YouSaid · the spoken record

Dustin Hoffman

lines on the record: 42
first: 2012-12-02
most recent: 2012-12-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I do plan to read it one day and have somebody really explain it to me as I'm reading it. So I probably would pick Dickens, the complete works of Dickens.”
2012-12-02 · Desert Island Discs · Dustin Hoffman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Give you a chance to take some luxuries. So don't tell me what they're going to be just now. Well, I just did a film called Quartet and in that film is a song that was sung by Flanagan and Alan, and it's ironic because it happens at a moment in the film where someone might be dying at the home. And it really sums up the spirit of what this film is when you hear it sung by elderly people and it speaks for itself.”
2012-12-02 · Desert Island Discs · Dustin Hoffman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I get up pre dawn about four thirty in the morning, I greet the dawn with a cup of coffee, and the dogs, you know, taking em out, and it is the most treasured time I have each day. It is my desert island day. Yes, I could live on a desert island by myself if I had to. My assistant is here, and she's probably laughing in her cups now because I'm so dependent on people to remind me to take my glasses and my keys.”
2012-12-02 · Desert Island Discs · Dustin Hoffman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Follow your passion. Don't get trapped in the culture because making it in my day was simply making a living, and today it jumps straight to celebrity. I mean, you can have a sex tape put on, which in my day would end your career, and today it makes your career. And I say please keep reminding yourself that nothing is permanent. I have one son who's just reading literature day and night and writing poetry, and he just said to me the other day, I'd like to go back to graduate school. I think I want to teach. And that's the best advice I think I've ever given.”
2012-12-02 · Desert Island Discs · Dustin Hoffman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually I stole that line from my friend Mauricell, who co wrote Tootsie, and he once was talking about marriage and he said the only way a marriage can be successful is that the husband is scared shitless of his wife. But there's something profound in that because I think it's not in our DNA to have a nest and to have children and be there every minute. And I think we have to commit ourselves to a home takes much more diligence and discipline. And I think if our wife doesn't somehow intimidate us saying, you know, you stray once and I'm out of here, that marriage is not going to work. So it is a kind of frivolous statement, but it has a basis of some truth.”
2012-12-02 · Desert Island Discs · Dustin Hoffman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I was saying to you before, I've never seen this show this will be the first time or heard this show, and I'm ashamed of myself, but I said to you that what a wonderful show this is, and I think what is going through my mind is.”
2012-12-02 · Desert Island Discs · Dustin Hoffman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I said, what do you mean? And he says that you'll never work again. And that is a real feeling. If you didn't grow up as a child star, if it took you years and years to get your first job, the feeling is that this is your last one. You're not going to be asked again.”
2012-12-02 · Desert Island Discs · Dustin Hoffman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't recall. What I can tell you is that for whatever rhyme or reason, Duval and I have never been in a film together, and Hackman and I had never been in a film together, just never worked out that way until I did a film called Runaway Jury, which was a few years ago. And it was the last day of shooting. And after we finished the scene, Jean and I went out, was in New Orleans, and we had a drink and a second drink and then a third drink and then a fourth drink. And we admitted to each other how frightened we were that day because we thought, oh my God, it's a ten page scene. What if I don't memorize it and we thought we would disappoint each other? But then he said something that stays with me. And it's the absolute truth. He looked at me and he said, so do you feel the same way I do dustbone? My nickname was Dustbone after you finish a movie.”
2012-12-02 · Desert Island Discs · Dustin Hoffman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know if I'd phrase it that way. It's not that I don't want to get caught in a rut if I could have been a leading man, I would have jumped at it. I think Gene Hackman, Bob, we all would have. We just weren't considered leading men. In those days, if you went for auditions, they would list it in the backstage, which was a newspaper for actors, leading men, leading women, character leading men, character leading women, juveniles, character juvenile. That was what I was always sent out for. I said, gee, I like this part. No, that's the lead. You're a character juvenile, which meant you were the odd-looking one. You were the unattractive one, or character ingenue, because the juveniles and the ingenues were beautiful, handsome. So in a sense that's what we were claimed to be is character actors and therefore it was just our lot.”
2012-12-02 · Desert Island Discs · Dustin Hoffman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's how high the moon I did want to be a jazz pianist for years until I had to realize I didn't have the talent. It's usually an up tempo piece of music, and suddenly I was listening to the radio just a few years ago and this guy was singing it and I filled up, I became emotional. The first time I really listened to the words because he sang it as a ballad. And I said Wow, look at what an artist can do. Look how they can turn something around and make it their own and make it completely fresh.”
