Behind the Scenes: Kramer vs. Kramer (Benton, 1979) with Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep

From the very first day I bought the book, I only imagined Dustin doing the part. When Bob Benton came into the project and we started working, we both agreed he would be the ideal Ted Kramer. We were writing for Dustin from the beginning and it was a brilliant choice on Stanley's part. We finished the script and we had his, at that time, his manager read it, who loved it, thought Dustin would be terrific, and we couldn't get an answer. I was working, and it was a very low point in my working and emotional life, because I was getting a divorce, my first one, my only one. None of us think we're ever going to get divorced when we get married, and I had children involved. And also, I was having difficulty in the projects I was involved in, and it was literally at a time when I thought, I don't want to make movies anymore, I want to go back to the theater. Bob Benton and I flew to London to meet him. He was in London, having come in from Bath, where they were shooting. And I called him on a Friday, and it was all arranged. And he said, what are you doing here? I said, what are you talking about? I said, Dustin was supposed to be meeting with you, Bob and I are here. Oh, why don't you meet me four o'clock Sunday at the hotel? He was staying at the Inn on the Park. And I hung up the phone, I looked at Benton, I said, forget it. I said, that doesn't sound like great enthusiasm, we're going to get kissed off. We went to meet him. And of all the things in my life, which define luck, this was it. He was standing in the lobby waiting for us. That's how much he wanted to get us in and out. I think I wanted to meet them downstairs, because the minute you have someone come up to your suite, you can't get rid of them. And it's harder, it's a longer meeting, and I did not want to have a long meeting. And we walked in the bar, and the maitre d' said, Mr. Hoffman, I'm so sorry, if you had called for a reservation, I would have held the table. We're full. And he had to invite us up to the suite. On such things hang amazing consequences. And so we went upstairs, and I started to talk, and Stanley started to talk, and Dustin started to talk. And I was candid with him. And I said, I'm in the middle of a divorce, and it's like those few things in life that you think you're prepared for, because you've heard a lot of stories from other people, and you've read a lot of stuff, and you've seen a lot of movies. And until you've been there for the birth of your child, or the death of your parent, or someone in your family, or your own divorce, you haven't been there. And I said, what I am experiencing is just so different, and so much deeper than what I read of the novel, and what I read in your screenplay. I'm not connecting with it, and because it's something I'm going through, I think it would be too painful for me. What got said between all of us, and who said it, I don't remember, that I think got Dustin more interested is that he would be doing the most difficult thing for an actor to do, in a sense, to play himself, which is really hard, and requires an extraordinary kind of self-observation and discipline. And there are not many actors with the range and the discipline to actually play themselves. I know it sounds simple, but it's the hardest thing an actor can do. I think Benton, he always smiles. And he gave me one of his Benton smiles, and said, well, what would you like to do? I said, do you want to go in a room with me and spend a few months? I think Benton said yes, and Stanley chimed in. I said, I'm not looking to rewrite the story of my experience, the facts of it, but I think the truth of it. I moved into the Carlisle Hotel, and Bob and Dustin would come every day, and we'd spend approximately 12 hours or more every day talking about the screenplay, talking about life, and trying to find the truth that we could bring to the screenplay. And that's how the process started, and it was long. Dustin has all these ideas, and they're terrific ideas. And I would get caught up in the ideas, and Stanley would say, no, no, no, here's what the movie is, and he'd reign us back in. It was almost like group therapy, talking, talking, knowing that no one would repeat outside what was being said. Real revelations made about who the people were, all of which Dustin absorbed, because that's what he is. He's an absolute sponge. If you were to walk down the street with him, you think you're talking to him, you turn around, and all of a sudden he's paying attention to some homeless person or something else, and he's just absorbing it. And I think the spine that was found was, is that what makes divorce so painful is that the love doesn't end, which is what both parties want it to do. If it's a real love, all those moments of when you first met and looked at each other, and I mean, those extraordinary moments which you want to make disappear and repress and get rid of, the realization that they are like freshly cut flowers. And it made everything