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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Monday, April 28, 2003

Hoffman still wags the dog in Hollywood

By David Germain
Associated Press

Assessing his many interviews to promote his new film "Confidence," Dustin Hoffman decides he's given only one decent response to the many questions asked.

Out of the limelight for a few years, actor Dustin Hoffman is in the midst of a string of supporting film roles, including that of a mob boss in the new movie "Confidence."

Associated Press

A reporter asked Hoffman if he himself is confident. Hoffman's answer: When he comes to a one-way street, he looks both ways before crossing — whereas a confident man looks only in the direction from which traffic flows.

"That was my one good answer all weekend," Hoffman recalls.

Hoffman may underestimate his gift for gab. More so than perhaps any other major Hollywood star, Hoffman plays the raconteur when chatting with reporters, offering personal asides, historical trivia and ribald anecdotes while discussing his movie.

"There is nothing more fun than talking to Dustin Hoffman, whether for 10 minutes or 10 hours," says Edward Burns, who plays a con man in "Confidence" whose gang reluctantly finds itself pulling a job for crime boss Hoffman. "He's unrelenting. It's one great story after another."

Many celebrities settle on short, quotable sound-bite answers and offer them up repeatedly in interview after interview. Hoffman will rattle on for 15 minutes to answer a single question.

"Cut me off anywhere you want here. I can't help it," Hoffman advises early in an interview. "I don't know how to do two-sentence answers. I'd love to be the guy that's asked, 'How do you feel?' and says, 'Good.' Then on to the next question. That is our culture now, isn't it? Sound bites."

Hoffman, 65, has run counter to Hollywood expectations since his film debut in Mike Nichols' "The Graduate" in 1967. At 30, he was old for a rookie movie actor. Until then, he had been a stage performer who disdained scripts that came his way because he wanted to remain in theater.

And he broke the mold of the tall, generically handsome leading man, helping open the door for such movie stars as Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro.

"The truth of the matter is, I'm a freak accident," says Hoffman, going on to detail the character descriptions he encountered for Hollywood auditions before "The Graduate."

"They tell you, here's the parts available: Arthur, 35, smokes a pipe, leading man. His wife, beautiful, wears diaphanous gowns, leading. Daughter, ingenue, the word means she's beautiful. Next to that is character juvenile; that's her ugly girlfriend, to give her contrast. Same is true of juvenile male, good-looking. And character juvenile, that's the part I could go for.

"Mike Nichols changes everything and makes the character juvenile the leading juvenile, who then becomes, because the movie works, a version of what Hollywood euphemistically calls a leading man."

In the years since, Hoffman has taken wild turns in screen roles, among them the seedy Ratso Rizzo in "Midnight Cowboy," the Custer's last stand survivor in "Little Big Man," the academic-turned-vigilante in "Straw Dogs," the cross-dressing actor of "Tootsie" and Tom Cruise's autistic brother in "Rain Man," which earned Hoffman his second Academy Award (the first came for "Kramer vs. Kramer").

Hoffman's had his share of flops, including "Ishtar," "Sphere" and "The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc," in which he had a small role as Joan's conscience.

The latter two followed 1997's "Wag the Dog," which earned Hoffman the most recent of his seven Oscar nominations. After that came one of Hoffman's periodic retreats from film.

Sometimes Hoffman has filled the gaps between films with returns to the stage. The last few years, he's been developing screenplays with the idea of directing and starring in them himself. Developing his own projects may be a necessity to avoid becoming marginalized into older, peripheral characters. As a concession to the young audience that drives Hollywood, one of Hoffman's scripts would pair him with a much-younger actress.

"Yes, you wake up one morning and you say, 'Oh, there's less scripts available, because I'm now 65,' " Hoffman says. "Kids make up the first weekend at the box office. I don't know if they're going to run in there the first weekend to see a movie that concentrates on a 55-year-old man and a 45-year-old woman that fall in love."

Hoffman is in the midst of a flurry of films that began with last fall's "Moonlight Mile." In a release coming up this fall, he co-stars with Gene Hackman and John Cusack in the John Grisham thriller "The Runaway Jury." Early next year, he appears in "J.M. Barrie's Neverland," starring Johnny Depp as the author who created "Peter Pan."

The character Hoffman plays in "Confidence," directed by James Foley ("Glengarry Glen Ross"), originally was written for a menacing, 250-pound brute. When they learned Hoffman was interested, Foley and Burns were eager to switch the character.

"I think the brilliant thing Dustin did was that on the page, that character would sort of intimidate my character physically," Burns said. "But this being a con movie, it's all about mind games, so Dustin figured out ways for his bad guy to mess with people's minds and intimidate them that way."

Hoffman says he has streamlined his criteria for choosing roles. It's no longer about who he gets to play but who he gets to work with, people such as Foley, Depp and "Neverland" director Marc Forster, who made "Monster's Ball."

"There are huge mistakes in life, and I realized one of mine was that I should have worked with a lot of people that I had a chance to work with in the past but didn't," Hoffman says. "I just said, I'm not even going to look at the script anymore or the part. I want to get in the room with people I want to work with. ... That's my only criterion now."