2012-12-02 · Desert Island Discs · Dustin Hoffman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it was almost offensive to a large public that Nichols would do this. I mean, what Mike Nichols did, nobody else would have taken the chance and cast me in it. And when the film was finished, I went back to New York and I started auditions and flunked everyone, never got asked back, went on unemployment. Little do I know. They're cutting me into becoming a star. Little do we know that pictures are going to be a phenomenon”
2012-12-02 · Desert Island Discs · Dustin Hoffman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So did you. I haven't heard that before, but I would say it's accurate. So we're going through this day, and everyone is miserable. Nichols even takes me aside while we're testing and saying, why are you so nervous? Why are you so glum? I said, because I told you I'm not right for this. He said, but it was just a test. Just let's have fun. And he put his hand out to shake, and I shook his hand, and his hand was so wet and clammy because he was, my hand slipped out of it. And I thought, oh God, they finished the film, and I learned later, years later, that they screened this film before it opened in screening rooms, and each time people came up to them and said, What a great film you almost had, but it's a shame you miscast the lead. And so that was the perception, even though I didn't hear those words for years, but we opened to some mixed reviews. I remember there was one reviewer, and he called me a Cretan in print.”
2012-12-02 · Desert Island Discs · Dustin Hoffman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I didn't want audition for it. Again we were all arrogant purists, and we didn't want to be stars and we just wanted to be artists, and he calls me, and he was the director. Annie said Why? I said, Well, look at Robert Redford. I said, you know, I'm not a character actor, but this is, I think, from the sublime to the ridiculous. And he said, why? Because you're Jewish. I said, yes, that's part of it. And this guy is ultra-wasp. And he said, did you find it funny? I said, very funny. It's wonderful. And he said, well, maybe he's Jewish inside. And that's what made me come out in test. I had to memorize this scene. I went out tested with Catherine Ross. It went so badly that day.”
2012-12-02 · Desert Island Discs · Dustin Hoffman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yes, but for other reasons because it didn't break the record in terms of my former opinion of myself. I felt that Nichols felt he had made a mistake while we were shooting, the character's name was Benjamin Braddock. It was from a book, and it said he was six feet tall, blonde haired, blue eyed, it was Robert Redford”
2012-12-02 · Desert Island Discs · Dustin Hoffman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, when I was doing my first summer stock in New York, I was about twenty two years old, and I did have a girlfriend that I met in acting class, and I walked in one night and I saw that she was making out with my acting teacher, and it devastated me. I was shaken, to say the least, and I would hang out by myself and there was a terrible upright piano somewhere backstage, and I would just sit at that piano all day long fooling around, and somehow this song came out, and years pass, and Bet Middler's doing a special on TV, and she calls me up, she says, I need a star. She says, or they won't let me do this special. I said, well, I wrote a song. Why don't you sing it? She says, Well, do you have the words? I said, I never wrote the words. She says, All right, I'll write the words. And she wrote the words, and I got the place.”
2012-12-02 · Desert Island Discs · Dustin Hoffman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While Bob Duval and I both agreed that the reason we went into acting was to meet girls. I never went to the Promen high school. I was short, filled with acne, Literally told I was unattractive. I didn't have any girlfriends, and when I took that acting class in junior college and did a scene and they told you who to work with, you picked it out of a hat, and I had to play the gentleman caller in glass menagerie, and there was some girl who played Laura. And we did the scene in class, and suddenly this beautiful girl comes up to me who hadn't given me a glance for three months and said, do you want to do a scene together?”
2012-12-02 · Desert Island Discs · Dustin Hoffman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, in fact, we all got to the point where you have an eight by ten picture of yourself, and on the other side is your resume, which we would lie about. We acted here, we acted there, we never had acted anywhere. But it got to the point where it was so painful, we would knock on the door of the casting director, slip the eight by ten underneath the door, and leave.”
2012-12-02 · Desert Island Discs · Dustin Hoffman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I indeed slept on his floor because he only had one bedroom for him and his wife, but he was hoping that I would only stay three or four days, and they couldn't get rid of me because I was so frightened of New York it was August of fifty eight. He had a friend by the name of Bob Duval and introduced us because Bob was looking for an apartment. It was a wonderful time because again it was a beat generation days and there was no expectation of getting employment and we really did think I still believe it in a way that the actors that are the least talented are the ones that get jobs off of auditions. And the reason for that is casting directors and directors are fearful of making a mistake in the casting. So they kind of will pick the derivative and if you were original then you didn't have a chance.”
