Dustin Hoffman brings mischievous wit and charm to Cannes Film Festival
He’s graced the silver screen for more than five decades, but Hoffman shows no signs of slowing down or losing his childlike enthusiasm for his craft, as he speaks from the Cannes Film Festival
Afternoon Mediterranean light pours into an open doorway where Dustin Hoffman sits, grinning.
He will turn 80 this summer and his hair, still full, is mostly white. But he looks remarkably good. Age has done little to dim his eagerness for engagement, his mischievous wit or, it turns out, his proclivity for continual self-examination.
In Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), which is competing for the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, he plays a mostly forgotten abstract artist whose failed ambitions and self-obsession have instilled deep neuroses into his children (Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, Elizabeth Marvel). Hoffman, a two-time Oscar winner, might seem to have little in common with Harold Meyerowitz, but he disagrees.
“Feeling like a failure, it’s constant,” says Hoffman. “I do try hard to improve each day, but you don’t. I’ve been in therapy forever. In fact, I have a deal with my analyst that after I die she’ll come and sit at the grave site and we’ll find a way to communicate.”
At even the celebrity-stuffed film festival, Hoffman is a standout. A “legend,” as he was accurately called at a press conference – a label Hoffman reacted to with an eye roll. “I resent people who say they grew up with my movies,” he responded. He’d have preferred to play either Ben Stiller or Adam Sandler’s parts, his character’s sons, he said – a joke, but also not.
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This isn’t Hoffman’s first trip to Cannes. He was here in 1974 with Lenny, and more recently with Kung Fu Panda.