At Karlovy Vary Film Festival on Saturday, Dustin Hoffman said the U.S. was as divided as during the Vietnam War, and he also joked he was still trying to figure out who he was.
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The double Oscar winner, who received the Crystal Globe for Outstanding Artistic Contribution to World Cinema at the opening ceremony of the Czech festival on Friday, was introducing a screening of his breakthrough film, Mike Nichols’ 1967 romantic comedy-drama “The Graduate.”
He was asked by the festival’s artistic director Karel Och how “The Graduate” – which he said had been Hoffman’s personal choice as the film to play at the festival – can inspire people nowadays in their 20s when the reality seems so different than the reality of the late 1960s.
The actor responded, “It’s actually the same, because the book by Charles Webb was written in 1964, which was before the Vietnam crisis, which divided America as it is divided today.”
He added, “I think the important thing to realize – what you’re going to see – is that the parents were coming out of the Great Depression of the 1930s when no one could get a job, and suddenly now, because of the war, they were able to work, and instead of giving themselves, they gave objects, so the generation that was living then was not given love, they were given objects, which you will see at the beginning of the film.”
He added, “Lastly, I don’t think we know who we are when we are in our early 20s. We want to be who we are when we look in the mirror, because when we see ourselves in the mirror, we change our look. We have a mirror look. We want to be this person, which is not who we are. And the idea is that we spend years trying to find out, ‘Who am I?’ And I think I’m still trying to find that out,” he said to laughter from the Czech audience.
Och had started by asking him to explain how he landed the role, which “turned out to be so pivotal” in his career.
“It was an accident, and that’s the truth. Mike Nichols, who was the director of the moment, he was like Spielberg is today,” Hoffman said, “he had spent almost two years looking for this person that was to be ‘The Graduate’ and after two years – I know this because he wrote it later in his autobiography – he was willing to say, ‘We can’t make it,’ and he was going to not make the film.
“Literally the last day he was going to see people it was my turn and Katharine Ross’ turn. Had we been there two years before, we would not have gotten the role. The people that would have been there the day that we were, they would have gotten the role, and that’s the truth. It’s all luck,” he concluded with a broad grin.
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The festival runs July 3 to 11.