we did then loaded. It was just loaded. It's in the first shot. I mean, she's got the best face of anybody on screen. There is an inherent intelligence and goodness that comes out of her, and I think the audience responds to that. There are certain actors that are just, they're like, to watch them work, it's like watching a battleship sail into harbor and just move its guns around and fire off the round and hit the target and put the guns back and move away, and without, as though it's effortless. And she can do anything. I mean, she can do anything. I first heard about it through my agent, who knew that I was greedy for work, and I was playing in Central Park in The Taming of the Shrew, in Free Shakespeare in Central Park in New York, and I was shooting Woody Allen's movie, too. But my agent set me up anyway, because I only had two weeks of work on Woody's movie, and he sent me to Stanley Jaffe, who said, you know, how do you think you can, you can't shoot someone else's movie and be in a play and be in our movie. This is a very important movie. And I said, yeah, but I just have a little bitty part. I'm just in the very beginning and the very big end, and you know, if you work it around it so I can work on Woody's movie in the middle. You know, I was a repertory actress, which means you work on a lot of different plays at the same time, and I thought I could do it. We had a conversation about what qualities we needed in the character of Joanna, and first and foremost was she had to be likable immediately, because she was going to do, within the first five minutes of the film, the most heinous thing a woman can do, which is leave a child behind. And you had to not just write her off at the end of the picture when she came back. I think if there's anything, you know, that runs through all my work, all my characters, it's that I've had a relationship with them where I feel I I thought she was a rat in a maze, you know. She had no choice. Sick people don't often have a choice, and I thought she was mentally ill, you know, ill, depressed, sort of out of control. There were a lot of people making very dramatic moves in their lives to find themselves, and that was very much an issue. It was in some long extended way a playing out of what had happened in the 60s, when you had this whole thing of the flower generation and the idea of be faithful to your own feelings. She was married to a man who did not know how to have an intimate relationship, and she was trapped in this, and she was frantic. Was she suicidal? She was on the verge of a breakdown for sure as a character, and recognizing that and not wanting to be a bad mother, she did what the greatest mother would do. She loved her child enough to leave him. All she knew was that her life lay on the other side of the gangplank. She had to walk, get off that that ship, and she didn't know how it was going to turn out. Very often when you look up with people that are interior people, you don't know why they do anything. You can't. They don't do not explain themselves. I mean, a lot of it is that she was locked up inside of herself, but I knew that I had the chance to come back at the end and explain who this terribly imploded person was. Well, there are magazine article versions of life, and then there are real versions of life. And at the time, there wasn't any guy I knew who was working in a formal job who could have peeled off several hours of the day to be with his kid or be with his family, even if his wife continued to be in the marriage and not have suffered in work. The most intense and rewarding part of his life at that point had been his working life. And his family was something he put up with. He put up with the weekends just to get to Monday again, because that's where he was the most alive. I grew up in a town outside of Manhattan where the film was shot, and Shirley Rich was the casting agent on the picture. And she was doing just an overall search for any sort of young boy that age that might fit a physical profile that could be the son of Dustin Hoffman. At first glance, I didn't think Justin was right, because I think Leave It to Beaver had been on TV recently, and I thought he looked too much like a TV kid with the bangs and looked too perfect. I think in my mind's eye, I wanted a really funny looking kid like I could believe would be my own. But that's not to say my own kids aren't gorgeous. But yeah, if a really ugly kid had walked in, it would have gotten my vote, I think. We were lucky because Dustin really wanted to be involved, and he was at many of the readings we did with the kids. Justin was the last of the young boys that we tested. And he came out, and he started in the scene, and Dustin would start to improvise, and Justin would improvise, and he'd stay right there with him in the scene. And he'd match Dustin in energy, which is really hard for a young kid to do. There was this magical moment when Justin sat next to me, and he got very close. And we were just talking and improvising, and the camera was there. And at some point, he just put his hand on