Scorsese recalls his ‘Mean Streets’

Cruz puts ‘torture’ of early work behind her

CANNES, France, May 10, (Agencies): Forty-four years after his Cannes Film Festival debut, “Mean Streets,” Martin Scorsese returned to the Croisette Wednesday to recall his breakthrough film, one he said he only understood years later.

A day after declaring open the 71st Cannes with jury president Cate Blanchett, Scorsese joined a post-screening conversation for “Mean Streets,” which played in Cannes’ Directors Fortnight section in 1974.

“This was the first time for me at Cannes,” said Scorsese. “And it was almost the best because of anonymity and trying very hard to change that.”

“Mean Streets,” of course, helped establish Scorsese, who then had two features under his belt (“Who’s That Knocking on My Door” and “Boxcar Bertha”). Two years after “Mean Streets” landed in Cannes, Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” would win the Palme d’Or despite booing at its premiere and the reported apprehensions of jury president Tennessee Williams.

And “Mean Streets,” about two Catholic brothers — Harvey Keitel’s responsible, guilt-ridden Charlie and Robert De Niro’s more combustible Johnny Boy — in a violent, gangstercontrolled Little Italy, remains one of Scorsese’s most personal films.

“Most of ‘Mean Streets’ took me years to really understand even though a lot of the film was what I was living at that time in the early ‘60s,” said Scorsese. “It took me years to really understand it’s about my father and his youngest brother. Until the day they died — and his youngest brother died only a few months after him — my father was still doing favors, as they said. My mother said, ‘Don’t do it!’ He was always in trouble. He was always in and out of jail, but I loved him.”

For Scorsese, there’s little that’s heightened about “Mean Streets.”

“Melodrama was to us drama,” said the 75-year-old filmmaker. “This was a daily occurrence. Philosophical and moral discussions with serious consequences.”

“Mean Streets,” he said is ultimately about the question of: “How does one lead a moral life in a world that is not?”

The screening prompted Scorsese to speak about an influential priest, a “street teacher” to him between the ages 11 to 17.

“He was the one who made me realize that we have to go for more,” said Scorsese. “I explore this concept of love and compassion in life. I had to do it because the other alternative was violence and murder. I mean, that’s what I think, what I saw around me. The only hope would be to find that in yourself, to be able to deal with others that way.”

Scorsese this spring finished shooting his gangster epic “The Irishman,” a big-budget release for Netflix that reteams him with De Niro and Al Pacino. Scorsese noted the film’s scope, saying it contains nearly 300 scenes, but didn’t wade into the ongoing disagreement between Cannes and Netflix. The festival has barred films without theatrical distribution from its prestigious competition

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lineup. Netflix in turn withdrew its releases entirely from this year’s festival.

Spanish Oscar winner Penelope Cruz said Wednesday that putting a firewall between acting and her private life — even when working with husband Javier Bardem — had put a stop to the “torture” of her early years in the industry.

Presenting her new film “Everybody Knows” by Iran’s Asghar Farhadi at Cannes, Cruz told reporters that she and Bardem made a point of not taking their personal life to the set, or their work home with them.

“When I was in my 20s, I thought the more I would torture myself and the more I would stay in character for months, the better the result would be,” Cruz said.

“We (she and Bardem) have very similar ways to work and maybe I did that experiment when I was younger because we both started very young.”

Cruz and Bardem, who many celebrity watchers say have claimed the place vacated by Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt in the star couple firmament, met on the set of the sexy 1992 Spanish dramedy “Jamon Jamon” when she was still a teenager.

But it took working together on Woody Allen’s “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”, which premiered at Cannes in 2008, to light the romantic spark.

Cruz took home an Academy Award for her supporting role as a hot-tempered artist in the film. She and Bardem, who won the previous year for “No Country for Old Men”, are respectively the first Spanish man and woman to win an acting Oscar.

Bardem, now 49, publicly declared his love for Cruz, 44, at Cannes in 2010 and they married the same year on an island in the Bahamas owned by their friend, US actor Johnny Depp. They have two children together and jealously guard their privacy.

“I have a life and then I have my job and that allows me to jump many times in one day from reality to fiction — I love that beautiful dance back and forth from both dimensions,” Cruz said.

“It would not make your life better, I think, if you used certain things from your private life (on a film set) so the fact that we know each other and trust each other so much only helps.”

Cruz and Bardem have starred in nine films together, including last year’s “Loving Pablo” by Spanish director Fernando Leon de Aranoa, in which Bardem plays infamous Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar and Cruz a journalist who falls in love with him.

Cruz said that while she enjoyed working on “Everybody Knows” with Bardem, in which they play ex-lovers thrown together decades later, “it’s not something that we plan on doing every two years”.

“No, that will be once in a while if we feel it’s right, like in this case,” she said.

Farhadi, who has frequently worked with his own wife, fellow Iranian director Parisa Bakhtavar, said the couple seemed to maintain a “healthy” distance from the industry.

LAS VEGAS:

Property that belonged to famed comedian Jerry Lewis will be auctioned next month in Las Vegas.

Julien’s Auctions says some of his watches, including one given to him by Dean Martin, and his wardrobe and props from the 1963 film “The Nutty Professor” are among the items that will be auctioned.

The auction house says the watch is engraved with the phrase “Jerry My Buddy/ and Pal/ I Love You/ Dino.” It is expected to sell for between $4,000 and $6,000.

A custom-made tweed burgundy suit that Lewis worn in the film is expected to fetch between $2,000 and $4,000.

Lewis, whose fundraising telethons became as famous as his hit movies, died Aug 20. (AP)