Did I tell you the story about [director] John Cassavetes?' asks Martin Scorsese. Without pausing for an answer, he begins to spin the tale from nearly four decades ago. 'He and [actor] Seymour Cassell were drinking one night, and they got a little drunk, and they decided it would be funny to go into the cinema downtown on Canal Street [in New York]. The Chinese cinema. They were sitting there watching this film, and apparently it's a kung fu film. It was 1968 or 69, before Bruce Lee. They were so excited that they were whooping and hollering.'
And? 'They were thrown out,' says Scorsese, doubling up with laughter at the thought of two of his best mates, by then major figures in Hollywood, being expelled from a cinema. '[The manager] was like, 'You two, leave, you don't belong here'. And they were going, 'Hey but look at that, this is amazing!' '
Leaning forward in his seat, Scorsese has many more such stories to tell. Today, it's not the Oscar-winning Hollywood player who's talking, but the veteran cinephile who has made film history documentaries such as My Voyage to Italy (1999) and who can regale his audiences with his experiences as an avid filmgoer, such as his memories of watching his first Japanese film on late-night TV (Kenji Mizoguchi's 1953 film, Ugetsu Monogatari) and how Carlos Reygadas' Silent Light - a mesmerising 2007 film set in a Mennonite community in Mexico - presented 'entertainment, but in a different vision'.
And his exposure to Indian culture. 'When I saw Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali [1955] it wasn't about two people in a palace in New Delhi or Calcutta - they were in a forest, they were in a hut, they were sitting on the floor, and these were people. And you begin to hear about this writer Tagore, and all of a sudden you begin to hear this music, and it was like, 'What's this instrument?' It's a sitar, that's Ravi Shankar, and I found the album and bought it. And the next thing you know, Pather Panchali, Aparajito [1956] and The World of Apu [1959] were shown together at Carnegie Hall - 51/2 hours in one go - and I saw all three of them.'
Our meeting - at an empty bar in Cannes' Carlton Hotel on a Saturday afternoon during the city's film festival - has been arranged to allow Scorsese to talk about his work as president of the World Cinema Foundation, an organisation he founded two years ago to advocate and facilitate the preservation, restoration and screening of films from around the world.
The evening before we meet, Scorsese introduced a special festival screening of a new, restored print of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Red Shoes [1948], a film that he said changed how he saw the world when he first watched it as an eight-year-old. An hour after our conversation, he's at the Palais des Festivals again, attending the presentation of Shadi Abdel Salam's 1969 classic The Mummy, being digitally restored under the aegis of Scorsese's foundation.
His story about Cassavetes' Chinatown misadventure reveals how cinema can encourage interaction between different cultures. 'You have to understand that it was so cut and dried back then ... even though we would cross Canal Street and we were in the Chinese section, there was no communication, there's no way of knowing each other,' he says. 'And that changed, and it's through cinema - and the next thing I saw was King Hu's A Touch of Zen [1971], the first Chinese film that I saw.