Dustin Hoffman on Inside The Actor's Studio

So today I watched Dustin Hoffman's interview on Inside The Actor's Studio, I've been saving this episode on the Tivo since it aired last year sometime. Wow, everything he had to say was so inspiring! I want to share the notes I took, they are not word for word quotes of what he said, but rather my interpretation of what he said, the way I understood what he said, what his words meant to me. In some cases, the wording is very close to what he actually said, in other cases, if you watched the show, what I wrote down is completely different from the words he actually used.

* Strasberg on creating a character: You have a frame of what's given in the material.

* Hoffman on creating a character: You are always you, you haven't got anybody else to work with, but a character is you with a tweak-it's amazing, it doesn't take much.

* "In acting, you try to admit more than the lesser crime. You want to get down to the deeper crimes of your self." We are so flawed as humans. When you sit on a hot radiator, you immediately jump off. When we touch those hot areas in ourselves that we really don't like on a deep level, we get off those spots as quickly as possible. As an actor, we need to sit on them, "shake hands with the Devil."

* Hoffman gave two very interesting anecdotes about working on Rainman that I found illustrative of the "Trust yourself, trust your insticts" thought.

(1)Hoffman had a very hard time finding and understanding the character. In the scene where he and Tom Cruise are driving in the car, they were asked to improvise. Hoffman felt he screwed up because for the first time in his career, he wasn't able to get into the character's head and know what the character would be thinking, so he couldn't think of anything to say as the character. When the director finally yelled "Cut", Hoffman was asked to take a look at the playback. Every time Cruise said something, Hoffman said "Yeah." And that was the character.

(2) Hoffman was dreading the scene in the bathroom where he turns off the hot water because the baby will get burned. He had no idea how to play it, and they did a couple of takes that were awful. But they were on a schedule and he had to do it. So on the next take he channelled all of his anger at himself as an actor for not being able to do the scene, that became the subtext, and that's the shot that ended up in the movie.

"A take is the actor's time to fail. Every art has to have it's failure quotient." Film is not theater. There is no curtain rising, no audience, your performance is going on dead film, and in the end may not even be included in the film. We as actors don't need to get every beat of every scene perfectly on every take. That's what editing is for.

While working with Robert De Niro on a film: De Niro didn't know his lines, so he had them on index cards that he kept in his lap. They started the scene, and De Niro starts his lines, and then starts laughing, and says calmly, "I don't know my next line." He doesn't call cut, he just looks down, gets the line, and continued.

Thoughts from film maker Renoire: As a director and an actor, you don't have to know everything about the scene. You're not going to be able to do everything the script calls for. You do what you can. That's what you share, that's what you give. The audience is the co-author and the co-director and the collaborators. They will do the rest of it.

Some people say all you're doing as an actor is your autobiography over and over and over again. You're doing your mother, your father, sister, uncle, your self--You're always drawing on family because they're the closest thing.

Failing is not the worst. Commiting a sin is worse. Not failing, commiting a sin. Putting something out there that is safe, that you think "Well, I won't get hurt. It's been done before." It's kind of a sin because you're denying yourself your gift. There's nothing wrong with failing, you're gonna fail, everyone fails. Take a big risk, let the film not work, let the actor be inconsistent, but take the risk, that's worth everything.

"Woulda-Coulda-Shoulda" hurts us more than anything.

On the value of imagination vs experience: Strasberg taught that your body is your instrument. Get to know your body, the physical and emotional, and how they integrate with each other as best you can. Find value in the exercises that help you learn to relax in front of an audience no matter what you're feeling, in sense memory exercises. But those are only exercises, they are not acting technique. They are tools you can use if you need them to help you connect, but if you can get it from the material, from your acting partner or partners, do that. The Method is your own method, discover what works for you. This nonsense about feeling everything--you can't. You just can't. It is amazing that you can fulfill the director's direction and the author's intention just by doing it. If the script says to yell the lines, then yell them. There's no feeling there, you just do it. Sometimes the lines are just said and that's it. There's no acting involved.