Harvey Keitel hears the journalist is calling from Dallas and he grabs the phone, ready to riff. "OK, what time's the barbecue?" he asks in his unmistakable Brooklyn accent. "I want one medium rare."
He's in a friendly mood, which makes sense because he wants to talk about friendship -- particularly as the theme relates to his new film, Youth, opening Friday. The latest blindingly beautiful drama from Italian filmmaker Paulo Sorrentino (The Great Beauty), Youth features the 76-year-old Keitel alongside the 82-year-old Michael Caine. They play artists in the autumn of their years, passing time at a lush Switzerland resort as they ponder what, if anything, is next.
Keitel's Mick Boyle is trying to finish a movie script with five young collaborators. Caine's Fred Ballinger is fighting off entreaties from a royal envoy who wants him to conduct his most famous symphony for the queen.
They've known each other forever and a day. They have learned to keep each other sane.
Keitel compares Sorrentino's handling of friendship to a Dostoyevsky novel. "Paulo wrote about it so specifically and so powerfully, about the dangers of it and the rewards of it and how careful we should be with it," Keitel says. "It's sort of like a tome of instruction to be careful, because it's a very delicate thing. You can be destructive about friendship and you can be very creative about it."
He learned to value his friends growing up in the Brighton Beach area of Brooklyn, where temptations and hazards were plentiful. Keitel got in his share of trouble, but he had buddies to help keep him in line. He's kept in touch with old boyhood companions to this day.
"Friendship was a place to go to recuperate," he says. "I think of Quasimodo, knocking on the church doors, yelling: 'Sanctuary! Sanctuary!' The power of friendship saved my life growing up and I value it to this day on the highest level."
Loyalty was the key trait for the role that put Keitel on the map. In 1973's Mean Streets, he played the spiritually tormented hoodlum Charlie, whose primary cross to bear was his best friend, Robert De Niro's explosive, nearly feral Johnny Boy. As an actor, Keitel is drawn to humanity's darker corners: I first encountered him as Sport, Jodie Foster's menacing pimp in Taxi Driver; my most vivid impression of him as an adult remains the sensitive brute of The Piano.
Of course that's just acting, the sanctuary that has given Keitel solace through his adult life. Like Marlon Brando, James Dean, Robert Duvall and other giants, Keitel learned his trade at The Actor's Studio, where he studied under Lee Strasberg. That was where he learned to stay in the moment, the skill he finds most vital to his craft. (Keitel is now co-president of The Actor's Studio, with Al Pacino and Ellen Burstyn.)
"It's the search to find how to bring a moment of truth into the character so you can think it onto the stage," he says. "It's difficult to find the truth, difficult to acknowledge it and live with it."
Keitel has seen and done a lot in his 76 years. Enough that his words of gruff philosophy carry weight, onscreen and off. Enough to wonder if he sees irony in starring with Caine in a film called Youth.
The way he sees it, his education never ends.
"I think I'm still learning all the time," he says. "For me, that's the Youth of the movie."
