Post Graduate Education
A star for five decades, with a string of classics on his CV, Dustin Hoffman is still learning new things about the film business. Taking a role in the computer animated hit Kung Fu Panda was an opportunity to expand his experience further, he tells FOCUS.
Although he finds himself enjoying veteran status these days, Dustin Hoffman is still enjoying fresh challenges in his screen career. His latest outing sees the 70 year old voicing Shifu, reluctant mentor to the decidedly unheroic Po (Jack Black) in Kung Fu Panda.
"When they asked me if I wanted to be in a film called Kung Fu Panda I thought it was the end of a distinguished career," Hoffman says, deadpan.
The intense production period, and the constant request for actors to return and provide new or amended dialogue makes the creation of an animated film one of the longer feats of film production.
"I didn't know these things took four years," Hoffman explains, "and even then they first think of these stories nine years before they're finished. They keep coming back and altering it and changing it, they try this and that, just like any other art form. In regular movies you're supposed to get it right the first time. I realised that at a certain point you say if you're going to do it you're going to put yourself in their hands."
Then there's the fact that actors deliver their performances before the animation is finished and - crucially - in isolation from fellow cast members, both of which make this a unique challenge as they work closely with their directors, in Hoffman's case John Stevenson and Mark Osborne.
"They very quickly become easy to hate," the actor chuckles, "it's always: 'do it again, louder,' - you feel like a novice actor again. They tell you at the beginning that there's a camera above your head, a regular 35mm camera, and it's recording everything that you do because when you're acting you don't know when you're moving your hands, your face or whatever.
"They then take that film and give it to the animators who incorporate that with the image they've already constructed. I do think we're in the infancy of a new art form. I hate to say it but I used to think they were cartoons. They've moved on."
ANWAR BRETT
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Shifu (right) keeps Po under control in Kung Fu Panda
Ian McShane, Jack Black, Lucy Liu and Dustin Hoffman attend the London premiere of Kung Fu Panda
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