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Why did you get fired?
HOFFMAN: He's not a good actor [laughing]. We've known each other for years.
HACKMAN: I got fired, I think, because I just didn't fulfill the director's and the writer's idea of what the part should've been. In rehearsals I do a lot of searching around. I try not to perform and I really feel confident in what I'm doing. I mean, you can go [the] first day and perform and probably won't go further than that.

But the way that we were all trained in the 50s and 60s, you needed to keep searching. So I was doing that, and they decided that I was just taking too much time.

So you don?t try and work out a character ahead of time?
HACKMAN: For me, I don't try to work it out ahead of time. I don't know if we work differently.

HOFFMAN: No, both of us have a lot in common. We can't learn lines.

What surprised you the most about finally getting to work together?
HACKMAN: It's funny, I wasn't surprised at all. I felt like we had worked together.

HOFFMAN: We did in school.

HACKMAN: At the Pasadena Playhouse. We did ?Of Mice and Men.?

HOFFMAN: He was a brilliant Lenny.

HACKMAN: We also were double cast in ?The Taming of the Shrew.? We played the same role.

HOFFMAN: We both played Petruchio.

HACKMAN: I had to wear his tights. I played in the first act and then, Dustin came out and played the same character in the second act. It must've startled people.

HOFFMAN: You know what happened on this movie? He was cast before I was because they were trying to get a movie together.

Then I get cast - maybe I was one of the last principles to get cast - and then the director discovers that we knew each other years and years and years ago and hadn't worked together. [He] goes back to the writer and says, ?We don't have a scene for them together.? And he goes, ?Okay, we're going to write a scene.? The director said, ?Take your time.?

[The director] decided to shoot the scene, the bathroom scene, the last day of the shoot, but Gene finished his work weeks before and I finished my work weeks before. Now we have to sit every day, waiting as the clock ticks - it's always nice to have a film over with. We show up to do the scene the day before and admit to each other that we hadn't slept the night before, how f**king nervous we were, and it's like eight pages. We had to shoot eight pages, and we weren't going to get through it. So we did the first take and we were terrible, both of us, and yet we embraced each other because we got through it. It was intimidating.

What was so difficult about it?
HOFFMAN: Well first of all, it's hard to shoot a movie and break for a long time and then come back and do, in a sense, one of the biggest scenes that each character had. I thought about it and I think that in a funny way, Gene and I became very good friends very early, and I think that certain things we have in common and one of them is, part of you feels like you're never going to work again. We've both always felt that way. It's a freak accident that we became stars. It's a freak accident that we've been able to have a career. There is a part of us that always feel like we're a fraud. That's enough to make you nervous.

Page 3: Working with John Cusack, Gun Control, and Honest Lawyers