MOVIES : Welcome to His Neighborhood : Harvey Keitel has made his mark with some savagely forceful characters, and just hanging out in a local cafe with the actor can be intense.

It was probably one of the funnier pieces of graffiti ever to deface a New York City subway station.

About five years ago, on a wall in a station on the Lexington Avenue line, hung a poster for the film “Awakenings”--the one picturing a pensive, white-coated Robin Williams waiting on shore while his patient, the L-Dopafied Robert De Niro, stands on a stone in the water, stretching his arms exultantly over his head.

In a rough balloon drawn from De Niro’s mouth, someone had written the following words:

“Boy, am I glad Harvey Keitel’s not in this movie with me!”

So droll. So smart. So knowing.

Little did they know.

It’s true that until about five years ago, Harvey Keitel had been considered the odd man out of the De Niro-Scorsese downtown New York film collective, the one whose career hadn’t attained the glorious trajectory, the one who made bad choices and bad movies--or no movies--and, perhaps, simply didn’t have the talent or wisdom to correct his course.

But, like graffiti, assumptions have a shelf life. And Harvey Keitel--not just one of the busiest actors in film but, to many minds, one of the best--has proved that aging is not the same as ripening, that art is not the sole province of youth and that dedication to one’s craft can occasionally carry a payoff.

This year, at the age of 54, he will appear in six films, including Spike Lee’s “Clockers,” which opened Wednesday, and Wayne Wang and Paul Auster’s “Smoke,” and its improvisational offspring “Blue in the Face.”

When he sits down to talk at Bubby’s, a coffee bar-restaurant he frequents near his home in Manhattan’s TriBeCa, he has just returned from Maine, where he’s been shooting Jim Wilson’s black comedy “Head Above Water.” He recently completed the Quentin Tarantino-scripted, Robert Rodriguez-directed “Dusk Till Dawn” and spent months in the Balkans working on Theo Angelopoulos’ “The Gaze of Ulysses.”

Keitel has played psychotics, degenerates and killers so convincingly that he scares people; Ellen Burstyn, recalling Keitel’s performance in “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” said that he “terrified” her. His performance in Abel Ferrara’s “Bad Lieutenant,” with all its moral squalor and Keitel’s obsessive acting style, prompted physical revulsion among some audiences. Likewise, his doomed gangster in Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs.”

But the focus he brings to his work seems to abandon him when he has to play himself. It has made him a notoriously elusive interview. And it’s commonly accepted that he doesn’t care for the process.

“Ahhh, I don’t know how that gets around like that, y’know,” Keitel says. “I feel it’s important to do interviews. How else do we pass on information on our work but through interviews? Through the writings? Through the drawings? I mean, I’m not in favor of indiscriminate interviews and that, but I am in favor of the interview. I’ve learned a lot through interviews of other people who came before me and I hope I can pass on some information to the inquiries of people coming after me.”

Sitting outside Bubby’s on a sunny New York afternoon, Keitel most closely resembles his character Augie in “Smoke” and “Blue in the Face.” Friendly/serious, he’s also solicitous of the writer and photographer, whom he perceives as guests (“Is it too noisy here? We could move . . .”). He relocates the sugar dispenser to keep the yellow jackets away and engages in a brief but affectionate nonsense conversation with the owners’ 2-year-old son, Aidan.

“Ah hahhahah. Hoooo!!!” Keitel says, chucking him under the chin. ‘You remember me?’ He has the cutest face look at him . . . he always smiles when I do that.”

He wanted to do the interview here, where his privacy is respected. It’s comfortable enough and, besides, Harvey Keitel is home. He’s lived in the neighborhood for 15 years, and when asked why, seems taken aback.

“I don’t know. Let’s look around. Whattya think? A lot of light? Yes, well there’s also a lot of life. A lot of children. They’re building a theater, there’s a theater around the corner, there’s the Tribeca Film Center, it’s a very developing area and it’s still very laid back--meaning you can come down and sit outside in your thongs as I’m doing and just relax. It’s a relaxing place.”

Whether Keitel is capable of relaxing is another story. Perhaps at night, when he finally sheds the characters that his Actors Studio training leads him to absorb and become.

In interviews, he edits himself preemptively, relentlessly, wanting to give the right answer, the artist’s answer. As a result, he leads himself down Byzantine syntactical and philosophical mazes.

He’s asked about Rocco, the detective he plays in “Clockers,” which was adapted by Richard Price from his novel. Rocco, in many ways, is an actor himself.

Isn’t he?

“I’m just thinking for a second,” he says after a pause. “Because I have to divide the elements up in my own mind. I’ve heard it said about detectives by detectives that they’re great actors, that by the nature of their profession they have to be. To get information, you often have to put on a pretty good show. And the ones that are great detectives are in a sense great actors.

“On the other hand, one of the aspects that attracted me so much to the film was the issue of self-righteousness. You put those two elements together--his acting and his hiding from himself. I’m sort of dividing him up a bit to make sure we differentiate between the aspects of the personality that Richard Price wrote, i.e. anyone who stops the adventure of finding out about who he is can lapse into self-righteousness.

