Philip Seymour Hoffman has one Oscar, two Tony nominations and an Emmy nomination for his acting. Now he’s directed his first feature, “Jack Goes Boating,” an adaptation of Bob Glaudini’s Off-Broadway play about two couples, one coming together (Hoffman and Amy Ryan) and the other falling apart (John Ortiz and Daphne Rubin-Vega) over the course of a few wintry months and a disastrous dinner party. The drama makes its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival before opening in theatres in a couple weeks.
What Hoffman doesn’t seem to have is much interest in promoting his film. During a roundtable interview at the festival, it becomes apparent that Hoffman hasn’t been harbouring a secret desire to become a director, and “Jack Goes Boating” wasn’t exactly his dream project.
“It’s not something I pursued. This is something that made itself available,” he admits. “Two companies saw the play and they wanted to make a movie out of it. And then John [Ortiz] had the idea that I’d direct it because I’d been directing a lot for [our theatre] company. And I thought about it for awhile, started seeing it in my head, and thought, yeah, why not? Let’s go.”
When asked to talk about the casting process – Ryan came to replace theatre actress Beth Cole – Hoffman says, “there wasn’t much of one.” He decided on Ryan because “she was in a reading of an early draft. She was just kind of someone they wanted, we all wanted.”
Making the switch from actor to director didn’t hold much in the way of surprise for Hoffman. In fact, he mocks the idea that it would.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about that. People ask that question a lot. ‘Did anything surprise you?’” he says. “What do you mean, like, ‘Oh my God! That happened! I can’t believe that happened in my life! This is so surprising!’ You know what I mean? You realize a surprise is like … you’re never surprised. You’re always like, oh, that’s interesting. I find a lot of things interesting. A lot of things kind of compelled me. But nothing surprised me, like, ‘I didn’t know filming happened on your head. You have to actually bounce on your head when you make a movie. It’s crazy! I’m surprised!’”
He also mocks the idea that making a movie is all that different from putting on a play.
“I think there’s a lot of talk about that and it’s kind of like, whatever, in a way,” he shrugs. “People want to make a big deal out of it because movie people want to be movie people and theatre people want to be theatre people, and it’s like, you’re theatre, I’m movie, and movies are different! No, it’s all art, it’s all feeding each other, everything’s influencing each other, we all should be nurturing that.”
Hoffman didn’t find anything interesting about the process of directing himself. “You just, um, you learn how to do it. I had to learn how to do it. It’s one of those ‘surprising’ things,” he says.
The only time Hoffman gets excited is when he’s asked what he loves about theatre.
“It’s an essential thing to a society and I think there’s people that understand that,” he offers. “The better the play, the better the people – it can’t be beat. There’s something that happens between an audience and an actor and a play on any given night that is astounding in its power. And when that happens, basically you’re hooked.”
Hoffman can’t help pointing out the flip side. “[Some] people don’t understand that. They go to the theatre and they’re like, you know, ‘This is boring.’ What’s going on with that person? It’s, like, profound that they’re up there in front of all of those people trying to make that work, you know. It’s pretty intense.”
Hoffman’s next project is directing the Sam Shepherd play “True West” for Cate Blanchett’s theatre company in Sydney, Australia.
-By Kim Linekin