Dustin Hoffman plays the eponymous Magorium in Zach Helm’s new kid flick “Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium”. While the movie has many bizarre sights, including a room filled with flying trains, a domesticated zebra, and a toy store that has mood swings, easily the oddest duck in sight is Hoffman’s Magorium, a 243-year-old eccentric (with a capital ECCENTRIC) who runs his toy store with a gallon of whimsy and a pretty hard lisp.
Hoffman, who’s legendary for his method performances in such classics as “Tootsie” and his Oscar winning turn in “Rain Man”, goes for broke in this role and seemed very eager to discuss it, his career, and his life in general during a press conference in New York.
Q: You are known as an obsessive perfectionist regarding your characters. How do you research someone who's supposed to be over 250 years old?
DUSTIN: I visited a lot of graveyards. [laughs] Succinct answer. When the writer and director met with me on this, we agreed what we didn't want to do. First, prosthetics. Once we agreed not to do that, we said, "How do we handle it?," I thought the only way to handle it was to try to present a character that the people in the film as well as the movie audience would believe that HE would believe that he was that age. So there was nothing to research then. If you meet people and they say something, it doesn't matter if they're lying or not, what's important is if they believe it.
Q: What did you go through mentally to bring this character to life?
DUSTIN: Well...Norman Mailer just died. I was on a computer earlier this morning and I reading his last interview. In this interview he was mentioning Warren Beatty out of all people, and he said that when Norman Mailer saw "Bugsy," he was asking Warren how he brought out the violence that he never had shown in a film. He liked what Warren said, Warren said, "All you have to do is have 5% of the character in you and the rest you can do." Mailer, as a novelist, thought that was true. All you have to have is 5% of a character and you just expand. In this case, I think the essence was this was not hard for me, I always say that with a caveat, that I did good work because that's not for me to say, but I've always felt that I'm subjected to being a "non-grown up" my whole life. I've never been able to grow up. I look forward to it some point.
But this character is an adult, but he's not a grown up. "Grown-up" means you kind of pretend. You pretend to be other people. He's what a kid is. That's the idea. A kid is there to believe, a kid believes as long as you let him believe, and once you start to kick that out of them...I think a kid looks at an adult for hope and if you don't give a kid hope then they feel hopeless around you. And that's what I think the movie tries to be about. Kid's make a decision about people very quickly. "Are you safe?" "Can I trust you?" I've always been very close to kids. I yearn to find that more and more in my life. I'll quote somebody else. Coppola, I've read recently, he was saying that in the first years of your life, psychologists say that you develop a sense of self. This infant or child suddenly realizes there's a "self" there. Then for a period of time, up until age five, there's a purity. They are completely individualistic externally. We all are internally. But something happens in school that deprives you or censor your own individuality, so if you don't mix in, you're odd. And we're all odd. So there's a desire to retain that. And I think as journalists and writers, you know, what does it mean to have your own voice? You have it and you had it, but society can kick the shit out of you. For reasons I've never understood. And that's what I think the movie tries to convey. So when I say "believe" or "magic," "magic" is just the individuality of what you feel you can do.
Q: I know you've said in the past that you wanted to play "Willy Wonka." This new film seems very similar to that movie. Why would you want to play such a character and how do these stories relate?
DUSTIN: You want the truth? No, you want a good story. [laughs] This might be a good story. I never read "Willy Wonka" and I never saw it. So when I said that I wanted to play it, I heard the original was really good. Everyone said that it would be a good part for me, right around the time that Gene Wilder did it. I said, "Oh, maybe I'll get that part." But Gene Wilder got it, so I put that out of my mind. When they did the remake, I asked my agent to see if he could get me for it, but he said no, they wanted a younger star. So I can't tell you anything about it. I hear that in "Willy Wonka," somebody's evil, or somebody's unkind. At the end of the story there's a sinister character?
Q: Sort of. Depends on which one.
DUSTIN: A friend of mine was telling me about the "Wonka" story.
Q: There's one where Christopher Lee is evil.
DUSTIN: Oh, maybe that's what was the one she was talking about. The same friend, she teaches at a preschool, she said she thought I was the "good wizard" in this film. This film did not have a sinister figure and most children's works have a sinister figure but this one didn't. That's the truth and I know it's not a good story.
Q: Acting is essentially playing. It seems that this particular film gives actors a genuine opportunity to play. Is that a different experience, for you as an actor, than working on a screen play that is more serious and has more violence?
