Dustin Hoffman Thought He Was Failing While Filming The Graduate
Surviving "The Graduate"
In a New Yorker weekend essay, Dustin Hoffman recalls the shoot that made him famous and the dread that shadowed it. Sitting by the pool at the Chateau Marmont, surrounded by people who seemed to belong, he felt like an outsider certain he was ruining every take. The film that launched his career, he writes, was the one where he was convinced he was failing.
It was the film that made me famous. On set, all I could think about was how I was failing.
- xenocratus
Something that I was mulling on just the other day. As I grow in my career, on a day to day basis I feel like I'm failing or doing things badly. Maybe because I have no comparison frame for it, because of the growth. Maybe because it's never possible, while you're in the thick of a project, to provide that post-hoc history. The open-endedness feels weird compared with clear causality.
Or maybe because I'm growing beyond my limit of capability. Time will tell.
- zem
I wonder if it's just me, or if the movie did not age well. I saw it for the first time around 10 years ago, and I was really expecting great things since I was a fan of hoffman and of simon and garfunkel. i found it a very lacklustre movie, nothing I had read about hoffman's iconic performance really landed for me, and the movie as a whole seemed dull and unconvincing. it wasn't a patch on kramer vs kramer or even tootsie.
- somberi
As an aside, I admire Mike Nichols' ability to make gorgeous _looking_ movies. Many scenes from The Graduate, the State Island Ferry opening scene in The Working Girl, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. And even the 2003 movie Closer. That is almost a 40-year span.
Atypically, he worked with 13 different cinematographers across his 19 movies. Woody Allen, as a contrast, as prolific as he is as Mike Nichols was not, used similar quantity of cinematographers across ~50 movies. Woody Allen, only because, I find his movies visually beautiful, too.
In the New Yorker article linked above, for me this stood out:
"Hollywood had never been my endgame. As far as I was concerned, the studios kept beautiful people imprisoned in seven-year contracts."
Reminds me of high-IP people inside Frontier Labs :).
- js2
For anyone not familiar with "The Graduate" or wants a refreshed, this analysis by Steven Benedict is as good as anyway:
https://www.stevenbenedict.ie/2012/12/the-graduate/
(9 minute audio essay.)
- zabzonk
People posting here are perhaps missing that it is a comedy - with a bit of tragedy right at the end.