For a long time, though he loved the sense of emotional freedom and expression acting gave him, he tried to convince himself that it was merely a seemingly easy route to riches and fame. He would tell his friend Rufus Collins, ‘I just want to be an actor to make money. That’s my only interest: to make money.’
To which Collins would reply, ‘You’re not telling the truth, Harvey.’
Which, of course, he wasn’t. If anything, the opposite was true: here was the thing he’d been seeking all his life, an art into which he could pour all the feelings he had struggled for years to hold in check. If he could convince himself that he was just doing it to make a living, he wouldn’t have to face the fact that it was the most important thing in the world to him. And that, so far, he wasn’t making much of a dent as an actor. Yes, he was working semi-regularly. But he worried endlessly to his friends and numerous girlfriends over every part he didn’t get, agonizing over whether he really did have talent. Had he made a colossal mistake? Was he exposing his most secret self merely to be humiliated?
The apparent proof that he had chosen the wrong direction slapped him in the face every time he had to accept a part-time job as a court reporter. Every time he sat down at a deposition to transcribe the proceedings, he was plunged back into the world of uncertainty: If he was an actor, why was he here? Why couldn’t he support himself with his art? Would he ever be able to escape permanently, out of this drudgery and into the realm where his thoughts and emotions could guide and shape him? Too many days, it seemed as if that would never come, that he had foolishly dreamed and hoped for something that could never be his; that, like Icarus, his wings had melted because he’d dared to fly too close to the sun and would forever be plunged into the dreariness of life that had all but consumed his father.
But he began to feel that all the risks he had taken had been worthwhile when he began studying at the Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg and Ernie Martin, who taught for Strasberg. Working with Strasberg opened his eyes to what acting could be about if you thought about it and applied yourself. According to actor Ron Silver, who shared the Strasberg classes with Keitel:
When Strasberg taught, what he was saying always seemed so simple. Like you almost didn’t know whether to take him at his word. At the same time, he could be very abstract. He’d say, ‘Just be, just exist for a minute. Just have a real moment.’
Some pupils took what he said to an extreme. He was never one for indulgence, never one to dispute a director’s authority. He was never someone who would insist on substituting his own truth for the character for the playwright’s truth. At the same time, you also had to have respect for the actor as the author of the authenticity of the line.
The bulk of the teaching focused on sensory work as it applied to doing scenes. The idea was to work on each of the five senses, to teach the actor to expand on his imagination – to be personal in the work by drawing upon his own experiences to revisit emotions comparable to ones being felt by the character. The emotions, Keitel was taught, were already there; now he had to learn to free them when he did the scene.
It wasn’t the same as planning what to do in the scene; rather, the actor unleashed the emotions and applied them to this character. Keitel was taught to create an imaginary life for the character; the scene was a moment out of that life that was happening now, spontaneously and freely.
Keitel, already consumed by the love of acting, immersed himself in this new way of thinking, discussing it in class and outside, with whomever he could get to talk about it. Martin remembered about his former student:
There’s always been passion for the work. His choices were always big choices. He works to be in the moment and he doesn’t allow other things to interfere with the creative process. He’s always discussing the work, wanting to understand more of it.
In the past twenty-five years, I’ve seen a lot of people go for results, rather than the work, and you can make good money doing that. There are a few, however, who truly, truly have the passion and the love to work and rehearse, who love to go through the process. Some people want to get there as soon as possible. Harvey is one of those people who love the process.
The process: that method by which an actor discovers, develops and comes to embody a character. To Keitel, it became a meticulous regimen involving the various kinds of rehearsal exercises he’d learned, finding a physical key to the person as well as an interior emotional design: ‘This is my way of working, but it’s not as if I made it up myself. It’s part of the way acting is taught now in New York, based on the Stanislavski system. It’s part of the teachings to “fill the part”.’
Doing the homework, for Keitel, means analyzing the script and extrapolating an entire life for that character, a framework in which to set his actions in the script:
Stella Adler, who’s a great teacher, remarked that the analysis of the text is the education of the actor. So you get the script and you dig into it, to discover where the character is coming from, where his background is, what he does, what his desires are, what his fears are, how he lives – analyzing what the author had in mind.
I must know what his mother and father were like together, what his childhood and home life were like. I have to know if he didn’t go to college, or only stayed one year, or graduated. I have to know what his views are about many different things: the actor creates the character’s past. Before you shoot, you have rehearsals, where you find out what the other actors are going to do, what works best. Once the cameras roll, there’s always that little something that is improvisational, spontaneous.
For him, it became part of the spiritual framework of his life: ‘Acting is religious,’ he said. ‘Great acting can be worshipped because it descends into the subconscious, into the soul. And somewhere in there must be God.’
Yet, as much as he loved the work he was doing at the Actors Studio, Keitel remained frustrated in one major pursuit: membership of the prestigious organization, something that could be attained only by auditioning for and being selected by a rigorous membership committee. You were allowed to audition only once a year. But each year from the mid 1960s on, Keitel would find himself passed over for new membership: ‘I kept failing. I was so humiliated, so miserable that I couldn’t get in. It had tradition – something was being passed on. There was a standard that was aspired to.’
Keitel persevered, another quality that would serve him well in the career to come. Finally, in 1974, after he had appeared in Mean Streets, he was accepted as a member of the Actors Studio in his eighth year of auditioning. One of the Studio stalwarts told him later that she’d threatened the committee, saying, ‘Either let him in this time or I’m telling him not to audition again. Don’t put him through this anymore.’
‘It was a great day for me,’ Keitel said, ‘I felt I’d accomplished something I’d always dreamed of.’
In the spring of 1970, anti-war protests on American college campuses resulted in the killings of four Kent State University students by overzealous Ohio National Guardsmen. The event upset Keitel; when he phoned Scorsese, he learned that anti-war forces were taking over the film department at NYU and making short films to be shown on college campuses around the country. So Keitel helped out and even appeared in Street Scenes, the documentary shot that spring during the height of anti-war sentiment. ‘I see the movie we did as more than entertainment,’ Keitel said. ‘I resolved then to try to choose roles that have social meaning.’
By the end of 1970 Scorsese, on the strength of his work as assistant director and editor on the movie Woodstock, had moved to Los Angeles to try to edit Warner Bros.’ mess of a rock-concert film, The Medicine Ball Caravan. Eventually, Keitel followed him out there and lived with him for a while as he looked for work. But the pickings were slim, both in terms of work and women: ‘No one would go out with either of them,’ observed one friend from the period, ‘because the women thought they were a couple of losers.’ By the beginning of 1972 Keitel had moved back to New York, convinced