Harvey keitel pulp fiction7/17/2023 ![]() "When I was a boy in Brooklyn, when we played soldiers, we liked being Nazis," explains Keitel, who is Jewish. He specifically requested two of his darkest roles, as Judas in Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), and as an SS officer in Tim Blake Nelson's The Grey Zone (2001), about the corruption of both the Germans and the Jews who ran the gas chambers in Auschwitz. Keitel's best performances have plunged into those existential frays and black nights of the divided soul: his violent concert pianist in James Toback's Fingers (1978), remade this year by Jacques Audiard, or his tormented, drug-addicted cop in Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant (1992). ![]() There's a phrase I've often brought to mind to help me through tough times: 'Keep your eye on the doughnut, Harvey, and not on the hole.' I guess that's my existential struggle right now." That's been my experience, not only in my career but in my life so far, and our task is to make our downs part of our ups. Where would we be without them? Certainly not in the real world. "I'm doin' my best, Sheila, I'm tryin' hard. Others will not, such as Be Cool, the recent sequel to Get Shorty, in which Keitel has a comic cameo. Or with Quentin Tarantino, in Reservoir Dogs, which Keitel co-produced, and Pulp Fiction. Or with Jane Campion - also in Istanbul, presiding over the jury - in The Piano and Holy Smoke. ![]() Some will go down in cinema history, such as his work with Martin Scorsese, in Mean Streets and Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. He has appeared in more than 100 films, and shows no sign of stopping. "I will take it with me." Lifetime- achievement awards are for doddery oldsters and has-beens, and Keitel, who turns 66 in May, wouldn't wish to be regarded as one of those. "I've decided," he told me, when we met on the morning of the ceremony, "to say that I'm not going to accept the award. Always a deliberate man, Harvey Keitel had been brooding on what he would say when picking up his lifetime- achievement award at the Istanbul Film Festival.
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