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Harvey Keitel may be the only member of the legendary Actors Studio — he has been in it since the early '70s — who both memorizes the Upanishads and subscribes to Leatherneck, the Marine Corps magazine. In 1965, the scrappy high school dropout and three-year Corps vet answered an ad for actors placed by NYU student director Martin Scorsese. Keitel's acetylene-torch Brooklyn intensity so impressed the director that he cast Keitel in the student film Who's That Knocking at My Door? and later flicks. But Keitel had bad luck: getting fired as star of Apocalypse Now, doing too many arty flops. ''There was a time when I couldn't get any work. It was beyond weird, it was hell,'' he says. At one point, he was reduced to doing an Italian TV comedy called Kiss Me, Witch.
But Keitel came back big in '91: His gangster Mickey Cohen in Bugsy won him an Oscar nomination; that, along with parts in the Demi Moore film noir Mortal Thoughts and Thelma & Louise, earned him the National Society of Film Critics award for best supporting actor. ''He's in a position in his career that he hasn't been in for over 15 years,'' exults Tarantino. ''Now he's the lead, or the second lead, or like De Niro in Brazil — he comes in, kicks ass, and leaves.'' His two current pictures will be followed by the thriller Rising Sun and Snake Eyes, ''a cross between Bad Lieutenant and Day for Night, with Harvey playing Truffaut and Madonna as the actress,'' according to director Abel Ferrara. Keitel says he plans a 1993 directing debut with a film ''about children growing up.''
Sitting in a café near his Manhattan loft, Keitel sips cappuccino in the company of Stella, who shows up dragging her sitter by the hand; she seems a very normal kid, impatiently interrupting as her daddy muses about family values and pleads, ''Just let me finish.'' ''It's like Thelma and Louise,'' Keitel concludes. ''The question popped into my mind when I read the script, 'where were their daddies?' You know, Callie Khouri had a great line in her script — it could be the guide phrase for the '90s: 'Love isn't something you fall into; love is something you do.''' Acting is something Keitel fell into, but now he feels he has some serious work to do exploring man's descent into da abyss.
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