Piecing together his art

Dustin Hoffman tells a story that illustrates how seriously he takes his work. Joe Pesci, he says, wanted to play Jake La Motta’s brother in “Raging Bull.” When director Martin Scorsese refused to consider him, Pesci tracked down the director at a hotel and threatened to throw himself out the window if he didn’t get the part. He got the part.

“That,” says Hoffman, “is the ultimate actor’s story.” This is not to suggest that Hoffman is the ultimate actor; it’s to say that he’s no stranger to extremes when it comes to acting. What Pesci did, he might do himself.

“Dustin loves the acting more than anybody,” says Ed Burns, who co-stars with Hoffman in “Confidence,” opening Friday. “He wants the thing to be so good. He never goes to his trailer. He’ll hang out on the set and cheerlead. It never has to do with Dustin. It always has to do with the betterment of the scene or the film. Give him a hundred takes and he’ll keep working.”

Of course, Hoffman parodied his own obsessiveness 20 years ago in “Tootsie,” playing a fanatical actor who dresses in drag to get a job. And he hasn’t changed much, as his work on “Confidence” demonstrates.

The performance he gives as King, a mob boss whom Burns is trying to scam, is full of ticks, grace notes and unexplained behavior, all the sorts of textural things that are often lost in caper films. Almost none of it is in the original script, because Hoffman in no way resembles the character as first conceived.

“Look, I knew one thing when I took the part,” Hoffman says. “I knew what I couldn’t do. The character is supposed to be menacing. He is a 250-pound man, has a bald head and has a sexual ambiguity. You should cast somebody like Jesse Ventura, because that’s the way it’s written. But you find your own way to do it.”

Hoffman was helped along by director James Foley’s decision to change the setting from gritty New York to sunny L.A. to make the environment more contrapuntal to the dark nature of the story. King originally ran a seedy boxing ring, so this change in venue meant that what he did for a living no longer made sense. He still had to be a sleazeball, but he had to be the kind of sleazeball you might find here, so they made him a nightclub owner.

Hoffman could more plausibly play a guy like that, but he had to be scary. Now, another unthreatening-looking actor would have achieved this effect by threatening and bullying the other characters, but Hoffman took a different tack. He worked from the idea that everyone in the film knows he’s a borderline psychotic, so he rarely has to act like one. He intimidates and torments through indirection and unpredictability. Take, for example, the scene in which Burns introduces him to a con-artist love interest, played by Rachel Weisz. After a little banter, Hoffman puts his hand on her chest.

“There’s no more annihilating thing I could do to him -- not to put my hand on this girl’s breasts, but to try to somehow get her stimulated and to let him know that I can get her going,” Hoffman says. “That’s wonderful fun to play.”

“What’s great about that scene was Rachel didn’t know that was coming,” Burns says, grinning. “And she was definitely freaked out. She genuinely was turned on but also really uncomfortable. And you can even see she welled up a bit.”

“He definitely turned me on, but it was also very sadistic,” responds Weisz. “Just to say ‘turned on’ and ‘freaked out’ is not really enough words. I was kind of attracted, repulsed. I guess the general sweep of it was pulled and pushed. What happened on the screen, that’s what happened. That’s the way Dustin works. He doesn’t allow himself or anyone around him to stay in a safety zone.”

A shameless mimic

There’s another scene in which Hoffman, talking to a character who’s taller than he is, pulls over a box and steps up on it so that they can be eye to eye. He actually saw a bantam-sized producer do this on the set of “Midnight Cowboy” while talking to a visiting Sean Connery. Hoffman is a shameless mimic. He famously reproduced producer Robert Evans’ rambling, mumbling style in “Wag the Dog.” Here, according to Paul Giamatti, who plays a colleague of Burns’, Hoffman modeled his presentation after Foley.

“He has the little chin beard and the snapping gum, the glasses around the neck, the clothes, the way he’s talking, the fact that he’s got ADD [attention deficit disorder], because Foley seems like he has ADD,” Giamatti says. “I don’t think I’m being simplistic about it. He’s totally doing Foley. I think Foley was aware of it. I think he thought it was funny.”

“There is truth to that,” Foley says. “It started in the very first meeting we had. I was hell-bent on getting him and was pitching him why he should do the movie. I was chewing a bunch of gum and talking fast. I guess I had my own attention deficit disorder. He asked me if he could exchange shirts with me. And then I had my reading glasses that I used to hang around my neck. He wanted the glasses. And he decided that that would be the basis of his behavior. It didn’t seem odd. It seems odd in retrospect. My conjecture is that he’s the kind of actor who goes about piecing together a character from disparate elements that don’t necessarily have a logical connection.”

Among these disparate elements was homework Hoffman had done some 25 years ago for a movie called “Straight Time,” in which he played an ex-con and for which he actually had himself smuggled into a prison in order to get an idea of what it was like. In “Confidence,” he used this experience to inform King’s rather eccentric sexual ambiguity.

“Your taste is going to become a little more eclectic,” Hoffman says of prison life. “The rules of sexuality are much different in the joint.” Then he adds, describing his relationship with Burns, in which this sexual ambivalence comes into play, “I like him, so why deny that as the character? Why not just let that be a part of it? It was never in my mind to be gay or not gay. It’s just to use flirtation as a way of power.”

Clearly, Hoffman likes to provoke other actors, who by and large welcome the give and take. However, this can be hard for directors who have a fixed idea of the way a character should be developed and a scene should be played. Hoffman has a long-standing reputation for being difficult to direct, and though Foley says he had no trouble with him -- probably because Hoffman was in on the character from the get-go -- he concedes that his producers were worried that they would go over schedule because of Hoffman’s working methods. (They didn’t.)

“I think there are two kinds of directors as far as actors are concerned,” Hoffman says. “They either want you to surprise them, or they don’t. Every actor must create the part differently than any other actor would because it’s a marriage of their essence with the character’s essence. But there are directors who don’t understand this.”

They do if they work with Dustin Hoffman.