my leg, and it was so familiar. And it just felt like the way one of my kids was. When kids sometimes touch a parent, they just make some kind of contact. It's almost like monkeys. There's just a physical hand on the shoulder, or just on the leg. And there was something exquisite in the moment between us. By the time we were three quarters of the way through that, before I'd ever yell cut, we knew that was a boy. Everyone, we were in total agreement. I said, that's my kid. I guess to myself, and I think they felt the same thing. That's my kid. Dustin said it best. He was the hardest actor that he worked against in his entire career, because there was no such thing as dishonesty. Everything was honest. Justin was astounding. He's still the best child actor I've ever seen. The French toast scene was just some awesome acting by Dustin Hoffman. We ran through that scene, and when they rolled, it was a completely different thing. I think that whole thing of folding it up, dipping in, okay. That's all improvised. I can't remember if even getting burned at the end was improvised, or whether Bob had written it, or whether it was in the book. But we still found ways to improvise the moment. Justin would come onto the set, and we would tell him what was going to happen that day. The script supervisor, a wonderful one named Renata, would go and run his lines with him. And then we would sit there and rehearse. And then he and Dustin would run lines and rehearse together. And I said to him at a certain point, because we took to each other, Justin and I, and I said, Justin, you don't talk like that. I said, that sounds like kids on TV, in those sitcom shows or something. Okay, Dad. And he kind of looked at me. He was very bright. And I said, you're kind of very mature. It was like a kid playing a kid, as I remember. I think Bob told the parents, and they were shocked, I think, please don't let him memorize the lines anymore. Don't let him prepare. Just bring him in. We'll take care of the rest. A lot of things came from Dustin. The ice cream scene, which most people think is the classic imprimatur of the film or signature of the film, is one that's truthful. We all who have children have been in that moment. All are terrified at the frustration that you start to feel. That's not in the writing. That I do remember, because that was something I think was my daughter Jenna had done to me. And I told Justin the story while we were sitting there, getting ready to do that scene and talking to the crew. I said, you know what this reminds me of? And I tell a story about Jenna. I said, did she just go to the freezer and take it out? She did that once. He said, what'd she do? He'd get all excited. He might've met Jenna. And I said, well, she violated. She ate it. He said, I want to do that. And I remember, I said, go ahead. And right away you see the cameraman and lighting guy saying, we're lighting for the table here. We're not lighting for the refrigerator. And it was wonderful. We just had fun. We were having fun. He was really doing it. And I said, I got to talk to Bob. And Bob was in the next room talking with Stanley Jaffe about schedule. When Dustin had an idea, he says to me, don't say no till you've heard me out. And so I, all I wanted was to say no, but I said, okay. And I just remember Stanley went, he just, you know, because you know, this was a relight. This was another 30, 40 minutes. And then he acquiesced. It was wonderful. Irresistible. It was so much better than what was on the script. It was perfect. It's like making a reservation at a restaurant that you really like. And then on the way there, you see some other place and somebody in the car says, let's go there. It's pretty tough to get everybody to say, okay, you know, it's a restaurant we haven't tried before. Most people I know try and make the generic picture. And we try to make the specific picture. Thinking if it happened to us, it certainly happened to others. It's a different way of making movies and probably not fashionable now, where things are cut together much more quickly. But in the olden days, in the seventies, behavior was interesting to people. And, and very often, oh, I remember Dustin screaming, don't, don't cut, don't cut, don't cut. Because the stuff that comes before a take or just after a take, sometimes that's when most purely you live on screen and most effortlessly the story's told. Part and parcel of being with Dustin Hoffman was improvising. And I had come out of improvisational theater myself being part of Second City Workshop under Paul Sills in the sixties. So I loved improvisation. I was very comfortable with it, very happy with it, but I was very glad that Benton was there to do the finished product and the writing. Jane was special. I mean, it is a small part, but she wound up with an Academy Award nomination for it because she brought such, again, truthfulness to it. The normality of two friends talking about nothing. It's one of my favorites. It may be my favorite scene in the picture, because it was so honest, just two people who liked each