American actor Harvey Keitel, one of the protagonists in this year's clips, has returned to the Karlovy Vary festival after eleven years. He remembers the shooting of his clip fondly, but has not seen the finished version.
The 76-year-old actor had a packed second-last day at the festival. First he spoke with journalists at a press conference, then introduced Paolo Sorrentino's Youth, in which he plays a Hollywood filmmaker, and then he went to a discussion with filmgoers. Here too talk turned to directors with whom he has worked, including Martin Scorsese.
Keitel is known as a favourite actor of Quentin Tarantino, whose Reservoir Dogs he helped make happen. "A colleague from Actor's Studio sent me the script, saying I might like it. And I did, I thought it was brilliant. When I called Tarantino, he didn't believe it was really me," Keitel said. In contrast, the script for another of his well known films Bad Lieutenant he first threw in the trash. His participation in another well known independent film Smoke wasn't great in the beginning either. "His script was really thick and I didn't really get it. But I told the screenwriter that if he'd done that much work and he really wanted me, I'd do it. Over the course of shooting I came to understand it," said Keitel.
At the KVIFF Talk he added a story about how Robert De Niro taught him to read scripts; he said he was sorry that he didn't read more when he was young and didn't get educated and he confirmed that whenever he sees the young actor Tony Revolori, who was visiting KVIFF with the film Umrika this year, he slaps him.
