What Simon, the photographer, notices first of all is the way Steve Buscemi talks. "Amazing voice," he says, unscrewing an enormous lens from his camera after pinioning Buscemi against a Majestic screen with it.
This strikes me as odd: voices are usually my domain, faces his. But what I first notice is Buscemi's eyes almost sleepy, as though unwilling to engage. Nothing could be further from the truth; just wait till the light comes on in them when Buscemi talks about certain things theatre, shooting Fargo, working on his own debut feature, Trees Lounge, which premières today in Un Certain Regard.
And then there is the short, Black Kites, directed by his wife, Jo Anders, which première at Sundance this year. They have a five-year-old son, who is down in Cannes a place the
actor reckons he has "blocked out" since he was last here in 1989, with Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train.
Not only does Buscemi star in two films in Competition "Fargo" and "Kansas City" he also has his own film in another section, which I am willing to bet is a record. He's worked up a soundbite on it. "I feel like the Lili Taylor of Cannes," he says a reference to the I Shot Andy Warhol star who seemed to be in every film in Sundance this year. "You've been working on that," I say. "Yeah," he grins. "But I've only tried it on my friends so far." Fellow hacks, repeat it and be second.
But what I notice is not the soundbite: it's that Buscemi shows most animation when he is talking about his wife's film and his family. The corners of his mouth turn up, with a warmth absent from the full-teeth number most movie stars do. Clearly, Mr Pink in Reservoir Dogsthe role by which everyone still labels him is merely a figment (a pigment?) of someone else's imagination.
I think Buscemi thinks something like that about his career, which started on New York's alternative theatre scene, writing and performing his own material and that of his buddy, Mark Boone Jr, who appears in Trees Lounge.
"We performed in basement clubs, performance spaces, clubs, mainly on the Lower East Side," he recalls. Then he broke into the movies in a significant way via a film called Parting Glances, directed by Bill Sherwood, in which he played a musician with AIDS.
"That led to other film work," he notes. "And, although I was working with good people, I felt I was playing a lot of seedy characters, drug dealers and stuff. And I felt like I wanted to do something that was more like what I was doing in theatre. It wasn't like I was consciously trying to alter the public's perception of me as an actor, because I don't think they had a perception of me as an actor!"
If the public didn't start to get a perception of Buscemi last year when he appeared in Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead (which wowed audiences here last year), Living in Oblivion (which won an award at Sundance) and Desperado then it certainly will from this year's run of Fargo, Kansas City and Trees Lounge.
"They were all done in 1995, which was a pretty good year for me," he says. "Fargo was first, shooting in February. Then I did "Kansas City" but I only worked on that for two weeks, which was right before I started Trees Lounge.
It was a great year, but a really tough one. My wife was finishing her film at the same time as I was finishing Trees Lounge."
Buscemi broke out of the creative cul de sac of his characters in both In the Soup and Living in Oblivion to write, direct and star in Trees Lounge. He plays Tommy Basilio, an unemployed, 31-year-old barfly in Valley Stream, Long Island, who spends most of his life in the bar of the film's title, with occasional outings to drive an ice-cream truck something Buscemi himself did in his pre-acting days. Basilio also gets "dangerously close" (those are the words of the film synopsis) to his 17-year-old helper, Debbie, played by Chloe Sevigny from Kids.
"I wouldn't call the piece autobiographical," says Buscemi, who grew up in Valley Stream, Long Island, where Manhattan is 30 miles and a couple of universes away. "But that was certainly the springboard in creating the character for myself what might have happened had I not had the creative outlet that I found with acting. People find him charming and funny, but he's getting a little too old for that to be this guy who kind of floats through life.
"There used to be a line in the script which was cut out which goes: 'Most of my friends are either married or they're dead or they're in jail'. It seems that I wasn't going to be getting married, I didn't have any particular skill and I dropped out of college.
I was hanging out in bars a lot and any job that I had was just to facilitate my drinking. I'm glad I got out, but I still have affection for people who live there. It's just a different world." And has being a writer/actor/director given him an equal affection for that particular kind of masochism?
"I didn't really have a problem" he says, pausing for effect, "besides exhaustion. I wrote it for myself, so I really understood the character. Acting is the one thing I know how to do, so it relaxes me."