other sitting in a park, watching the kids and talking. That's a great example of a scene that was partly written, partly improvised, because by that time they knew each other. They knew the characters so well, they could move the way they wanted to move. The words were just words that were stuff we had to, because I remember that we just sat talking a lot in between takes. We were just trying to get into that. So how are you doing, Jane? So how's life with you? So got a boyfriend, anything, whatever. How are you doing? What's your longest relationship? I remember that Nestor set the shot up so that I would fall onto a series of mats that were placed around the jungle gym. And I think the mats were everything from motorhome cushions to sandbags, because we're doing the longest fall, which was actually only like probably four feet or something like that. Of course, you know, movies and insurance, everyone's freaking out. So Stanley says, right before he's about to roll, I think, he says, let's put a perimeter of people around in case something happens. And sure enough, I missed the cushions. And I think that Stanley actually was the one that sort of bounced me back towards the cushions. And then we set up for Justin just to be lying there in the veritable fake blood. And he knows he's got to cry. I think it was the first time he had to cry in the movie. And he's like any actor. I'm like, God, what am I going to do? I've told this story to friends, and they look at me like I'm brutal. And I say, oh, my God, how could you do that to a kid? But you'd have to have been there to understand, I think, this relationship. And I just started talking to him about, I think about how much I loved working with him and how much the crew loved him. He didn't know at this point how temporary the relationship is with a film crew and a cast, and that when it's over, it's over. And sometimes you don't see anyone ever again, and sometimes you just see them once in a while. But it's not ever going to be like this again. And I just was using words like this because he really enjoyed working. And he just was lying there in this plot and looking up. And I says, you know, you like Eddie, Eddie Brown, you know, camera guy. He says, you know, you may not see. I said, you look so-and-so there. And he started to fill up, and he was just crying. And I says, you're feeling something now, aren't you? And I bring it up because it was, in a sense, gotten there by improvising. The whole process, I never felt manipulated in any way. I mean, I was having a ball and learning how to cry, having someone suggest that I think of sad things. It was great. You know, I was like, cool, I can make myself do this if I think of this. This is really a neat thing. But when it was over, he couldn't stop crying, and everyone got a little nervous because he's just a six-year-old kid. Cut, beautiful, wonderful. And he's still, he's heaving. And I remember picking up and holding him, and I kind of walked with him. And I said, are you okay? He says, yeah, yeah, yeah. I said, are you sure you're okay? He says, yeah, yeah. He's crying. I said, you really did a good job there. Did it feel like you did a good job? He says, yeah, yeah. I says, well, how do you feel about that when you do a scene, you really cry? And he went, I feel terrific. And it was streaming. And I says, you're an actor then. That was the critical moment, is that Meryl comes back and says, I want my kid back right at the moment when I become father slash mother. That was her scene. And all I'm hearing when I'm doing the scene with her is, I want Billy. And we rehearsed it a few times, and she's, you know, it's her scene. But I remember going out a bit and saying, something's wrong. It's not working. He says, what is it? I says, I don't know. I said, there's just something. I'm really angry by the end. I just, I know that. I just don't, I don't like, I just, I am really pissed. The shattered glass in the restaurant scene was completely Dustin's invention and spontaneity. I think it was an improvised moment. It was the best of what improvisation can be. To the cameraman, I said, see that glass there on the table? You talk like convicts in the joint. You know, you don't want the guards to hear you. You know, see that? He says, yeah. I says, okay, just tell me if I whack that before I leave, and I'm not going to whack it. I'll be careful. I'm going to whack it at the brick wall, because I don't want to hit her or anything like that. It's not a breakaway. You know, have you got it in the shot? Just move it a little bit to the left, back there. You know, he says, and I'm looking at him, and he's going. You know, nobody knows what we're doing. So he's ready for it. And Benton knows, and I'm saying, I want, I want one more. I want to do something. And Meryl knows I want to do something. People, you know, but they don't know what. And she's not expecting any of this nonsense. And we do it. Felt wonderful. And she really, I mean, and she's not acting. But, you know, Meryl does a lot of, 99% of her work is not acting either. So, I