Legendary American actor Dustin Hoffman recalled his decades-spanning career while accepting the Crystal Globe for Outstanding Artistic Contribution to World Cinema at the opening ceremony of the 60th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. Visibly emotional after watching a long showreel trailing some of his greatest roles in films like “Tootsie,” “Rain Man” and “Kramer vs Kramer,” the actor said he feels “very lucky” to have “his life’s work on a screen staring back at you.”
Hoffman, who will also present a special screening of Mike Nichols’s 1967 drama “The Graduate” at the festival, started his passionate speech by saying he felt “honored and humbled” by the award. The actor recalled working with the late Robert Redford in Alan J. Pakula’s lauded investigative thriller “All the President’s Men,” stating Redford told him back then: “You never think about a body of work while you’re making movies, because you’re busy building the body. And that’s true. The pleasure of doing what we do is being engrossed in the work itself and losing track of time.”
“I first fell in love with acting because it was the first time I felt lost in time,” he continued. “I knew instinctively that this was how I wanted to live. I wanted to be lost in time. I wanted to be absorbed in time. Why? Because it made me feel alive.”
The actor mentioned his upcoming 89th birthday in early August, telling the audience, “if you’re very lucky, one day you’ll get to be an old man like me […] and there it is, your life’s work on screen staring back at you. It makes me very emotional, very nostalgic and most of all very grateful to have had the opportunity to do what I love decade after decade with so many brilliant people who were doing what they loved, too.”
The “Hook” star also praised the Czech festival for “serving this love of filmmaking.” “Festivals like this one help support and inspire all actors and filmmakers who pursue this work with passion and love, and that’s what makes it truly meaningful. Thanks for the honor of this award, but most importantly, thank you for joining me in caring for this art form.”
Hoffman will soon release his memoir, “Look at Me,” which will be published on Nov. 10 through Simon & Schuster’s Simon Six imprint. The memoir will provide insight into the actor’s life, family background, achievements, and what it means to pursue one’s own creativity.
The opening ceremony also saw actor-turned-director Maggie Gyllenhaal be awarded the festival’s President’s Award. The well-humored star began her speech by emphasizing how “moved” she felt by the ceremony’s extended opening musical number, which saw renditions of major film hits from the last six decades such as Céline Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” from “Titanic” and Keala Settle’s “This Is Me” from “The Greatest Showman” sang live against a backdrop of festival memories.
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Referencing her latest directorial effort, “The Bride,” Gyllenhaal said: “If you have seen [my new film], you’ll know that I love dancing and singing and I even teared up a little bit watching everyone be so open. It moved me.”
This is not the first award given by the festival to Gyllenhaal. In 2006, she won best actress for Laurie Collyer’s “Sherrybaby,” but couldn’t make it to the spa town for the ceremony. The actor did, however, visit the town a few years prior, as a 19-year-old exchange student from Columbia University taking a semester abroad in Prague.
“I was thinking about this lovely invitation to come and accept this award and I think that being here that semester was one of the first inklings I had of myself as a director,” she recalled, adding that, despite her extensive career as an actor, she has only directed two films: “The Bride” and “The Lost Daughter.” “It took me a while to realize that was the better job for me.”
While in Prague as a student, Gyllenhaal took a Czech Culture Studies class. In her first week, she was shown Miloš Forman’s “The Firemen’s Ball.” Despite liking the film, it almost wasn’t enough to entice her to return for week two. But she did, and that’s when she first watched Forman’s “Loves of a Blonde.”
“Something happened to me,” she noted of that fateful screening. “I loved that movie. It’s like something cracked in me. I went: I like that. Maybe everyone likes ‘The Firemen’s Ball’ better, but I like this better. Me. This is my taste. And then I kind of started to go, ok, yes, I like Quentin Tarantino, like everybody else does, and I also like Jane Campion and I also like ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ and, it turns out, I also like obscure Miloš Forman movies. Or one of them, in particular. That voice of going, ‘this is me, this is what I like,’ is part of what pushed me to be a director, to express my view of the world, however strange and challenging and however different.”
The opening ceremony was followed by a screening of the festival’s opening night film, Juan Cabral and Santiago Franco’s “The Match.” The 60th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival runs July 3-11.
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