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.

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."
"And then it hit me that Emma had done this scene in Love Actually that just came to me, where she's told or she finds out that her husband's been unfaithful. I told her I'd never seen a scene quite like it in films. I've seen that moment - you know, you see that many times in films - but I've never seen it executed the way she executed it. Because it was beyond acting. She gave us an entrance to her soul if you will, as corny as that sounds. And I said, 'I think we should attempt to do this piece like that,' because we spent a lifetime doing characters, quote unquote, and I don't know if we've ever done what came out of us in Chicago because we got to each other personally. And we were kind of evoking those scenes in life, like the Love Actually scene she had. And we said we would do that and with the director's agreement, ultimately, some nights having more than one camera, we would play with a scene so that neither of us knew where it was going. We knew what the scene was, but we would open it up at every single time and every take. So we really didn't know what the other one was going to do. Not really improvisation, but an improvisatory atmosphere."
"I think what came out of it, now to get to the answer to your question, was that we, in Chicago and talking about our lives, we hit on similarities that we had, and that was a certain kind of defense mechanisms that we both have. We all do that, you know? We have certain defense mechanisms that work for us, because we put them to take care of us so we don't have the same pain in life happen again. It's the guard rails. And we felt that these two characters were there and they were both frozen in life. They were meeting at a time when neither one of them had been living. She blames it on her mother, but as she says at the end of the film, it's her. I blame it on my daughter and my ex-wife and my job, whatever, but it's me. We in a sense are in it catalysts for each other. But something happens between us where I think in the subtext of it, we felt that we deserved a life. The characters did. And somehow, what married it to us, is that we felt like we deserved to do a film like this once."
Emma Thompson: "I thought of my bad date. When I was a gal..."
Dustin Hoffman: "You still are, thank you very much..."
Emma Thompson: "Thank you, you're so kind. The first job I did was a revue show in Australia. We went and did revue, Hugh Laurie, me, Stephen Fry, a couple of other [actors], we went off to Australia and did a revue. And I was the only girl and it was pretty difficult because the guys were very guy-ee. They're very, very clever, and they used to practice their cricket in the dressing room and I just kind of finally felt that I had to make a stand. So I started going out with a male model who was really quite dim, as a sort of antidote, really. Unfortunately, and greatly to my regret, he followed me back to England, which was a disaster. I remember him coming to the festival where we were performing and standing in a pair of leather trousers and leggings [laughing] with his legs akimbo, his hands on his hips, announcing to one of the boys that we was in fact an international man. I was so embarrassed that I actually went over and bit a sideboard in the assembly room bar, which bears my teeth marks to this day. So there you go."
Dustin Hoffman: "What question did she answer?"
Emma Thompson: "It was about a bad date."
Dustin Hoffman: "Okay, oh got it. Oh, it was about the bad date."

Do you think that the older you get, the more you understand love?
Emma Thompson: "Yeah, I do, actually. But that's only if you've put a good lot of graft into it. You can't just understand love because you're older. That's not a given. You can understand love if during the period that you've been getting older in, you actually work at it, work out what works, what doesn't work, what love is, which is a daily activity not something that just, you know, carries on in the ether without you. Love is as mundane as washing up, you know? The plates aren't going to wash themselves and put them back and love is not going to survive..."
Dustin Hoffman: "That's brilliant. She's a writer. That's good."
Emma Thompson: "...unless you do the work. And the work is sometimes quite painful."
Dustin Hoffman: "So we translate that line as saying you said love is as mundane as, well we say as doing the dishes..."
Emma Thompson: "Yeah."
Dustin Hoffman: "That's good. I think."
Emma Thompson: "So I think that you do get to learn about that, if you do love and you do commit to loving someone over a long period of time. I mean, then there's other kinds of loving where you just decide you don't want to stay with someone for a long period of time and you go from one relationship to another, stopping at the point at which there is an obstacle that you simply don't wish to climb over. That's another matter."

Emma, are you prepared for a sequel to Nanny McPhee?
Emma Thompson: "Nanny… Yeah, we shoot that next year. Very excited - very excited. It's taken three years to do this script. The first film took nine years door-to-door because the script took seven years to develop. Just was really hard to work it out. But this one, because I learned so much on the last one, it only took three. So we start that…we've got a green light in everything so hopefully it really will happen. Although who knows in this climate? There's a baby elephant in it that I'm particularly excited about."
Dustin Hoffman: "They're going to use a real baby elephant?"
Emma Thompson: "They're going to use a real baby elephant, yeah."
Are you directing it?
Emma Thompson: "No, Suzanna White is directing it. First time I've worked with a woman director, which I'm really thrilled about. So the triumvirate at the top is all women, me, and Lindsay Doran and Suzanna. And that I think will make for a very comfortable shoot."
Dustin Hoffman: "The sex of the elephant?"
Emma Thompson: [Laughing] "Stop!"
Dustin Hoffman: "Sorry."

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