DUSTIN Hoffman is quite surprised he's here. Not here, here, seated next to Adam Sandler in a dark London hotel room, but here as a megastar and double Oscar winner, still working at the age of 80.
It's 50 years since he descended that escalator to the sound of Simon & Garfunkel in The Graduate, propelling him to a kind of generation-defining fame he never could have predicted.
Since then the hits are almost too numerous to mention, although any attempt would surely include Midnight Cowboy, All The President's Men, Kramer vs Kramer, Rain Man, Straw Dogs, Marathon Man, Tootsie and Hook.
"I never thought that I would get hired when I was starting out," he says. "Bob Duvall, Gene Hackman and myself, we were hoping just to make a living, off-off Broadway, off Broadway, we never thought any of this would happen."
But happen it did, to all three of them, a band of pals who are now often mentioned in conversations about the greatest living actors.
He's been nominated for seven Academy Awards and bagged two, for Kramer vs Kramer and Rain Man, won the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute and the Kennedy Centre Honours Award, but says all that success has not helped him to put his finger on quite who he is.
"I calculated that I need to live to be about 132, because at that moment I will know myself," he says. "I have been talking to god about that."
He is certainly settling into the professional role of a patriarch, and flexing some of his comedic muscles in films such as Meet The Fockers, Little Fockers and the Kung Fu Panda animated movies.
He continues that run in Noah Baumbach's new film The Meyerowtiz Stories (New And Selected) in which he plays a sculptor dissatisfied with the level of success he has achieved and a self-involved and negligent father to three adult children played by Sandler, Ben Stiller and Homeland's Elizabeth Marvel.
"I don't think actors should play parts unless they are in it, otherwise it looks like they are performing a part," he says. "They go, 'Oh so-and-so is an a****le but I'm not an a****le so I will just perform an a****le. I will get a few people in my head that I know that are a****les and just do that.'"
He says this commitment and truthfulness is something he has witnessed in Sandler, who plays the less successful of his two sons, the one who never had a sculpture named after him.
"What Adam was doing, which I can't put into words, there was something about him that I've not seen before. I know him and I've done another film with him but I went home and said to my wife, 'I think Adam has hit a part of himself in which he would be the person that didn't make it'.
"And that is as close as you can get to the bone, I thought that is what Adam was doing, to hit that."
Such failure as a parent is a world away from the kind of dad Hoffman is to his own six children, Sandler says.
"He raised his kids, he's tighter with his kids than anybody and he's very far from the character he plays in the movie," he says. "He's all about his kids' happiness and sending them out into the future and making sure they are prepared."
Turning to his co-star, he adds: "You guys have great kids, that whole family is great."
The pair clearly have a lot of respect and affection for each other. When Hoffman is not quite as steady on his feet, it is Sandler who lends a hand. But they also like to make fun of each other. When discussing Baumbach's brisk screenplay, which sees characters wrapped in their own monologues, failing to engage with and respond to each other, Sandler jokes: "He does that in real life, Dustin doesn't acknowledge anybody who is in the room, by looking in the distance.
"'When is this over?' is basically what he's thinking whenever I speak with him, he looks like, 'Let's end this so I can get back to humanity'."
Hoffman adds: "Noah had a 172-page script and yet the film is only one hour and 50 minutes and he said something which I thought was very interesting, which is we as human beings want to be able to guess what the person is saying to us before they finish.
"That is very ordinary in real life, we don't have to hear the whole sentence."
Sandler laughs. "I was about to jump in and not listen to the end of your sentence but I couldn't come up with anything," he says.
While Hoffman is outlining his plans to live for another 50 years to figure himself out, Sandler says: "I still have no idea of who I am. One minute I say this and the next I say the complete opposite and I believe them both, I don't really know what the hell the truth is with me yet."
Hoffman, who also starred opposite him in 2014's The Cobbler, can't resist a dry dig.
"I worked with Adam on a film before this and I thought he was this close to knowing everything about himself and then a year later we are doing this and he has regressed."
:: The Meyerowitz Stories (New And Selected) is available on Netflix now
