Word: oneness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Consequently, he is not an easy guy to work with. He wants to examine all aspects of a line before he commits himself to going with it." They met in 1966 when Hoffman, then an unknown, was doing three of Schisgal's one-act plays in Stockbridge, Mass. The author liked to take early-morning walks, and every day when he left his hotel, Hoffman would be waiting for him. "He'd have the script and a million questions to ask: 'What's your thought here? What's your thought there?' I had never...
...scene was about and then allowed to say whatever he wanted. "When kids learn lines," says Hoffman, "you can't cut them with an ice pick." Camera angles were kept simple so that father and son, who were expected to improvise, could move wherever they wanted. In one early scene Justin, who was supposed to be rebelling against Hoffman, showed his defiance by eating a bowl of ice cream after he had been told not to. But Justin, suddenly the improvisational actor, turned the battle into a ferocious clash of wills by taunting Hoffman with an upraised spoon...
Hoffman understands kids so well that he finds it a particular injustice that nature has provided for only one sex, the opposite one, to carry children and give birth. When he was preparing to play Ted Kramer, he kept staring at young mothers and pregnant women, especially pregnant women wheeling children in baby carriages...
...villain," Streep recently told TIME'S Elaine Dutka, "if there's a white hat-black hat situation, that doesn't make for an interesting courtroom scene, which I consider the climax of the film." Joanna's testimony at the custody hearing is indeed one of the film's most wrenching sequences, precisely because Streep avoids histrionics, lowering her voice rather than raising it. When she cries she does so visibly in spite of herself. So thoroughly had Meryl come to inhabit her character that she wrote every word of this speech herself...
Director Robert Benton recalls her work that day on the set with amazement: "We must have shot that scene from seven in the morning until six at night, over and over again. First in closeup, then a medium shot, finally a long one. Later in the day, we shot only Dustin reacting to her on the stand. During this last take, all 30 people in the room were facing Dustin. I happened to be watching Meryl, as well. She had the same intensity as she had when she first did the scene...