TORONTO – Many
consider Philip Seymour Hoffman the finest actor working who’s never been nominated for an Oscar – but that may soon change, thanks to his older brother.
Gordy Hoffman, 37, wrote the movie “Love Liza” – and audiences at the Toronto International Film Festival have been dazzled by Phil Hoffman’s performance as a man who, after his wife’s suicide, copes by sniffing gasoline.
There’s buzz that the film, which opens in December, will finally bring the Academy Award nomination the 35-year-old actor has yet to get, despite rave reviews in films like “Magnolia,” “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and “Happiness.”
Toronto has proven to be a major launching pad for Best Actor nominees – “American Beauty” and “Training Day” were both shown here, and Kevin Spacey and Denzel Washington went on to bring home the trophy.
Still, insists Gordy, who’s written and acted for the stage for years while working odd jobs, insists he never wrote the seriocomic “Love Liza” with his younger sibling in mind.
“I was a cab driver in Chicago for 2½ years and I spent a lot of time at gas stations,” he recalled.
“One day I saw a woman loitering around some gas pumps. I don’t know if she was trying to get gas to huff, but it occurred to me that it would be interesting if an urban professional male started indulging in this very erratic, kind of destructive, socially reprehensible behavior.”
He decided to turn the idea into a screenplay.
As Phil Hoffman recalls it, they were at their mother’s house in Rochester about five years ago when Gordy handed him the script and asked his opinion.
“I read it from cover to cover and I was completely blown away by it,” recalls Phil, who has also directed as well as acted on stage and in film in the last eight years. “But it wasn’t an easy movie to get made.”
As his director Phil Hoffman enlisted his old roommate in Los Angeles – actor Todd Luiso, the nerdy record-store clerk in “High Fidelity.” Together they spent years trying to raise money for the low-budget project.
The problem was that the script is far more appealing than its plot summary – something between “Monster’s Ball” and “In the Bedroom” – would suggest.
Phil’s character, Wilson, takes up model airplanes as an excuse to explain the fumes filling his house and ignores his late wife’s mother (Kathy Bates) entreaties to open a letter his wife, Liza, left behind.
So convincing is his performance that some viewers believe he was actually sniffing gasoline.
Hoffman says no, he was just acting.
“It’s much more common than people think – a poor man’s high that does a lot of damage to the brain if it’s done over a long period of time,” he says.
“I talked to people who talked to people who did it, and from what I knew of other drugs, I figured out what it would be like.”
Like the teenagers in the movie, the brothers – sons of a divorced family court judge – used to get high at construction sites.
“Sniffing gas is something that kids do, and for Wilson it’s a very childlike thing, a regression to his childhood,” Phil Hoffman says. “My brother and I grew up in a rural area, getting high on beer in houses that were half-built.”
Thanks to his increasing fame, they finally got the financing to make the film, which was shot in 24 days in Mobile, Ala., and New Orleans.
In January, “Love Liza” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, where Gordy Hoffman won the festival’s screenwriting award and Sony Pictures Classics picked up the film.
“Phil believed so completely in the script,” Gordy says. “And the award told everybody it wasn’t some nepotism thing.
“I was very nervous about working with my brother for the first time because he’s so talented,” he continues. “By sheer fortune, we got really lucky.”