John Cassavetes: The Art of Narrative

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (Directed by John Cassavetes)

John Cassavetes was resolutely independent, and found it impossible to deal with commercial conventions and Hollywood expectations, choosing to focus on the intricacies and complications of human relationships. He created characters who were driven toward conflict with their friends, lovers, family, colleagues, and themselves, a conflict rooted in their desires and struggles for freedom and love.

Because of Cassavetes' creative brilliance, his actors became indistinct from the characters he created. By providing the necessary circumstances for his actors to "breathe life" to the characters they were portraying, Cassavetes opened up new avenues of vision for his movies. He argued that "stylistic unity drains the humanity out of a text,” while “the stories of many different and potentially inarticulate people are more interesting than a contrived narrative that exists only in one articulate man’s imagination." The distinct characters featured in the movies directed by Cassavetes are among the most memorable in all of world cinema.

Cassavetes was formidable in his investigation of the range and mystery of human emotion, the structure and performative nature of subjectivity and the ways we relate to each other. The complexity of personalities that come to the fore in Cassavetes’s films imbues them with a startling realism that confronts traditional narrative structure to portray the underlying complications of life itself.

The most psychically and aesthetically tormented of the films he wrote and directed, John Cassavetes' The Killing of a Chinese Bookie is a work that is painfully at odds with its own identity as a crime film, while also portraying a central character who is a fractured mirror version of Cassavetes himself. Whether it was his contempt for the material, which started out as an attempt to produce an entertaining genre piece, the hasty pre-production, or the strength of his preoccupation with and admiration for actors and artists, at whatever level, Cassavetes' vision for Chinese Bookie started to collapse almost straight after shooting started. His instinctive drive toward cinematic expressionism—to create profoundly insular artistic realms in which time and traditional story lines cease to exist —destabilized the carefully crafted script, as did the rushed post-production, that resulted in a film that ultimately failed to live up to Cassavetes’ intention of delivering a straight, uncomplicated gangster story. Indeed, Cassavetes was painfully accurate in his assessment of his artistic proclivities when he said that "If I created a gangster picture, I would have to make it pure entertainment, since that is what we demand from that particular genre, which is a distinct American art form. I'm not sure I'm capable of pure entertainment.”

The tensions growing throughout his career of impressively strong independent films (Shadows, Husbands, A Woman Under the Influence) could no longer be sustained during the conception and production of Chinese Bookie. These opposing forces—the desire to please financiers and audiences with uncomplicated genre entertainments against the desire to make complex and performance-driven character studies, with the latter eschewing the tropes of sex and violence that the former would require—collided and could not be worked around, destroying Cassavetes' original plan for the film and transforming it into something altogether strange, mesmerising and different.

And yet, because of its very chaos, Bookie is a masterpiece. With its gaudy, improvisatory story of a performer attempting to please his audience, but caught up in the mess of his own desires, while he hurtles out of control through a story that he cannot control, the world of both Cosmo and his creator John Cassavetes, fuse into a living, breathing testament to the nobility of artistic endeavour itself.

The following essay by Philip Lopate examines the theme of narrative and personality in one of Cassavetes’s greatest and brilliant films, ‘The Killing of a Chinese Bookie’ from 1976.

In John Cassavetes’s personal cinema, the director was always trying to break away from the formulas of Hollywood narrative, in order to uncover some fugitive truth about the way people behave. At the same time, he took seriously his responsibilities as a form-giving artist, starting with a careful script (however improvised in appearance). Nowhere was the tension between Cassavetes’s linear and digressive, driven and entropic tendencies more sharply fought out than in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), one of his most fascinating achievements.

Following up his success with A Woman Under the Influence, the director thought it might be interesting to try a gangster picture to stretch himself, in effect by exchanging the domestic suburbia of quarreling married couples for a more raffish milieu, and meeting the audience halfway with some traditional Hollywood entertainment values associated with the genre: suspense, murder, double crosses, topless dancers. An amiable, courtly nightclub owner, Cosmo Vitelli (Ben Gazzara), already in debt to loan sharks, indulges his unfortunate weakness for drinking and gambling, and ends up owing twenty-three thousand dollars to gangsters, who demand that he pay off the debt by executing a competitor of theirs, a mob boss whom they inaccurately describe as a Chinese bookie. The story obeys the step-by-step fatalism of an unfolding nightmare, whereby small mistakes and temptations lead to deeper consequences, such as can be found in classic film noirs with Edward G. Robinson, Glenn Ford, and Jean Gabin. Looked at purely as narrative, there is surprisingly little waste in the script: each scene advances and intensifies the central dramatic situation. Cassavetes even fulfills the genre contract with action sequences (rare for him) that involve shootings, chases, and sinister, underlit garages, perhaps drawing on his own experience as an actor in crime movies. On the other hand, the film’s enduring power comes across most in subtle details of setting and character that play against, or in inertial counterpoint to, these obligatory propulsive scenes.

