The director Philip Seymour Hoffman really wanted to work with: “I feel like we’d get each other”
The best actors can take any part in any type of movie and make it a memorable one, which is precisely why Philip Seymour Hoffman emerged as one of the most exciting, dynamic, and versatile character actors of his generation.
Not that he was permanently shoehorned into supporting roles, though, with the star equally capable leading the line as he was dominating the background. That’s reflected in his Academy Awards history, with Hoffman’s only win out for four nominations coming from his solitary ‘Best Actor’ nod and not his trio of ‘Best Supporting Actor’ noms.
His ongoing creative partnership with Paul Thomas Anderson was a mutually beneficial one that saw him give disparate but equally effective performances in Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love, and The Master, while he proved himself equally dependable in broad crowd-pleasers and intimate dramas alike.
Whether he was running from the elements in Twister, embodying the schlubby best friend archetype in Along Came Polly, antagonising Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible III, dispensing gravitas in The Hunger Games, causing audiences to tear up in Doubt, blowing their minds in Synecdoche, New York, or hamming it up in The Boat That Rocked, Hoffman was truly a man for all seasons.
He was an American actor who worked exclusively in American films, but his own personal tastes covered all that cinema had to offer. Any international production would have seized the opportunity to enlist his abilities from the moment the opportunity first presented itself, but Hoffman sadly never got the chance to work with a director he’d been watching from afar with the greatest admiration.
Second-generation auteur Jacques Audiard didn’t make an English-language feature until his ninth when Joaquin Phoenix and John C Reilly led the line in The Sisters Brothers. Hoffman had already tragically passed away by that time, but in an interview two years before his death, he outed the filmmaker as a name on his professional bucket list.
“Every once in a while there’s somebody I really want to work with, and it’s different,” he explained to Port. “The one person that pops into my mind is Jacques Audiard, who made A Prophet and that film about the piano player, The Beat That My Heart Skipped. I saw them and I thought, ‘Those are my kinds of movies’. So Audiard is someone who’s like, oh yeah, I feel like we’d get each other.”
Hoffman had near-perfected the art of playing outsiders, misfits, eccentrics, down-and-outs, underdogs, and quiet men who harboured secrets, which would have made him the perfect fit for Audiard’s searing character studies and penchant for drawing incredible performances from his actors.
Noir drama The Beat That My Heart Skipped, prison movie A Prophet, and heart-wrenching drama Rust and Bone served as the director’s international calling cards that helped bring his name to audiences far outside of his native France, and Hoffman was instantly taken with what he found. They would have made for an excellent pairing on every level, but it wasn’t to be.