2012-12-02 · Desert Island Discs · Dustin Hoffman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Study, actually. I met Gina at the Pasina Playhouse. He had just come out of the Marines and he was kicked out of the playhouse for not having any talent after three months. And I think the reason was that he was such a naturalistic actor that it didn't look like acting, and they thought in those days it should look like acting. He said, come to New York when you finish, and I did.”
2012-12-02 · Desert Island Discs · Dustin Hoffman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Frimfram sauce I never heard it until Diana Krawl sang it and it had the line in it which you'll hear called Shafaffa on the side, and since I didn't want to eat when I was growing up it was a tense table, I would be told to eat this particular dish that they gave me because it had shafafaffa and that meant it was delicious and I didn't know that it came from a song and when I heard it just three or four years ago I hadn't heard the word shaffa in seventy years and I just burst out crying and my wife came in somebody crying about. I said shafafa.”
2012-12-02 · Desert Island Discs · Dustin Hoffman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I went to a junior college after high school, and that's where you went if you didn't have grades to get in university. And I was failing in my first year, and a friend of mine's there said, well, why don't you take acting? And I said, I have no interest in acting. And they said, but it's three credits, and nobody flunks acting. It's like Jim. And I took an acting class, and it was the first time I could study, rehearse, learn lines, anything without looking at my watch. Five, six hours flew by like it was twenty minutes, and I said, okay, I'm going to be an actor. I'd heard about the Pasina playhouse. I tucked my parents into funding for me. But there was a certain point in class where I looked around. There was about twenty kids, and I said I may be the best one here. And that was the first time I had a feeling that maybe I'm not bad. Not that I'm good, but maybe I'm not bad.”
2012-12-02 · Desert Island Discs · Dustin Hoffman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do believe in the conscious and the subconscious and the unconscious, and anything that's not the conscious, you try to repress or suppress because they're painful. And I do believe that you keep those traumas until you work through them.”
2012-12-02 · Desert Island Discs · Dustin Hoffman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tustin Farnham. And then somehow they decided I was a sickly baby because I weighed so little at birth and I had operations, some of them and some medical procedures that really weren't needed. I remember selling newspapers on the corner in the middle of the street as you do when I was about 12 years old and once a week a nurse would come and I have to put the papers down and go sit in a car and she'd give me an injection. I don't know what it was. And also, I couldn't have lunch at school. I came from an interesting family. I had to bike home and eat the lunch that was prepared for me. And it was usually calf sprains or kidneys or something. I've seen photographs of myself and I look fine. I was just thin and short.”
2012-12-02 · Desert Island Discs · Dustin Hoffman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know, I know that maybe it started because my father and my mother wanted and then expected a girl and I wasn't a girl so they didn't even have a name for me and I think they picked the name out of a magazine. Because you were”
2012-12-02 · Desert Island Discs · Dustin Hoffman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I couldn't fix my concentration in school, and I think that was somehow implanted in me because now there's nothing more than I love than reading and learning, and in those days, somehow by the time I got to school it had come out of my home that I knew nothing. That was my lot. It was kind of the stereotype that was placed on me, and you learn later in therapy that you get your love from your parents by being what they want you to be.”
2012-12-02 · Desert Island Discs · Dustin Hoffman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is Otis Reading. I just remember driving to work every day to make the graduate, and every morning I went to work there was on a morning that passed that I didn't hear sitting on the dock of the bay. I still love it with all my heart.”
2012-12-02 · Desert Island Discs · Dustin Hoffman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The reason for it was which I didn't know at the time is my father was always dreaming of being living a lifestyle which wasn't real. He didn't have the money to move to Beverly Hills and we would move to Beverly Hills and he lasted six months before he went bankrupt and then we'd move somewhere else. He was always trying to improve his lot in life. This is fascinating a character my father.”
2012-12-02 · Desert Island Discs · Dustin Hoffman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's a kind way of putting it I was a very bad student and in those days I would be called you are you're a real comedian which was a nice way of saying you're a loser”
2012-12-02 · Desert Island Discs · Dustin Hoffman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. My father didn't have a happy time of it. As you said, I'm foul-mouthed, and I'll say a word you may blip off from the BBC, but we had the same birthday. So when I was fifty he was eighty, and we were walking on the beach actually, and we stopped and I said, Dad, you're eighty today, and I'm fifty, do you have any words you can give me? And he looked at me and he said, yeah, it's all bullshit. And he turned around and walked away.”
2012-12-02 · Desert Island Discs · Dustin Hoffman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He came to see it and I was very nervous, was of good questions and I was very nervous and he came back I was hoping he wouldn't put it together, you know, that I was making a comment on him. And the first thing he said to me in the makeup room, he says, Boy, that guy is some loser I've never forgotten”
2012-12-02 · Desert Island Discs · Dustin Hoffman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and he loved Frank Capra. Then he was fired and he went from set decorating into selling furniture, and he was Willie Loman, in a sense. It's one of the reasons I wanted to do death of a salesman.”