mean, she's spontaneous, but she was very spontaneous here. And I remember she was pissed. I found out much later while we were doing the publicity, when people talk about this, that he was really, that he was mad at me. And I didn't, I mean, he, Dustin, was mad at me, Meryl. And I, I didn't know that. I still don't know why. I read the, you know, some of the stuff that came through, and he was doing the interviews and saying that he was so furious with me. And I was playing a game with him, and it's like playing tennis with, you know, Pete Sampras or something. You got to be on your game. And, you know, I don't know how to play tennis, and I wasn't in it, in a competition. I'm sure I was acting out on her throughout the movie, stuff that I was feeling toward the wife that I was divorcing in real life. It was the first time I ever made a movie where I was living through what I was acting, unlike a writer or a painter, let's say, who gets up in the morning and can exercise what they're going through. You know, we get stuff in the mail. So, you know, this, it's quite unusual to be getting a divorce. My, you know, my first and only divorce at the time I'm shooting a movie about a man getting a divorce. And people said to me later, it must be very, very painful. I said, no, it was great. It's like Justin saying, I feel terrific because there was, it was a wonderful feeling. I mean, just show up, just show up and turn the camera. He transformed his anger into the glass instead of me. So I guess I should be grateful. Dustin has a way of eliciting so many possibilities from you off camera. And sometimes he'll throw you for a loop. I mean, he'll say something totally out of the blue that has nothing to do with the script, but he wants a particular response. It's almost a directorial approach. There are moments when I would want to strangle Dustin because he'd say, I'd say, let's just get through it. I'm so tired. Let's just get through it. We'll worry about it. And Dustin would say, no. And he's right. And you, and you would learn to trust it. You'd argue about it, but that's the rough and tumble of making movies. You've got to allow people to find stuff as long as it stays within the limits, within the boundaries of the picture you believe in. Bob Benton was a director who really ruined me for everybody that I've worked with subsequently because he introduced the C-word, collaboration. I thought, well, this is how everybody works in the movies. This is cool. Everybody doesn't. But he made me feel important in the process for somebody who has 15 minutes in the movie. I remember him just tearing his hair sometimes that he led us this far into the process. He is a gentle, sweet human being, first of all. And I think that that is what makes him a great director because he knows where to go with something. And he knows that in order to get actors and moments to achieve something, you can't force it. You can't push something. He never tells anybody no. He goes, that's very interesting. That means usually, I think it's the worst idea I've ever heard. How do I get you out of the room? But he's very smart about listening to people, listening and ultimately filtering out that which he doesn't like and keeping that which he does. He doesn't have a pride of authorship. If you can make it better, make it better. I was working on Woody's film at the same time, Manhattan. And Woody would say, there's a comma in the middle of that sentence. It's there for a reason. And maybe you should just do it the way it's written. And I was like, OK, OK. But see, I'm working across town. There's nothing. He lets me do whatever I want. By the end of that movie, no other director said that to me. He says, I want to give you screen credit on this. Will you share screen writing credit with me? And I, like a fool, said no because I would have had another Academy Award. There is a speech I've written in the courtroom. I like the speech. I like the sense of the speech. I like where it begins. I like where it ends. But I feel as though it's a speech written by a man put into the mouth of a woman. Would you rewrite it and come back to me with it? And 15 minutes later, I forgot I'd said it to her. So on the first day of shooting in the courtroom, Meryl comes in and she says, I've rewritten the scene. I've rewritten that speech that you want me to write. And I suddenly remembered I'd asked her to do it. And I thought, jerk. I'm going to lose a friend as an actor. I'm going to lose a day's work. It's going to be awful. So I say, OK, let me look at it. And I said, it's all, it's handwritten. It's not even typed out. And it's too long by about a fourth. But it's perfect. I've never been divorced, but I have friends who've been divorced. And when that moment, when you realize that it's lawyers talking to lawyers and things always distort, that's when you've really divorced. It's when you've really lost each other because you can't even speak to each other and you don't know each other. So in a way, that's why maybe courtroom dramas are so compelling because people put