It’s the inner fury that garnered Hoffman a reputation for being hard to work with from his earliest days in the business. “I was the difficult one,” he says. “Parenthetically, the smart-ass Jew. [Jack] Nicholson was the dope addict. Warren Beatty was the womanizer. Redford was the pretty boy. And it was hard to get beyond that.” Still, Hoffman admits that at times he was tough on directors because “I was projecting something . . . that was coming from another source, and I wasn’t aware of it then. They were hitting that nerve where I felt objectified. Also, I had zero tolerance for certain kinds of behavior. What I call ‘pigeon-kicking,’ when someone yells and takes advantage of other people who can’t yell back. I find that intolerable.”
When he directed “Quartet,” he says, he realized “just how much acting directors do with their cast.” Actors, he explained, “have our part, have our scene, and that dominates us. What I was humbled by was how much goes wrong on a day-to-day basis. Maybe they lost their location or didn’t get an actor they wanted, the prop master made a mistake on a significant prop.” Realizing how many problems a director has to juggle in a day, “I thought, ‘So that’s what’s going on,’ ” he recalls. “All you think about [as an actor] is, ‘Boy, he’s in a bad mood.’ ”
When he was preparing “Quartet,” which is adapted from a play by Ronald Harwood, Hoffman says, he was inspired by an interview Maggie Smith once gave when a journalist noted that she had her whole life ahead of her and she replied, “Most of it’s been.” The film is suffused with a similar air of wistfulness, wherein the past seems continually to fuse with the present, especially when a long-dormant love affair between two characters reignites. When Hoffman presented the film in London recently, he was suddenly brought to tears recalling his divorce 30 years ago — while his wife looked on from the audience. “I said, ‘Lisa, I’m not still in love with my first wife’ ” he says now. “But what it did was reemphasize that the pain never goes away.”
If “Quartet” captures anything, it’s that sense of past-that’s-never-past that will no doubt strike a chord with the same segment that has identified so strongly with Hoffman’s characters for nearly 50 years. Whether he’s in front of the camera or behind it, he seems destined to be a cultural messenger, bringing crucial information about what it’s like to be alive right here, right now. “We’re all in the same generation here,” Hoffman told the assembled cast before production began. “We’re in our 70s, and if we can talk about what that really feels like, then we will have done the greatest service.”
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