2012-12-02 · Desert Island Discs · Dustin Hoffman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My father was a very serious young man who had I guess what turned out to be, you know, delusions of grandeur or whatever because he came to LA from Chicago with no money in, I think, $50, which was probably a lot of money during the Depression, with my older brother, my mother, and her mother, and I wasn't born yet. I have a photograph of him helping to build one of the freeways in Los Angeles with his shirt off and holding a shovel with a bunch of other guys, but somehow he was able to he had a lot of drive to get himself to Columbia Pictures before I was born, and he got a job as an assistant prop man and then a prop man and then assistant set decorator and a set decorator, and then he was fired, for reasons I've never learned. He wanted to be a director. This is all told to me much later. He spent his lunchtimes watching Frank Capra direct.”
2012-12-02 · Desert Island Discs · Dustin Hoffman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not all of them. I don't think I've ever learned all the words to any song, and that's another one of my demons. I think Slim Galer also wrote another song which I learn and sang at that time, which was called Open the Door Richard. Open the door Richard. Open that door and let me he was a great artist, I think.”
2012-12-02 · Desert Island Discs · Dustin Hoffman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What is it? It's called cement mixer, and it's the first song I remember if it's nineteen forty five that makes me about eight years old, in which I really laughed”
2012-12-02 · Desert Island Discs · Dustin Hoffman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's what an actor should do, but I think what you do as a director is if I had to find a metaphor I have kids. We raise five kids and the parent, I think that you want to be is that you let them go, but you're close enough to catch them if they fall. And I think that's basically the best you can do as a director, is that you're guiding them. And if they're missing it, you just kind of catch them and suggest something to take them closer to that point where, you know, they're walking on their own.”
2012-12-02 · Desert Island Discs · Dustin Hoffman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and the reason is that actors that have been doing film as long as I have, we are all directors. I mean, we direct each other as actors once the director turns us back. That part of it was easy, particularly when you're working with people like Courtney and Maggie Smith and Gambon and Pauline Collins and Billy Connolly, even Sheridan Smith, the better the actor, the less work you have to do. What humbled me was that throughout forty five years I didn't realize that everything goes wrong on a day to day basis, and the director smiles when you show up in the morning and you don't know that he just lost a location, that he was refused extra money to do this or that or the other, and that's what I was not prepared for.”
2012-12-02 · Desert Island Discs · Dustin Hoffman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I wish I could say I was I don't dislike myself I've learned that I don't have any choice but to live with myself but I do think quite frankly that you spend a lifetime trying to figure out who you are. You know, I think Albert Brooks made a film about that is that you die you go to heaven and God lets you watch your entire life on the screen and my fantasy has been that when you die you go to heaven and God tells you everything you thought was correct about yourself it wasn't”
2012-12-02 · Desert Island Discs · Dustin Hoffman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To do it then. I chose Labamba because it's one of the things I found out I could do on the set to keep loose, so I taught myself to jump rope like a boxer and I would put somehow I had heard Labamba once, Richie Vallens, and I put it on a cassette and put my earphones on and I could jump rope I remember on Tootsie I think I could I bet the crew that I could jump forty five minutes and I made some money But anyone who jumps rope this will help you along”
2012-12-02 · Desert Island Discs · Dustin Hoffman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The actual thing that went through my head is that It doesn't sound like enough to me. There's a depressing side to it is that it sounds like a eulogy sometimes and you're finished. A great career, good job, good night and good luck. And one wants to think that it's just the first act.”
2012-12-02 · Desert Island Discs · Dustin Hoffman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that I really believe that I was a freak accident when I became famous after the graduate wasn't meant to be. My friends of Jean Hackman and Bob Duval. We all just hoped to make a living doing what we did, and since God gave me this crazy gift, I felt I wasn't entitled to be able to do anything else. And that's the truth. I know it sounds very strange, but I didn't want to push the envelope. So”
2012-12-02 · Desert Island Discs · Dustin Hoffman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To make this decision if you had my demons, I actually directed actors when I started studying acting for some reason they found that I could give them notes. I thought it was going to become a director at that point, but no one offered me any directing parts, and it's very hard to audition as a director.”
2012-12-02 · Desert Island Discs · Dustin Hoffman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“a handful of the movies that contribute to an unparalleled body of work, he is the only actor in history to have top billing in three films that won best picture Oscar's.”
2012-12-02 · Desert Island Discs · Dustin Hoffman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source