"We went to one festival. Sundance. That's it. I refused to do any other festival. I could have had Madonna and 50 other Madonna's come to a New York City premiere." But no, said Vincent Gallo. He came to Buffalo to premiere his film, "Buffalo '66" at the North Park Theater on Saturday night.

Nobody talks a more engaging or compelling game of hard-bitten Buffalo chauvinism than Vincent Gallo. Until you actually see his film, he seems, in life, the home-grown Buffalo artist of all our dreams despite his '70s Manhattan migration--a ferocious, blue-collar, independent truth teller from the town that Michael Morgulis immortally dubbed "the city of no illusions." He seems, in life, like the maverick to end all mavericks from a city that has seen more than its share.

He sounds, in fact, like the Ani DiFranco of film and then some--a self-reliant, do-it-yourself proponent of what might be called the Buffalo credo: The B.S. stops here.

Attitude? Lord, yes, but attitude with a mission.

"Buffalo, N.Y. has been so bastardized. It has been so sarcastically stigmatized for the whole f------ country that I felt that if I was going to come to Buffalo, with a 50 percent Buffalo cast and a 50 percent Buffalonian crew, why the f--- am I going to have the premiere in New York like everyone else?

"The deal that I made with the finance company was: Either you have the world premiere in Buffalo, N.Y., or I take my name off the picture, I make sure none of the actors come to the premiere, and I never show up or associate myself with the movie again. Otherwise there would be no way this film would be shown here (for its premiere.) No way. There's no New York City premiere later on. There's no L.A. premiere later on. This is it."

And so it was on Saturday evening.Gallo--his friends call him Vinny--was at Spot Coffee on Deleware Avenue last Friday talking about the premiere a few hours away.

I know Buffalo. I know the sarcastic, self-hating, conniving, vicious city that is run by a couple of people here...Let me assure you that the idea of getting any press (to come to) Buffalo, N.Y., was nonexistent. I would have had to have Winona (Ryder), Madonna, all the people (I know) come here. I could have them come here. But then it's Winona Ryder in Buffalo. Duh-duh-duh-dada-dada. It's Fran McDormand doing "Fargo"--duh-duh-duh-dada-dada.

"I'm interested in my high school classmates, getting them to be proud of me, getting to see how they look now and having my mother and father and my relatives getting to participate in something I did. That's what's important to me."

That explains why he and his co-star Christina Ricci came here to show his film.

The next criminally obvious question: How on earth did he assemble this cast, for such a low-budget film to be made here? Besides Ricci, as promising an actress her age as there is in American film, the film features appearances by Ben Gazarra, Anjelica Huston, Rosanna Arquette, Mickey Rourke and Jan-Michael Vincent.

"I but and sell antiques and collectibles all day long. Million-dollar items all day long. The personalities that I do business with are incredibly pathological. I've worked as an actor, so I've had an agent--I don't anymore--and I've had producers deal with me.

"To me, the business of Hollywood is so transparent that making deals with agents and lawyers and managers and backers and actors themselves is about as challenging as tick-tack-toe to me. It's so transparent that I could engage in these negotiations when I was between takes in the movie."

All was not beer and skittles, though, when it was over. He and Huston, he says, are not speaking.

"Anjelica had the most difficult representation. Her agent, Tony Howard, and her agency, ICM, and her lawyers and everybody involved and herself were different (from the others). They wanted to be in this film. They felt it was good for Anjelica. Yet they were not willing to participate in the sensibility of the film. Outside of the actual script, there is a sensibility to making a lower-budget film, I felt. They made things difficult and asked for things that were inappropriate to ask for from the budget.

"Anjelica is a multimillionaire, so an extra 10K or 20K before taxes means nothing to her. To do a movie, a one-time project, it's a day of shooting. Look at the credits. It's a million-and-a-half-dollar movie. It's not 'Batman' where you say "Jack Nicholson as the Riddler.' It's just part of that bull---- thing that happens in the motion picture industry, which is that it's all about power, ego and money.

"Quite often I felt that I had situations with her representation that became about that, about power, ego and money. There is nothing pleasant about power, ego and money. There was nothing pleasant about that relationship.

"I, more than any person I've ever known in the movie business, have challenged those attitudes. I fought the union so that my director credit would not be controlled by them. They wanted my name at the beginning of the movie. I wanted a movie where the credit sequences in a smarter, classic way...I challenged everybody in the most violent aggressive way I could possibly challenge them to prevent them from diluting my vision. In that process with Anjelica, there was tension. She was phenomenal in the movie, though."

He doesn't like middle figures from the worlds of publicity and journalism, either. In his case, he had some justification with "Buffalo '66". Despite the staunch Buffalo chauvinism of his interviews, the publicist specifically assigned him by Lion's Gate studio expressed surprise that the Village Voice was widely available in Buffalo. She also said that Gallo's girlfriend's name was "Asia Argenta" (rather than Asia Argento. She is the daughter of Italian splatter-film master Dario Argento).

"I have no (regular) publicist because the convoluted relationship between a journalist and a performer or a public figure becomes controlled and manipulated by the people in between--by your editor or by their publicist. So that the basic nature of what you're trying to do is that everybody's self-serving. And everything becomes so convoluted that it's unpredictable."

He has been messed over too many times. For the Gallo piece, for instance, in the current Icon magazine, they used, for the cover, the only photo among all those taken of him that he didn't like.

"I'm the only person working on the level that I'm on--the director/star of a feature film with big stars--who has no agent, no manager, no lawyer and no publicist. You find one person on the planet who's on my level of success who doesn't have those things."

Whatever else Vincent Gallo is, he's his own man.

And "Buffalo '66" is his film--all his and no one elses.