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So I’m on my way to a TIFF interview and a pushy motorist tries to get in front of me at the corner of Front and Simcoe. And like many a cinephile, my first thought is to reach back 40 years to Dustin Hoffman’s famous line from Midnight Cowboy: “Hey, I’m walkin’ here!”

I’d heard somewhere that it was an ad lib, and had told people as much, but I wasn’t sure. But near the end of my interview, I realized I could just ask the guy I was talking to — Hoffman, who at age 75 has his directing debut, Quartet, playing at the festival.

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“Want me to tell you the story?” he says. Well, if you insist. Here’s what he said:

“It was a low-budget movie. Nobody wanted to make this movie, Midnight Cowboy. People walked out during previews; it was considered filthy in 1969. Very low budget. Consequently, on Sixth Avenue, there was no money to stack it with extras. So it’s what they call a stolen shot. We have radio mikes on, the van is across the street, we rehearse it by ourselves. You know, the director [John Schlesinger], me and [Jon] Voight. And we would have to do this dialogue walking. And the hidden camera across the street would go with us, but we couldn’t stop the signal, so we had to reach the dialogue at a certain point so we wouldn’t have to stop. It would have to be turning green when we hit it. So we rehearsed it ourselves and we finally got — oh, so we’ll start this far back, then we’ll do this pace and then we’ll get there when it just hits green — perfect — and we can just continue. And we do it, and the first take a cab jumps the light … I wound up saying, ‘I’m walkin’ here!’ But what was going through my head is: ‘Hey, we’re makin’ a movie here! And you just f–ked this shot up.’ But somehow something told me you’d better keep it within the character. And then Schlesinger jumps out of the van and goes, ‘What happened? What happened? What happened?’ We told him, he says, we have to do it again just like that. That’s in the movie. It almost hit us, that guy.”

[np-related]