CANNES: Hollywood legends Michael Caine, Harvey Keitel and Jane Fonda on Wednesday premiered one of the most divisive contenders at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the ensemble movie “Youth.”

The three play show-business veterans grappling with the ravages of age in the surreal drama by Oscar-winning Italian director Paolo Sorrentino. At a news conference following a press preview that drew both cheers and boos, the trio traded secrets to their remarkable longevity in an industry notorious for discarding the old.

In the film, Caine plays Fred, a retired composer who meets up on holiday with his old friend Mick (Keitel), a Hollywood filmmaker who is struggling to come up with the death scene finale to a new movie called “Life’s Last Day.”

His career-long muse Brenda (Fonda), who was meant to star in the film, finally backs out of the project telling him he’s washed up and citing a better opportunity in a television series.

“Like everyone else, you’re getting worse with age,” she says.

Fred and Mick sit in the elegant gardens of the Swiss Alpine hotel (where Thomas Mann wrote “The Magic Mountain“) discussing old loves, rivalries and the challenge of keeping creativity alive when life is robbed of its inspirations.

Caine, 82, regaled reporters after the screening with tales from his six-decade-long career and admitted he hadn’t been back to Cannes since starring as the womanizer Alfie in 1966.

“’Alfie’ won a prize and I didn’t so I never came back,” he joked.

Caine laughed off a question about whether he was “sad” to play an aged character, noting that he had won two Academy Awards in the latter part of his career when he was no longer playing romantic leads.

“The only alternative to playing elderly people is playing dead people,” he deadpanned. “So I picked elderly people.”