Philip Sey­mour Hoff­man: ​‘I’m a curi­ous guy, but I also want to shut down sometimes’

Philip Sey­mour Hoff­man has made a career out of play­ing sad sacks, odd­balls and bel­liger­ent ass­holes. The kind of self-loathing, self-plea­sur­ing creeps you wouldn’t want to get stuck in a lift with. But whether he’s get­ting his method on to por­tray an Amer­i­can lit­er­ary icon, ruin­ing Ethan Hunt’s day or just breath­ing heav­i­ly down the phone, Hoff­man is invari­ably a com­pelling screen pres­ence. Nowhere more so than in the films of his long-time friend Paul Thomas Anderson.

Hoff­man has appeared in all but one of Anderson’s six fea­tures stretch­ing back to 1996’s Hard Eight, estab­lish­ing him­self as a ver­sa­tile char­ac­ter actor in the process. In the decade since their last col­lab­o­ra­tion, 2002’s Punch-Drunk Love, Hoff­man has reaf­firmed his pas­sion for the the­atre, earn­ing a Tony nom­i­na­tion for his lead turn in the Broad­way revival of Arthur Miller’s ​‘Death of a Sales­man’. He’s also direct­ed his first fea­ture, Jack Goes Boat­ing, and recent­ly announced his sec­ond, Ezekiel Moss, which appeared on the 2011 indus­try ​‘Black List’ of acclaimed unpro­duced scripts.

Despite this late career shift, Hoff­man isn’t about to turn his back on life in front of the lens just yet – he’s due to start film­ing A Most Want­ed Man, Anton Corbijn’s fol­low-up to The Amer­i­can, and The Hunger Games sequel with­in the next few months. Before all that, we met up with Hoff­man to get the low­down on his spe­cial rela­tion­ship with Ander­son and his aston­ish­ing per­for­mance in The Mas­ter.

“Paul and I start­ed talk­ing about this char­ac­ter four years ago. But it’s weird; I didn’t real­ly have a back­sto­ry for Lan­cast­er in mind. I know I thought about it a lot but I don’t think I tried to nail it down too much. I think the less you know about him, the more inter­est­ing a char­ac­ter he is. He’s just a guy who’s basi­cal­ly dab­bled in lots of things; he got a few degrees and prob­a­bly did some ser­vice in some kind of mil­i­tary capac­i­ty. And then I think he became inter­est­ed in treat­ing peo­ple and deal­ing with peo­ple and help­ing peo­ple. He’s com­ing from a good place, I think. That’s his his­to­ry – he’s a guy who’s done a lot of dif­fer­ent things. How much of all of those things he says he is are true, I don’t know. It’s hard to nail him down and in that sense it was dif­fi­cult to play him. He’s a mys­te­ri­ous guy.

“In terms of how I dealt with him tech­ni­cal­ly there were a lot of dif­fer­ent points of inspi­ra­tion out­side of the obvi­ous stuff. But who he is and the way he is, the inter­nal life of the guy, is some­thing I had to think a lot about by myself. It’s not that I want­ed to avoid ref­er­ence points; it’s just the way I tend to do things. It’s so hard to put into words because it’s some­thing that takes place over a long peri­od of time. It’s a grad­ual process; a lot of dis­cus­sion and read­ing and research goes into it.”

“It’s been 10 years since Paul and I made a movie togeth­er. It’s good – now we don’t have to do it again for anoth­er 10 years. No, I mean, this was a great one to be in. But my work­ing rela­tion­ship with Paul doesn’t mat­ter; it’s my friend­ship with him that does. I get con­cerned when we don’t talk for a few months, not when we don’t make a movie togeth­er for a few years. I make sure that we stay close as friends and that’s what we con­cern our­selves with. In his mean­der­ings of try­ing to put sto­ries and scripts togeth­er – because he writes all the time – if he comes upon some­thing that he decides suits me then we’ll talk about it, but oth­er­wise I’m not con­stant­ly look­ing to work with him. I’ve already worked with him enough for a life­time, in a lot of ways. But I hope we keep work­ing togeth­er, I hope I’m still a part of his sto­ries. But if not then that’s okay.

“It’s fun­ny because I have this whole oth­er life in the the­atre that he’s not a part of at all. It’s such a huge part of my life and I think that’s always been very healthy for our rela­tion­ship because I bring a lot of what I do in the the­atre into Paul’s world. I think Paul’s more open to a lot of things now, people’s input and opin­ions. He’s more open to feed­back and crit­i­cism. You’ve got to trust your­self and have con­fi­dence in what you’re doing, and Paul has a lot of that so it’s tough for him to let oth­ers in and lis­ten to dif­fer­ent ideas. But he’s get­ting real­ly good about allow­ing mis­takes to hap­pen. It’s a more organ­ic process now.”