their hand on the Bible and swear to tell the truth. And they tell an intimate truth as well as the one that's going to get them what they want. Something had happened in the shooting of that, that Benton had caught. It's one of the best moments a director has caught in my career as an actor. It's a film actor, 35 years or whatever it is. He caught it. And that is that this is very personal stuff. But Meryl had lost her boyfriend recently before the film. John Cazale, I think is the way you know, Godfather Dog Day with Pacino. And I knew she wasn't over it. I mean, I know you never get over these things, but she was not over it. I went over to Meryl and I just said something to her. I don't remember what it was, but it had something to do with John. I think I asked her to look at me at a certain point. And my nod didn't have anything to do with the lines that we call the text. My nod had it to do with that I know she's still feeling the loss of John because I had said something to her about that. And it was just something happened. Benton happened to look over to see what she was looking at off camera and saw me go like that. And afterwards he got very nutty and excited and came over and said, what was that? What was that? She went like this and you went like that. I said, no, I was just where he said it looked like you were telling her she was good. And he says, I want to reshoot your side. I got to reshoot your side. And again, that becomes a signature moment in the movie, because these two people loved each other. They were fighting over custody and despite themselves. And that's what it literally is. Despite yourself, you're connected. Whatever it was, they shared as a dream as a couple. They were struggling, they were starting out and it went away. There's a terrible tragedy to that. They're forced to listen to one another. They're forced to hear one another. They're forced to remember that they love one another. That's the pivot on which the narrative shifts, that courtroom sequence. And it's vitally important. It is where reconciliation begins. The most important thing was that there was a resolution in the relationship between Ted and Joanna that didn't mean they were getting back together, but didn't mean everything was gonna be okay for them and for Billy. She is the one who does the final, totally heroic act. She doesn't give up Billy, not because she doesn't love him, but because she does love him. I do know that I was really, really pregnant when we shot the final scene. And I think it's a great way for an actress to get a close-up because they can't shoot down here. She looked at me as Meryl and she said, how do I look? Because she just cried in the scene that we shot before. It was mascara, whatever. And she didn't want it dripping or whatever. And she had been cleaning herself up a little bit for her last shot on the screen. And I said, you look terrific. And Benton said, what, what, what? What'd you say? And I said, no, it's just, I said, she wants to know if she looks okay for her last shot. And he knew that was the end of the movie. Oh, I don't think that's the end of the story. I think that they're in process. When you have a child together, you can get divorced, but you're in each other's lives all your life. She's on the ship again. They're not living together, but they're all going through it in a way together. Who knows where Billy, I'm sure when he got to be a teenager, he was sent right over to his mother's. I was very surprised by the success of the film. I mean, I knew it was a wonderful story, but I thought it was a small story and it turned out to touch many, many people. For me, it was a really wonderful experience. It was wonderful. I went into this not knowing anything and came out on the other side, a completely different human being. The response was extraordinary. It was one of the greatest rides in life because when it happened to be part of it and to also really care and be friendly with the people who were sharing the experience was fantastic. When I saw the film, I came out and stood on the street and everybody said, wow, wow. Who knew that's what Benton was doing back there in his little brain behind the camera as we were shooting. I was surprised that teenagers went to the movie. I would have thought it would be the kind of movie they would have stayed away from. But in fact, either their parents were separated or divorced or their best friend's parents were separated or divorced. And they needed to know it was going to be all right without reducing them to platitudes. There was this court stenographer who was working that day as the court stenographer on our movie. Figured I couldn't find an actor who could do it as accurately as this lady who did it in real life. So I talked to people and I was talking to her one day in between takes. And I was saying, so is this what you do? Do you do divorces? And she said, oh, I did them for years, but I burnt out. I couldn't do it anymore. It was just too painful. She said, I really love what I'm doing now. And I said, well, she says homicides.