At the Karlovy Vary Film Festival on Saturday, Dustin Hoffman said the United States was as divided as it was during the Vietnam War, and he also joked that he was still trying to figure out who he was.

The double Oscar winner, who received the Crystal Globe for his outstanding artistic contribution to world cinema at the Czech festival’s opening ceremony on Friday, hosted a screening of his hit film, Mike Nichols’ 1967 romantic comedy-drama “The Graduate.”

The festival’s artistic director, Karel Och, asked him how “The Graduate,” which he said had been Hoffman’s personal choice as a film to screen at the festival, can inspire 20-year-olds today, when reality seems so different from that of the late 1960s.

The actor responded: “It’s actually the same thing, because Charles Webb’s book was written in 1964, before the Vietnam crisis, which divided the United States as it is divided today.”

He added: “I think the important thing to realize – what you’re going to see – is that the parents were coming out of the Great Depression of the 1930s, when no one could get a job, and suddenly now, because of the war, they were able to work, and instead of giving themselves, they gave objects, so the generation that was alive then was not given love, they were given objects, which you’ll see at the beginning of the movie.”

He added: “Lastly, I don’t think we know who we are in our early 20s. We want to be who we are when we look in the mirror, because when we look in the mirror, we change our appearance. We have a mirror look. We want to be this person, which is not who we are. And the idea is that we spend years trying to figure out, ‘Who am I?’ And I think I’m still trying to figure it out,” he said to laughter from the Czech audience.

Och began by asking him to explain how he landed the role, which “turned out to be so pivotal” in his career.

“It was an accident, and that’s the truth. Mike Nichols, who was the director at the time, was like Spielberg today,” Hoffman said, “he had spent almost two years looking for this person who was going to be ‘The Graduate,’ and after two years (I know this because he wrote it later in his autobiography) he was ready to say, ‘We can’t make it,’ and he wasn’t going to make the movie.

“Literally, the last day I was going to see people was my turn and Katharine Ross’s. If we had been there two years earlier, we wouldn’t have gotten the part. The people who would have been there the day we were, would have gotten the part, and that’s the truth. It’s all luck,” he concluded with a wide smile.

The festival will take place from July 3 to 11.