Hollywood legend Dustin Hoffman has revealed he didn’t exactly enjoy shooting the film that would put him on the map as an actor.
In the late 1960s, Dustin was Oscar-nominated for his work in The Graduate, in which he played Benjamin Braddock, a young college grad seduced by an older woman, Anne Bancroft’s character, Mrs Robinson.
While the movie would serve as a break-out for the actor in his younger years, he admitted in his new memoir Look At Me that filming it was a “terrible experience”.
In excerpts published in the New Yorker, he blamed director Mike Nichols for making the shoot so difficult, claiming the filmmaker was “an entirely different person” who could be unpredictable and “frequently sour” once production got underway.
“Mike was irritable with everyone, but with me a certain sadism seemed to creep in,” he wrote, recalling one incident in which the director demanded “27 takes” for a scene in which his character was slapped, that didn’t even make the finished film.
“The scene has Benjamin run into Elaine’s room, soaking wet from the rain, to tell her that he’s had an affair with an older woman,” he claimed. “Within seconds, Elaine [played by Katharine Ross] realises the woman is her mother.
“Mike just kept telling Katharine to hit me, to hit me harder. Katharine worried she would hurt me, and I told her, ‘I’m OK. Just don’t hit my ear’. Unfortunately, she missed a few times. I was dizzy by the end of that day, and Mike didn’t even use the slap in the film.”
The following day, he said he punctured an eardrum and was left with “blood trickling out of my ear” while shooting an underwater sequence.
“Between all the slapping during the previous day and all the water pressure at the bottom of the pool, I’d punctured an eardrum,” he noted.
Dustin concluded that he felt Mike was so hard on him because he was “looking for an alter ego” to play the lead in The Graduate.
“That’s why Benjamin had taken years to cast, and maybe that’s why he was so hard on me,” he suggested. “I was a stand-in, there to absorb Mike’s own self-loathing.”
While Dustin bagged his first Oscar nomination for The Graduate, he’s since gone on to earn a further six over the course of his career, including wins for Kramer vs. Kramer and Rain Man in the 1980s.
Dustin’s memoir Look At Me is released on Tuesday 10 November.
