“Bullitt” is one of the most intense detective movies ever made, anchored by one ofcinema’s greatest car chases.

But when she was making it, Jacqueline Bisset felt far from the action. As Steve McQueen’s love interest, she was in few scenes — this was the late 1960s, early in her career, with international stardom still to come in the 1970s.

She recalls having a lot of downtime, as well as fond memories of hanging out in San Francisco, eating in a lot of “great” restaurants and getting to know the city.

“I lived in Los Angeles and the director, Peter Yates, said he wanted me to get ‘in the groove’ of San Francisco,” the British-born Bisset said during a recent video chat from her home in Southern California. “I really had no idea what that meant. So I took an apartment, and everybody was quite fashionable and so very smart. I rented a car to try and get into the groove ofthatthing — driving on the hills — but I had a stick shift and had a terrible sense I was going to go back down the hill every time I reached the top.”

Bisset and Turner Classic Movies co-hostEddie Muller将回顾“Bullitt”and its impact during theTCM Classic Film Festival, which runs Thursday, May 6, through Sunday, May 9, onTCMandHBO Max. Normally a Hollywood-based event, it is virtual for the second straight year and will also feature live events for fans on Zoom.

Muller would later idolize Bisset after she starred in Francois Truffaut’s “Day for Night,” but he responded to “Bullitt” the way any San Francisco-born kid would at the time.

“I did try to re-create some of the driving scenes,” Muller laughed from his home in Alameda. “I banged the bottom of mom’s car quite a few times on the hills in San Francisco.”

The festival opens with a 60th-anniversary screening of“West Side Story,”an obvious choice given not only the anniversary of the 1961 best picture Oscar winner but also Steven Spielberg’s remake slated for release in December.

Cast membersRita Moreno,a Berkeley resident,George Chakiris and Russ Tamblyn will chat about the film and its place in history as one of the best-loved Hollywood movies with TCM co-host Ben Mankiewicz at 5 p.m. Thursday, May 6, and on demand on HBO Max.

“I’m looking forward to (the remake), and I absolutely totally expect that Steven Spielberg will do something wonderful with it,” Chakiris said during the video chat.

However, Chakiris stressed that the true original was not the 1961 film, but the 1957 Broadway musical, written by Arthur Laurents (based on “Romeo and Juliet”), with music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. And he thinks the key to both was choreographer Jerome Robbins, who directed the play and co-directed the film with Robert Wise.

“We rehearsed at Goldwyn Studios here in Los Angeles — a huge rehearsal space,” recalled Chakiris. “When Jerry arrived, just his presence made a huge difference. I keep going back to him all the time, because of his creativity and perfectionism — and just who he was as a person. He was a perfectionist with all of us, but himself first.”

While both “Bullitt” and “West Side Story” will appear at the festival on both TCM and HBO Max, most of the content on each channel will be different. TCM’s slate is mostly classic Hollywood titles, while HBO Max, which is set to unveil its own TCM Hub, has the more eclectic choices, most of which will be available on the streaming service beyond the festival’s closing night.

HBO Max has a wealth of classic Hollywood content already, including tributes to actors Ali MacGraw, Martin Short and the Bay Area’s ownDanny Glover;and films by and chats with directors in a Masters section — Barbara Kopple, Barry Levinson, Steve McQueen (the director of “12 Years a Slave” and “Small Axe”), Mira Nair and Rob Reiner.

The streaming service also offerscurated collections, such as for theL.A. Rebellion(highlighting Black independent filmmakers of the 1970s like Charles Burnett,Julie Dashand Billy Woodberry), a series on immigrants in America and a section on Hollywood master Howard Hawks’ comedies.

TCM co-host Alicia Malone also noted a healthy slate of films directed by women on both channels. Other than Kopple, Nair and Dash, there’s also an Agnes Varda (“Cleo From 5 to 7”) and films by Chantal Akerman (the 1977 New York-set documentary “News From Home” and the experimental “La chambre”).

“I think Chantal Akerman was ahead of her time in the way she looked at the world — trying different methods of telling a story,” Malone said. “Getting to hear her letters to her mother (in ‘News From Home’) and getting to see New York at that time and the juxtaposition of hearing about her experiences with the footage that you see, it plays to so many emotions of ‘what is home?’ And home seems to be something that Chantal explored quite a bit in her work. It’s mesmerizing.”

TCM Classic Film Festival:Thursday, May 6, through Sunday, May 9, on TCM and HBO Max. For more information, go tofilmfestival.tcm.com.