At Karlovy Vary Film Festival on Saturday, Dustin Hoffman said the U.S. was as divided as during the Vietnam War, and he also joked he was still trying to figure out who he was.
The double Oscar winner, who received the Crystal Globe for Outstanding Artistic Contribution to World Cinema at the opening ceremony of the Czech festival on Friday, was introducing a screening of his breakthrough film, Mike Nichols’ 1967 romantic comedy-drama “The Graduate.”
He was asked by the festival’s artistic director Karel Och how “The Graduate” – which he said had been Hoffman’s personal choice as the film to play at the festival – can inspire people nowadays in their 20s when the reality seems so different than the reality of the late 1960s.
The actor responded, “It’s actually the same, because the book by Charles Webb was written in 1964, which was before the Vietnam crisis, which divided America as it is divided today.”
He added, “I think the important thing to realize – what you’re going to see – is that the parents were coming out of the Great Depression of the 1930s when no one could get a job, and suddenly now, because of the war, they were able to work, and instead of giving themselves, they gave objects, so the generation that was living then was not given love, they were given objects, which you will see at the beginning of the film.”
