Voyager (film) of the war. The main character shows some resemblance to Frisch, a frustrated architect turned author. German director Volker Schlöndorff, who already directed an Oscar-winning film, "The Tin Drum" (1979), moved to New York in the mid-1980s to make a television adaptation of Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" with Dustin Hoffman as Willy Loman. By 1987, with his career stalled and his marriage breaking up, the 47-year-old Schlöndorff could perhaps identify with the novel's main character, Walter Faber, and he decided to make a film based on the novel. After acquiring the film rights, Schlöndorff turned to Rudy Wurlitzer,
Dustin Hoffman and my brother, a high-school varsity football player, was Biff." Author Marie Brenner notes that Hoffman "has been obsessed with the play" throughout his career: "For years he has wanted to be Willy Loman; when he discovered that Arthur Miller was his neighbor in Connecticut, they began to talk about it in earnest." For Hoffman, the story also left a deep emotional impact from the time he first read it: Hoffman rehearsed for three weeks with the play's original star, Lee J. Cobb, and remembers seeing his stage performance: "I'll never forget that period in my life. It was so