Volker Schlondorff, director of "Death of a Salesman", has defended Dustin Hoffman against allegations that he sexually harassed a 17-year-old intern on the set of the 1985 TV-movie adaptation, saying allegations that the actor is a "predator is simply going too far."
Schlondorff, 78, a German filmmaker, has come forward following The Hollywood Reporter's publication of Anna Graham Hunter's column about her interactions with Hoffman.
In the piece, Hunter, now 49, claimed Hoffman repeatedly grabbed her buttocks, made crude sexual remarks to her and ordered female staffers to massage his feet.
Schlondorf, however, says Hunter has mischaracterised Hoffman's behaviour, and insists the actor was "a kidder" on the set. "Standard Monday-morning question was, indeed, 'Did you have good sex over the weekend?,' " Schlondorff says. "A joke, a running gag, everybody laughed at."
The foot massages, he says, were given to Hoffman because he was on his feet for 16 hours at a time: "Everybody gave him a foot massage now and then, on the set, amidst the chaos, nothing ambiguous about it."
Talking about the groping that Hunter referred to, Schlondorff says he never witnessed himself, but assured that if it did happen, there was "nothing lecherous about it. ... He was teasing the young, nervous interns, mostly to make them feel included on the set, treating them as equals to all the senior technicians."
Recalling Hunter's behaviour on the set the director says, "She had a self-assured, playful way herself. If (Dustin) knew that she would be upset when he was teasing her, he wouldn't have done it."
Since the publication of Hunter's account, a second allegation of sexual harassment against Hoffman, from screenwriter Wendy Riss Gatsiounis, has surfaced.
Gatsiounis says Hoffman asked her if she had "ever been intimate with a man over 40" in a pitch meeting in 1991, then repeatedly propositioned her after she tried to change the subject.
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