DUSTIN: No. I work the same all the time. It's funny when you said "play." When I did this film with Johnny Depp, I had a couple of scenes with him and so before he came over and we talked over the scenes and I'm a producer of his play which flops. He's a writer of the play. I'm the producer. And in talking about the scene, somehow Arthur Miller's name came up and I had worked with Arthur Miller's "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 ourselves. Ourselves are a 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 from the actors and everyone 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, but not as much fun as "Fockers,"[Meet the Fockers] because in "Fockers," I could just cut loose. And I could improvise. Here I had to say what the director had to 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?" the say, "We have a great dad but he's crazy. He's crazy."
Q: What were those scenes we heard about? What are "freebies?"
DUSTIN: "Freebies" are just...well directors are directors and they have a vision. They want to hit the note that they want to hit. You make sure that you are comfortable with hitting that note and you oblige 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, I have this...let me just do it and that's a "freebie.": There's many examples of it. In "Tootsie," 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 him, 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 students. During your career did you have mentors, and are you mentoring people?
DUSTIN: 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 Brano. I don't think there's an actor today that tilted that axis the way Brando did. Gene Hackman, Rob Duvall, James Dean, a whole generation of actors. But 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 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, his name was Bobby Brown, he took me aside he had 25 students, I was one of them. I studied with him for two years and he had brought the method acting to Pasadena and they didn't like him. That was the days of the "Un-American Activities." They thought he was a communist. And he took me aside, "You're a theater person, you're a theater animal. This is what you should do. And he says go to New York, study in New York and 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 years, 12 years when I got the break for "The Graduate." Mike Nicholson became the next mentor. I was spoiled, and John Sussanger 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 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 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." And some sentences I'll read. Now I'm at the age where the mentor for me is the artist that survives. When I hear about a director like Lumet, at the age of 81 making a film...I mean that's all you can ask for. There's this Porturgese director who came out with this latest film. He's 97 years old. They are automatic mentors. [laughs] It has to do with that.
Q: Why do so many children's films have such a dark theme?
DUSTIN: Well I was talking to my friend this morning, Cindy, the one that runs a preschool. And we were talking about that. She said, "This film does not have violence, as compared to Bambi. That's the first film I remember seeing. That mother died in flames." Wow. And Pinnochio fell asleep and his legs burned off. It's extraordinary how violent children's themes are. There's a sinister aspect to it. I don't know why. She liked very much death was a part of this film. She said, "Because death is a part of life. My kids are in preschool and they want the truth somehow. It's dealt with simply in this film. Parents many times sugarcoat for children and they should not." Is that your question? Sorry.
Q: We were talking to Jason Bateman earlier. He mentioned how he admired you as an actor and a parent. Do you have any favorite memories of your kids? And the second part of my question is what do you think of the writer's strike?
DUSTIN: Writer's strike I don't know about the details. I'm shooting a film in London. From what I understand it has to do with television and internet. It's ground breaking, it's stuff that hasn't been touched yet. They want a percentage of what's being downloaded on the internet. My general feeling is if the big stars are pocketing, and the producers are pocketing, then the writers should be pocketing too. Period. And film like anything is a business. Those who can grab a share should grab it. That's human nature. A union tries to even the field, but I don't know the details. 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: What is the movie that you were doing in London?
DUSTIN: I did a film a year ago called "Stranger than Fiction," with Emma Thompson. We had never met before and we only did a couple of scenes in the movie. The director had to cut our scenes in half because he thought it distracted from Will Farrell and Maggie, so I said can I see the scenes you cut out? I saw it and thought, wow, Emma and me are cooking so I sent her a copy and we'd 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 got about two weeks left. 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 its working day to day. It's called "Last Chance Harvey." It's about an American who's not in great shape. He writes jingles and the jingle days are over. It was big in the '60's, '70''s and in the '80's 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 relationship between the two of us. She is easily the most wonderful person to work with. She combines an intelligence with a a rare gift, which is an intuitiveness. She's a very bright woman. She's exceptional and I'm lucky to work for her.
Q: How are your experiences getting to know Natalie Portman?
DUSTIN: I met Natalie Portman years ago. I think she's about 26, 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 her boyfriend.When they did it on Broadway, 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 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 says "Dad, don't pimp for me anymore." [laughs] And they talked and they met a few times. But this was the first time I met with her, and Natalie's very bright, coming in every morning to make up 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 "Goya's Ghost." It's a flawed film, but everything is flawed. There's some great stuff, 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.
“Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium” is now playing in theaters everywhere.
http://www.cinecon.com/news/1120/interview-dustin-hoffman-mr-magoriums-wonder-emporium/
Simply Dustin Hoffman