“I became a direc­tor in the the­atre many years ago and that’s been my thing for a while now, so when I crossed over into direct­ing a film I did think about Paul but also a lot of oth­er direc­tors I’ve worked with. The biggest thing Paul taught me was that what­ev­er you do has to be yours, whether it’s on stage or on a movie set. It’s got to be per­son­al; it’s got to mean some­thing. I’m on my own jour­ney now and I hope I can make a hand­ful of films in my life. I’m try­ing to find my own voice as a direc­tor and there’s no doubt that Paul will con­tin­ue to be a guid­ing influ­ence in that respect.

“You always go back to act­ing and you kind of for­get. Any­thing that’s a cre­ative thing like that, it’s easy to for­get how you did it; it’s hard to repli­cate how you made some­thing work before. When some­thing comes to you you go with it and from there you might go off in any num­ber of direc­tions, but you always for­get how that actu­al­ly hap­pens. I guess it always starts with a ques­tion though, as stu­pid as they sound, you have to find a way into the conversation.”

“I’m a very curi­ous guy, but I also want to shut down some­times. In the sto­ry­telling busi­ness you’re con­stant­ly being inquis­i­tive and dig­ging at your­self. Some­times you’ve just got to leave it alone. But Lan­cast­er is def­i­nite­ly some­one I found hard to switch off from. I just find it so mov­ing that all he wants is to be close to this guy. It fas­ci­nates me that the need you can have for anoth­er indi­vid­ual can be so strong. And I think there’s some­thing real­ly attrac­tive about being as free as Fred­die is, cer­tain­ly that’s a qual­i­ty Lan­cast­er envies.

“Mak­ing this film recon­firmed my belief that all reli­gions and social move­ments are sus­cep­ti­ble to these types of fig­ures. For me, I wasn’t inter­est­ed in just look­ing at Sci­en­tol­ogy because there are so many oth­er move­ments that have come out of charis­mat­ic men. But I shy away from the easy, cyn­i­cal ​‘it’s a cult movie’ line because I don’t think that gets any­body any­where. There’s noth­ing ​‘cul­ty’ about it, you know, it’s not like we’re sat around drink­ing Kool-Aid. It’s a psy­cho­log­i­cal, emo­tion­al thing. I like the idea of see­ing if it’s pos­si­ble to be manip­u­lat­ed or led down a cer­tain path regard­less of who you are or what your beliefs are. I’ve always been a lit­tle bit wary of who’s lead­ing me, what group I’m involved with, you know. It’s good to nev­er blind­ly fol­low, to keep ask­ing questions.”

“Every film I make I always try to read reviews in the begin­ning, just to take a tem­per­a­ture of it. I’ve learned that it’s almost irre­spon­si­ble not to because you can end up hav­ing a sit­u­a­tion where every­one around you is real­ly scared to tell you the truth, and that’s not fair to make peo­ple be like that out of your own igno­rance. I want to know enough that I can look any­one in the eye and know what peo­ple are say­ing. But then I let it go because after a point it is what it is and things just take their course. I’ve been there when the reviews are real­ly harsh and neg­a­tive and obvi­ous­ly it’s not nice, but you can’t let it affect you. You have to learn to take it on the chin and just let it be. Every once in a while you do some­thing that gets torn apart and you’ll read stuff and think, ​‘Yeah, you know what, I see your point’. Most­ly it’s about know­ing enough to be able to let it go.”

“What else could I want? I’ve giv­en and shown up to the best of my abil­i­ty and career-wise I think I’ve had it as good as I could ever have dreamed. I hope I don’t start gain­ing regret because I feel real­ly good right now. I’ve dealt with all the bad stuff and learned to take it with the good. Life-wise that’s a dif­fer­ent ques­tion, but career­wise I’ve been very lucky. I want to do a lot of dif­fer­ent things. Right now I want to keep direct­ing the­atre, I have plans to do that next year. Maybe direct a film, too. Hope­ful­ly I’ll direct many more films and maybe pro­duce some as well. I’m lucky in that sense because even though I’m a ter­ri­ble writer I have good rela­tion­ships with a few real­ly amaz­ing writ­ers. My brother’s the writer in the fam­i­ly and most of my clos­est friends are writ­ers so I kind of vic­ar­i­ous­ly do that through them. I love talk­ing things through with people.”