Philip Seymour Hoffman has become Hollywood's byword for dysfunction thanks to oddball turns in "Boogie Nights", "Happiness", "State and Main", and now as a grieving husband in "Love Liza". You can also catch him doing his nut in upcoming Adam Sandler pic "Punch-Drunk Love" and Spike Lee's "25th Hour".
"Love Liza" is written by your brother Gordy. How did it all come about?
Yes, my brother wrote the screenplay. He's my older brother too. You know, this isn't: "My teenage brother wrote a screenplay and he wants..." My older brother's been writing plays. He's a writer. And once I got into it and realized how great it was, he just became another great writer to me. It was just another film I wanted to make.
So I went to him and said, "You should make this." It was in that first conversation that we felt maybe I should play it and then it took us five years to get money because we didn't have any!
SPOILER: You play a man whose wife has committed suicide and left behind a note that he can't bear to read. What's the reasoning behind that?
He's very confused. He's not sure why she did what she did, and so he's scared to find out that maybe there's something in the letter that he didn't know about. I think the main reason is that he knows once he reads the letter, it will be the last time he'll have spoken with her. That's the goodbye.
His suffering is intense, isn't it? He even ends up sniffing gasoline...
You know, when we pitched the film trying to get money for it, we'd always get to the gasoline part and people would always go, "What?!" And that's why you've got to see it to understand it. It's a regression, an adolescence, getting away from this grief that he's feeling. He sees kids in the neighborhood sniffing the gasoline. And so he's like, "I wonder what this is?" He gets high from it and he realizes it's a way to run away from his feelings.
How do you sell this film to audiences?
It is a very intense story. But it's such an entertaining movie to watch. Every time I watch it, I see a lot of layers and colours about life in this movie. It's not just one thing. It's not just grief from beginning to end. That's why I loved it when I read it. It shows sadness and grief and sorrow in all the different colours that it comes in, so there's a lot of humour in it also. That's why I feel strongly about it.
You do seem to play a lot of complex, grief-stricken or troubled characters. Why is that?
I think everybody's troubled. I think that's part of what it's like living on this planet. You just read the paper and you're troubled! That's how I look at the characters I play. I don't think they're all sad and grief-stricken, but I think they're troubled. People are problem solvers. They have problems to solve and they've got things to deal with. Issues. And if they're not, then they're probably not living on this planet that I'm living on. So I always try to address those things in the characters I play.
