Dustin Hoffman Psychiatric Institute, affiliated with Columbia University, when he was 21. "It was a great experience for me," he said. "All my life I had wanted to get inside a prison or a mental hospital. . . . I wanted to get inside where behavior, human behavior, was so exposed. All the things the rest of us were feeling and stopping up were coming out of these people." He used that experience to help him develop the character of Raymond Babbitt, a high-functioning autistic savant, yet a person who critic David Denby described as "a strangely shuttered genius." Hoffman created certain
Dustin Hoffman Burns, Andy García and Rachel Weisz. Hoffman finally had a chance to work with Gene Hackman in Gary Fleder's "Runaway Jury" (also 2003), an adaptation of John Grisham's bestselling novel. Hoffman played theater owner Charles Frohman in the J. M. Barrie historical fantasia "Finding Neverland" (2004), costarring Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet. In director David O. Russell's "I Heart Huckabees" (also 2004), Hoffman appeared opposite Lily Tomlin as an existential detective team member. Seven years after his nomination for "Wag the Dog", Hoffman got another opportunity to perform again with Robert De Niro, co-starring with Barbra Streisand and Ben Stiller