I didn’t know what a big deal it was to work with Philip Seymour Hoffman. I was 16. I was as green as green can be. He was very intimidating. He was really very intimidating.
Nobody in the production had been so into their character that they didn’t seem like themselves. Billy Crudup was warm and welcoming. They said, “Philip is going to stay in and around his character. He’s not going to be chatty and super friendly.” The character Lester is very brash and vocal.
Philip was very forward with me, in a school-of-hard-knocks way. It was almost like when you go on a hike with your dad, and your dad just hikes the mountain and expects you to keep up. That’s the way Philip did the scenes. It was like he was saying, ‘‘All right, kid, you’re here, you’re playing the lead in [director] Cameron’s [Crowe] movie.”
There was a certain weight that came with him. There was sort of a darkness. That’s part of what made his acting so compelling and complete.
I just remember the way he talked about acting and filmmaking: It was as cynical and cavalier as it gets on set. He and director Cameron Crowe were talking about the death of filmmaking the same way that Les, Seymour’s character, is talking about the death of rock ’n’ roll in the scene. I remember thinking, “Holy s- -t, I don’t know anything yet.’’
He had the flu the first day we were shooting, but he was just hammering away. I remember watching him in the scene in which Lester is doing the Iggy Pop dance. I was watching Philip work, and it occurred to me: This was the sort of caliber of acting that I was going to need to do from that point forward. There was something about watching Philip that opened my eyes to the potential for creating.
You learn a lot of tricks and a lot of sort of quirks to get you through a scene. You sort of rely on your natural affectations, but Philip was playing something that was real. I thought, “That is what an actor is, that’s what I need to start doing.” From that moment, he became sort of an idol, a role model. I never dared to keep in touch with him. I didn’t feel like I deserved to keep in touch with him.
I always sort of dreamed and hoped that we would get a chance to do that again. It’s a funny little world.
We were shooting a scene inside a diner, it was a hard day, I was very burned and it was a very complicated, technical scene, because of the lighting. I had to say things and convey emotion. They were things you would do naturally as an actor, but it was new for me, and I was freaking out.
Philip was making me nervous. I remember at one point, the script supervisor came up and said, “You have to write this word and then look up,” and I had a bit of a freak-out moment. And I looked up and Philip was just watching me. I didn’t know what to do, I was scared of him. And this small smile crept up — it was a twinkle in his eyes. It was like he was seeing the beginning of something, like the beginning of my career.
He smiled and nodded to reassure me that I was doing a good job. And then he looked down into his lap. I calmed down, but was a little confused, “Does he like what I’m doing?” A lot of what I remember about him was that little quick moment there, like he was looking back to that time when he was in the beginning of his career, the overwhelming nature of it all.
It was pretty cool.