“The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we’re uncool.” – Philip Seymour Hoffman, Almost Famous
I tried to write about Hoffman the day he died of an apparent heroin overdose in New York City. The actor and father of three had a self-confessed 23-year battle with addiction. Five times I sat down, laptop at the ready, my mind screaming through Punch-drunk Love and Magnolia and Capote, trying to hold on to those performances with a grip that wouldn’t let go, and then…nothing. I would hit a wall. Every single time.
I scrolled through all the major culture and movie websites and the outpouring of “his best performances” blogs and “why he was important to me” posts looking for some spark of inspiration, and then, BAM, another wall. It was as if writing about it made it more true. And I just didn’t want it to be.
Philip Seymour Hoffman, photographed by Elizabeth Shaw for 225 magazine at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival
He wasn’t a movie star by definition. Not really. His looks and his quirks didn’t destine him to be famous, but instead veered him to the art house. Still, overtime, his incredible talent turned him into one—a byproduct of his conviction, not the hope of it. And that’s the only honest version of fame, right?
On Sunday, one friend told me she was crying. Honestly, at first it was hard for me to feel anything.
My sadness wasn’t caused by misplaced hero worship. It was more like the numbness from a head-on collision with a vacuum, the giant, endless kind created when someone who was really incredible at something suddenly isn’t able to do that special thing anymore. To a lot of people, Hoffman was just some actor, but I don’t really care what the man does for a living, the fact is, it’s a cold, cold day when a good thing once shared becomes obsolete.
See, Hoffman had felt more real to me in the days leading up to his death than at any other time of my life (and I’ve put in some serious hours with so many of his movies), because I had just seen him when he met the press, including 225, on Jan. 19. at the world premiere of his new film, a thriller directed by Anton Corbijn called A Most Wanted Man. This screening at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah would be his final official public appearance before his tragic death in New York City two weeks later.
“Philip may move quickly through the line,” one of the festival’s publicists warned me long before the actors arrived on the red carpet. “He doesn’t like all this (expletive).”
An hour later, after being checked in not once but three times, another flack who had it in for us bumped 225 videographer Elizabeth Shaw and I from our prime interviewing position so that a few major television outlets—Fox News, AMC, E! TV, whatever—could have a little extra elbow room down the line. She asked us to leave, actually. “We won’t be able to accommodate you,” she smirked.
I’ve never been a rebel for rebellion’s sake, but I am a lover of justice, and it didn’t feel right to leave that premiere when we were one of the first press outlets to arrive. Honestly, with movie stars passing us on the street left and right, we’d been talking about meeting Hoffman all morning. Every bone in my body told me not to go unless physically escorted off site by a credentialed officer of the law. I informed Elizabeth that we weren’t leaving, and she said, “Okay.” Let’s do this.
Being super tall, I was a little anxious about this flack spying me still hanging around, so for much of the press line, I hung in the back, chatting it up with the Sundance Channel crew and watching from their nifty monitor as Willem Dafoe and Rachel McAdams made their way down the carpet (see picture below), but Elizabeth on the other hand…You’re little, I told her, go get back in there. And she did.
Working the angles and wedging her way forward, she was able to get some great footage and images of Hoffman discussing his final (completed) film, and I’m so proud of her for that. Sadly, I never did get to ask Hoffman any exclusive questions—huge regret, for sure—though I did sneak close enough to say hello to him and to catch the salty actor really hammering a TV reporter with sarcasm for her ridiculous questions. “Oh my gawd!” he exclaimed, an outburst worthy of any P.T. Anderson film, when asked if he thought his Hunger Games co-star Jennifer Lawrence would win an Oscar this year. He then darted away and was gone.
A Most Wanted Man is based on a John Le Carre post-9/11 terrorism thriller. I wanted to ask Hoffman if he read spy novels or was obsessed with pulp mysteries as a kid like I had been, and if that sparked his interest in this project.
I wanted to ask him if Corbijn—a former rock photographer—had any good Joy Division stories. I wanted to ask him so many things. But you truly never know when your last encounter with an artist will be, whether on film or on record, or even in person. As a last impression, Hoffman left a powerful one. It was that of an artist intensely intertwined with his craft and completely in love with the art of performing, of bringing an effective story to life—to the point that any questions deviating from those bedrocks were not to be suffered in the least.
Of course he had his demons, his battles—who doesn’t—but that day at Sundance his demeanor showed an actor steadfast and committed to the art of film. This I respect.
Critics will point to the films he truly carried with bizarre, affecting performances, films like The Master, Doubt, and, of course, his Oscar-winning performance in Capote, and those are acting class juggernauts for sure. But I’m often drawn to Hoffman’s subtler work, too, the slow burn performances in A Late Quartet, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead and the ultimately crushing devastation of Synecdoche, New York.
It must be the journalist in me, but I’ll always remember Hoffman for his portrayal of infamously acerbic rock critic Lester Bangs in Cameron Crowe’s 1970s on the road love-letter Almost Famous. The emotional apex of the film is a post-heartbreak telephone conversation between the film’s young music writer—Patrick Fugit as a Crowe stand-in named William Miller—and his mentor, his Yoda in leather and aviators, Hoffman’s Bangs. See, the entire movie, Hoffman has played Bangs as the public knew him, a wild man who danced on the dagger’s edge and lived to laugh louder at the rockstars he’d come to know too well. But here, finally, we, and William, get the golden interior, the heart of the man who wanted the best for this young boy whose dreams were still much bigger than his pen. Every word he spoke felt like it was directed right at me. Maybe they were.
Hoffman as Lester Bangs in Almost Famous.
Crowe updated his personal website, The Uncool, yesterday with his recollection of this scene, one of my all-time favorites, and how Hoffman’s intuition and his talent changed the tone and the script on the spot to make movie magic. Watch the scene below. It shows a master at work.
