ABC Interview

2009-12-21T02:29:00.000-08:00

Oscar-winning actor Dustin Hoffman's latest film Moonlight Mile explores the separate journeys people make through grief and back to their lives.

Dustin Hoffman plays Ben Floss in Moonlight Mile, a movie that begins with a funeral.

After a young woman dies, her fiancée, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, stays with her parents, played by Dustin Hoffman and Susan Sarandon. During an interview with ABCNEWS' Diane Sawyer, Hoffman revealed a life lesson he learned from the death of his parents — that no one can make it all right

HOFFMAN: People talk about closure … I don't think it exists. I think it's a wish. What we really want and need is something to let it in, and one gets emotional thinking about things like that. But to allow it to be a part of the history, of the fabric of your own life, because there ain't no closure.

SAWYER: What took you most by surprise at the loss of your parents?

HOFFMAN: I think what they never prepare you for, what you're never told is that it hits you out of nowhere. You're walking down the street. You can be in a good mood. You turn the corner, and it's like you're standing there in front of people, you know, crying. Something surfaces.

SAWYER: And it's never the thing you think will …

HOFFMAN: (laughing) Aren't we supposed to be getting some laughs?

SAWYER VOICE OVER TAPE: A 44-year career that began when a jazz piano player braved wounding rejections trying to become an actor.

SAWYER: I was reading here that you said that you would go to casting call after casting call, and they would tell you you're not good-looking, that you're the character juvenile. They say this to you when you go in?

HOFFMAN: It's worse than that. "Character juvenile" meant you're the ugly friend to the good-looking, you know, ingenue or the good-looking juvenile.

SAWYER VOICE OVER TAPE: Time for true confessions. My husband Mike Nichols decided to bypass the conventional pretty boys and cast Hoffman, still a relative unknown, as Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate.

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=125717&page=1