by the constraints that hinder our perceptions as
adults. To illustrate his point, he recalls a recent walk with his wife
where, up ahead, were a couple out with their toddler, walking and talking
while the child followed behind.
“The parents are walking normally,” he says. “But the kid can’t do that. The
kid is climbing up on a little ledge and jumping off, and running over to
look at something — and it’s a world in itself. It’s magical, and
it fills them: they see something and their legs just do it. And I said to my
wife, ‘How do we go beyond that? How do we suddenly not understand the wonder
of that? Why do we stop?’ ” So he and his wife decided to mimic the kid. “It
was extraordinary. There’s something to be said about not losing that.”
In both of our conversations, he refers to the final televised Melvyn Bragg
interview with Dennis Potter, as the writer struggled with the pain of the
psoriatic arthropathy that crippled him and the cancer that was killing him.
It’s an interview that had a profound impact on Hoffman.
“He talks about being in the present tense, being in the ‘now’. Being more in
the now than he had ever been. And how liberating that was. And it shakes
me,” he says quietly. “That, I think, is the metaphor of the Wonder Emporium
— that’s the magic, if you will. That if you think about that which exists
for more than two seconds, it is surreal. We’re back to the planet circling
around as it circles around in the middle of nothing. It’s just nutty.
Nutty. And I think kids, on an instinctive level, get that, and, in some
miraculous, subconscious way, embrace it.”
He sits back and sighs contentedly. “Kierkegaard was right.”
Mr Magorium’s Wonder Emporium is on general release
Why would you say that, Aidan?
Kierkegaard did in fact have a wicked sense of humour - there is even a lot of scholarly literature on it, if you wouldn't take my word for it. His humour is an integral facet of his existentialism. And the metaphor that Hoffman quotes does indeed sound like Kierkegaard.
Adrienne, Richmond Hill, Canada
Arrrgh!!!
Hoffman obviously hasn't actually read Kierkegaard.
Aidan, London,