Although their time together was very limited, Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson hit it off on the set of 2006's Stranger Than Fiction and have been anxious to work together again since that film. They got the chance to play off of each other with starring roles in Last Chance Harvey, a romantic comedy about two misfits who meet by chance (yes, there's a theme going on here) in an airport pub.

Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson Press Conference

Could you talk about working together and what that experience was like?
Emma Thompson: "It's actually kind of got surreal now, because since we started doing this tour of duty I haven't actually seen Dustin, except to sit next to him and talk about what it’s like to work with him.

[Laughing] I haven't actually looked at him in the face and said, 'Hello darling, how are you?' But anyway, we met on Stranger Than Fiction for the first time and made one of those rare discoveries that you make sometimes in our profession, you could just work with someone and there seems to be no obstacle, no solving, no edges to rub off, no nothing. It seems to happen with a very peculiar intimate ease. And it was frustrating to us, because we didn't get more to do, and we were kind of going mad with this feeling of, 'Oh, what a shame. Couldn't we just carry on these characters and do a film about them?'"

"We've made jokes about it. You always say, 'Oh wouldn't be nice and let's work together again,' and it never, ever happens. And then when I got home, Joel's script was sitting on my desk. And I just went, 'Oh my god! Send this quickly! Send this to Dustin quickly, quickly before he's forgotten that he said he wanted to work with me again,' because you don't believe anything anyone says.

[Laughing] So it kind of came out of this profound..."

Dustin Hoffman: "You're still in character, that's what you say in the last scene!"

Emma Thompson: "Yeah, exactly, yeah."

Dustin Hoffman: "You know, when you work with someone, I don't know what you guys do in terms of if you work in pairs or whatever, I would guess most of you work as by yourself and then, yeah, so it’s not like this. You know, in acting, it's an intimate experience, even though it's short term. It's a marriage, and it's an ordered marriage, it's an arranged marriage - in other words you don't get to pick your [partner] and so when you decide to go with someone in life or get married, whatever it is, then you know you have things in common, hopefully. You laugh at the same stuff, you know? And it goes on and on, really, really, you like this, you know there are similarities and you have a similar feeling about life, and that doesn't happen often in film, even though it's an arranged marriage and it did this time. It's just one of those things. With the help of a little sake, of course, to loosen things up."

Was there one scene that was more challenging than you thought it would be?

Emma Thompson: "Challenging? I think that the general challenge about this film is that it is not full of plot, subplot, super plot, action, heroes, villains, good, bad, simple things, it is about the movements of the human heart. It's what I call bread and butter acting, rather than the grand acting that we're sometimes required to do and we've both been required to do. It's inhabiting characters in a very subtle way, and making very ordinary moments, interesting and engaging, and full of meaning and profundity. That was the challenge for us and I don't know that whether we'd have been able to do that when we were young people. I think as a result of being older and having done this job for such a long time, between us, that we were able to do this movie."

"I think it's deceptive, actually, because [laughing] it doesn't sort of look like we're doing anything really, except being. But, in fact, the work itself was quite exacting because it's a very fine line you're walking along and it could easily be sentimental. It could be simplistic, it could be, I don't know…a bit cheesy. But somehow I think we've gotten away with that. I don't think it is any of those things. I don't anyway - I mean you may disagree and that's fine. But I've never really done anything like that before. And so yes it was a sort of challenge from beginning to end, really."

This is such a universal theme – two lonely people who find each other and fall in love later in life. Can you comment on that? And Emma, I’d also like to hear about any bad dates you've ever been on?

Dustin Hoffman: "Bad dates? I'd like to hear that one."

Emma Thompson: "Yeah. Ohhh, okay, you go ahead because I have to think..."

Dustin Hoffman: "You have to think up your bad dates?"

Emma Thompson: "You carry on."

Dustin Hoffman: "The short answer or the long answer? When we decided to do this we decided to do it with certain rules. Because something happened to us in Chicago, you know, because the two scenes we did in the film Stranger Than Fiction, it was very precise dialogue. It was stylized in fact. I mean, we were adhered to commas and periods and three dots, so it was not only word by word but it was almost a screenplay that was in a kind of modern verse. You know, not that the audience would suspect that, but that's the way we were asked to do it. And so we had all this other time hanging out together and talking and getting to know each other, and running the lines and stuff. But this life, it merged between us and so when this one came along and Emma did call me and I read it, we talked about how we would do it. And she said it's what she calls bread and butter and no plot. And we thought, can we evoke, or recreate, that life that happened, that went on with us, when we were just sitting in the lobby of a hotel, sipping sake, talking about the people walking by and the memories? Suddenly we became very autobiographical with each other. It was extraordinary."

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