US star Brad Pitt said it was "great fun" to win the Venice film festival award for best actor for his role in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.
"I could try to play it down, but it's great fun," Pitt said Saturday in Toronto, where thousands of fans packed the streets looking for a glimpse of the actor following the film's North American premiere.
"We all have our jobs (to do) and want to be really good at it, and to have this kind of acknowledgement is a real honor," he said.
PHOT: AP
"The nicest thing is how excited my friends are for me and ... to be amongst the lineage of people that have also been bestowed this honor. It's a really nice honor."
The two-and-a-half-hour saga examines the infamous US outlaw's complex relationship with his admirer turned traitor, during the last year of his life.
Since his death on April 3, 1882, Missouri-born gunslinger Jesse James has become a figure of folklore.
PHOTO: EPA
Being from Missouri himself, Pitt said he drew from the "cadence and the temper of how people relate there," as well as the local dialect, for the role.
"The nice thing for me ... was doing something related to the area where I grew up," he commented.
"Every time I see (Missouri) come up on screen, it quietly gives me a little bit of pleasure. It's just nice for me to have something that has some kind of connection to the place that shaped me."
The Assassination of Jesse James was filmed in western Canada, where Pitt also filmed The Legends of the Fall in 1994.
Also on Saturday, director Bernardo Bertolucci, whose Last Tango in Paris was banned from Italy for 16 years, said he wished he could help his homeland open up a bit more.
The 66-year-old director spoke before he received an honorary award for career achievement at the closing ceremony of the 11-day-long Venice Film Festival. At a news conference, Bertolucci was asked if receiving the honor would make him feel like Italy's ambassador in the world.
"I'd rather be the world's ambassador to Italy. That way, perhaps, I could bring something to this country that struggles a little to open itself up to international experiences," he said.
But "if I were ambassador, I would create diplomatic incidents," Bertolucci said, chuckling. "Thus it is better that I continue as a simple film director." His 1973 film Last Tango in Paris was banned in Italy for obscenity and returned to cinemas here in 1989.
The Last Emperor - Bertolucci's 1987 film about the life of China's last emperor - won nine Oscars, including best director.
In an interview last week, UK director Ken Loach, won the award for Best Screenplay at the Venice film festival for his depiction of the exploitation of immigrants in It's a Free World, thanked the "hundreds and hundreds of workers, legal and illegal," that he met while making the film.
"Listening to their stories, even though I'm an atheist, reminded me of the Biblical passage that says, 'He who defrauds a laborer of his hire is a blood-shedder.'"
In the film, single mother Angie gets sacked from an employment agency and decides to set up one of her own along with her flatmate Rosie.
Set in a down-and-out section of London plagued by gangs and full of job-hungry migrants, the film starts with Angie trying to make a better life for herself with apparent empathy for the workers.
Inexorably, greed catches up with her, and she begins making easy money by giving temporary work to illegal immigrants from countries such as Ukraine, Poland, Afghanistan and Iran.
"Angie's logic is the same logic of every business: get the cheapest labor, maximize your market, and cut every corner you can to make a profit," Loach said.
Loach's The Wind That Shakes the Barley about the Irish independence movement won the Golden Palm at Cannes last year.
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