Dustin Hoffman has described the making of The Graduate, the film that earned him his first Oscar nomination, as a miserable experience, laying out a difficult relationship with director Mike Nichols in a new essay for The New Yorker.
“It was a terrible experience making the movie that changed my life,” Hoffman wrote in the piece, which was published over the weekend and is largely focused on his dealings with Nichols.
The actor says Nichols was warm and welcoming during rehearsals, but became a different person once cameras started rolling.
According to Hoffman, the director “was irritable with everyone, but with me a certain sadism seemed to creep in.”
One of the most striking episodes he recalls involves a scene in which co-star Katharine Ross had to slap him.
Nichols reportedly made the pair go through twenty-seven takes, and the moment never made it into the finished film.
The physical toll did not end there.
Hoffman writes that he punctured an eardrum while filming a pool scene in a wetsuit, and that he came close to losing consciousness while shooting the sequence in which his character runs to the church.
Looking back, Hoffman says he came to understand what was going on.
He believes Nichols was using him as a stand-in for his own feelings, particularly in the wake of the director’s split from his former comedy partner Elaine May.
In his words, he was “there to absorb Mike’s own self-loathing.”
The Graduate turned Hoffman, then a relative newcomer, into a household name, and it remains one of the most celebrated American films of its era.
His account of the shoot offers a very different picture of what went on behind the scenes of the 1967 classic.
Hoffman has himself faced allegations of inappropriate behaviour on various sets over the years, including a well-publicised incident involving a slap to Meryl Streep during the making of Kramer vs. Kramer.