“Self-righteousness is a disease that can kill, and does, in the story Richard Price wrote. The self-righteous aspect of Rocco is the same in all of us: It can blind us to other realities. I always felt that Richard Price was sending up a warning flag in the form of Rocco, saying, ‘Beware of becoming self-righteous, beware of thinking you know everything, beware of that moment when you stop your discovery because you can lapse into self-righteousness.’ And in ‘Clockers,’ a young boy’s life is destroyed because of this self-righteous aspect of Rocco’s personality.”

Like most great actors, Harvey Keitel has trouble being Harvey Keitel--at least with a stranger, and especially a stranger asking questions. His intensity--a word that never escapes mention when the actor is being profiled--is not limited to the screen, not limited to the performance. He communicates a sense of considerable physical power, from the engorged veins that track along his forearms, to his face, which is a landscape of trouble. He is, like his neighborhood, battered but somehow beautiful, settled but edgy, and in a continuing process of redefinition.

B orn and raised in Brooklyn, Keitel was the son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who operated a local luncheonette. The mention of Brooklyn--which is so important to “Clockers” and “Smoke/Blue in the Face”--makes him smile.

In the Wang-Auster films, Keitel plays the manager of a cigar store, a local hangout full of local characters. But he dismisses the idea that he has based anything on his parents.

“No, no,” he waves the question away. “There were a lot of memories evoked, sure. I take everything I am with me, of course, into that shop. I mean, it was great being in Brooklyn. The guys were hanging out on that bar on the corner . . . watching us film. One guy had a great line. We were doing this scene and we had to repeat it about five times, and one of these guys--it was like a Friday night and they were all drinking and cheering, shouting and screaming and one hollered out, ‘If I drove my bus the wrong way five times I’d be fired.’ It was the funniest line uttered the whole time.”

After a hitch in the Marines and eight years spent working as a court stenographer, Keitel was bitten by the acting bug. He began studying with the celebrated Frank Corsaro (later mentors included Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler) and made his stage debut at the Cherry Lane Theater in a 1965 production of Sam Shepard’s “Up to Thursday.”

His film career was born when he answered an ad for amateur actors and was cast in Scorsese’s NYU grad film “Who’s That Knocking at My Door?” This led to his breakout role in the director’s “Mean Streets,” in which he made a splash. Keitel played one of the first of his many violent, abusive characters in Scorsese’s “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” and was Jodie Foster’s pimp in “Taxi Driver.” It was a winning streak that ended when he appeared in the dubious “Mother, Jugs & Speed” (with Bill Cosby and Raquel Welch) and then, after refusing to sign a seven-year contract with Francis Ford Coppola, was replaced in the lead role in “Apocalypse Now” by Martin Sheen.

In recent years--starting, probably, in 1988, with his portrayal of Judas in Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ”--Keitel has been on what’s generally considered a roll. There were several misfires--”The Two Jakes,” “Two Evil Eyes” and “Mortal Thoughts”--but then came a run that included “Thelma & Louise,” “Bugsy” (and an Oscar nomination), “Reservoir Dogs,” “Bad Lieutenant,” “The Piano” and “Pulp Fiction.” Daring films, often for young, first-time directors who have benefited from the Keitel association. And a heated pace of work by the always-busy actor.

Has Harvey Keitel caught up with the times, or have they caught up with him? “I can’t answer that question in its entirety,” he says. “What I can speak to, I’d say I don’t think so. I think it’s me that came around. By that I mean, I came around to a deeper understanding of myself, the work, myself and the work, the work and me. We call it evolving. So I think everything has been timely for me. I don’t think I was overlooked. I think I was looked at and the reaction was the correct one. I don’t think I was given--What do you call it?--short shrift.”

The average guy, Keitel says, “works a lot more days and hours than I do. Certainly, I have a good job.”

Eventually he asks that the photographer stop taking pictures. At no time has he actually looked at the camera; he refuses to, defiantly, protectively. It’s similar to the way in which he refuses to interpret his own work, or even suggest how an audience might.

“My focus is really on the work,” he says. “How that work is viewed is up to the people viewing it. I don’t think of myself in those terms. As an individual, I’m always trying to understand myself, what my fears are, what my strengths are, what questions I have to ask about life. What are the mysteries that motivate me. . . . I’d be less than candid if I didn’t say that I try to understand what I’m brave about and what I’m not brave about as a way to achieve a sense of identity and self-worth.”

It’s suggested that perhaps he views his work as something so delicate that it could be diminished by over-analysis.

“No, no, I analyze it deeply,” he answers. “It’s just not for discussion. . . . It’s like walking into your own confessional. You don’t share it with everybody; you share it with a person who’s approaching you in a religious way.

“I look at it like the Indians not wanting to take a picture, ‘cause they were afraid you might be taking something from their soul? Well, there might be something in that. . . . There might be something I’m giving up if I pose for a picture. I don’t feel right about it.”

So film is different, because the guy on screen isn’t him?

“On film, I’m not posing. I’m telling a story, and telling it to the dictates of my conscience and my ability. I’m not posing. I’m living it.”