Cosmo’s strip club, the Crazy Horse West, functions as a viscous flypaper to which the film keeps attaching itself, where time dawdles and dilates in a constant night. (Cassavetes insisted these nightclub scenes be shot through gels, which created stylized pools of isolating red or blue light for the owner-impresario to walk through.) Cosmo has gilded his tawdry peep show with a series of fantasy backdrops, all introduced by the dumpy, epicene master of ceremonies, Teddy, professionally known as Mr. Sophistication, who “takes” the audience to exotic locales. Unforgettably portrayed by the Hollywood screenwriter Meade Roberts, Mr. Sophistication belongs to that tribe Dostoy­evsky called “the insulted and the injured.” He oozes affronted, buffoonish humiliation. But he also epitomizes the needy, oversensitive artist – a self-parody by Cassavetes – who is hungry for the spotlight but believes himself fundamentally homely and unloved. Teddy’s theme song, “Imagination,” becomes the film’s bleak anthem.

At bottom, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie is a character study of its grinning, self-estranged protagonist, Cosmo, a small-time, rough-around-the-edges businessman trying to maintain an invented persona of Mr. Lucky suavity and charm. The corsages he brings each of his “lovely ladies” – rounding them up as escorts to the gambling joint Ship Ahoy, where they will be forced to witness his defeat – are the perfect expression of his self-conscious, formal punctilio and hunger for class. Gazzara turns in a brilliant performance as the unhappy Cosmo. (That Gazzara was unhappy himself through much of the shooting, finding it hard to sympathize with or admire his character, only reinforces our sense of Cosmo as discomfited with his chump role in life.) Cosmo seems always to be sniffing himself for something rancid or fraudulent. Trying to live up to an elegant standard of sophistication, he mutes his Sicilian street temper with a false veneer of politeness and seductive blather. In a long, revealing speech near the end, he admits that he is always betraying his real nature: “Look at me—I’m only happy when I’m angry, when I’m sad, when I can play the fool, when I can be what people want me to be, rather than be myself.” Ironically, he utters this false confession as a way to motivate the troupe to get back onstage and give the customers what they want – saying, “Choose a personality,” or in other words, Fake it for me. Even at his most sincere, he’s calculating, and even at his most calculating, he is lost, unable to decide what he is undergoing or who he is. One moment he says, “I’ve never felt better in my life”; the next moment it’s “I don’t feel too hot” (no surprise, since he has a bullet lodged in his gut).

Cassavetes clearly believed the self to be a constant bluff, a desperate improvisation launched in heavy fog. He told an interviewer: “People don’t know what they are doing, myself included. They don’t know what they want or feel. It’s only in the movies that they know what their problems are and have game plans for dealing with them.” The closest thing Cosmo has to a game plan is: the show must go on. In one hilarious scene, en route to his prospective hit job, he stops in a phone booth to check up on the evening’s performance: what number are the girls and Teddy doing? He berates his help for not knowing the acts better after all these years. At bottom he is a man of the theater, at its most Felliniesque and flea-bitten. He understands two things: “I own this joint” and “Everything takes work; we’ll straighten it out.” You do your job the best you can, even if it’s just shaking your tits onstage in the no-win ­situation life hands you. It is this sort of philosophical stoicism that informs much of the nobility in Cassavetes’s grubby universe.

The plot’s biggest gamble is to make Cosmo, this likable if screwed-up schnook, actually go through with the killing. Is it plausible that someone so seemingly decent would do such a thing? We don’t know, any more than we know enough about his past to say with certainty whether it’s even the first time he’s killed someone. But if we accept Cassavetes’s model of the self as constantly in flux – provisional, unknowable, yet susceptible to the immediate claims of duty – then we may be better able to make the leap and accept the possibility.

Cosmo’s counterpart in the gangster world is Mort, shrewdly played by that superb Cassavetes regular Seymour Cassel. Morty is another character with a false self, a smiling company man hiding behind an oddly decorous manner; “Will you excuse me please? I have to freshen up,” he says to his dinner companions before ordering another rubout. Not everyone surrounding Cosmo is as empty and amoral, however. Rachel (Azizi Johari), the beautiful showgirl who is Cosmo’s lover, and her mother, Betty (Virginia Carrington), offer him an alternative of tender care. So it is all the more startling when, in a powerful scene toward the end, Betty interrupts his monologue of childhood reminiscence and sweet talk to tell him she doesn’t give a shit. “Cosmo, I think what happened was wrong,” she says, rising to full moral stature, and adds that if he won’t see a doctor to have the bullet removed, then he can’t stay in their house. Without wanting to know how he came by that bullet, she indicates to him that he represents a danger to her and her daughter, and she has an obligation to protect her family. Thus his fantasy that this black mother and daughter are his true “family” crumbles, and he retreats to the club, his only haven. So might Tony Soprano later lick his wounds in the Bada Bing! club.

In 1976, when The Killing of a Chinese Bookie was first released, it bombed at the box office, much to Cassavetes’s disappointment. Critics found it disorganized, self-indulgent, and unfathomable; audiences took their word for it and stayed away. Today, the film seems a model of narrative clarity and lucidity; either our eyes have caught up to Cassavetes or the reigning aesthetic has evolved steadily in the direction of his personal cinematic style. Now we are more accustomed to hanging out and listening in on the comic banality of low-life small talk; to a semidocumentary, handheld-camera, ambient-sound approach; to morally divided or not entirely sympathetic characters, dollops of “dead time,” and subversions of traditional genre expectations.

The film, seen today, generates considerable suspense, part of which comes from classic man-against-the-mob conventions: seeing how the noose of fate is tightened. Part of it, however, comes from Cassavetes’s perverse reluctance to play the game of simple entertainment, offering more complex rewards instead. An example is the scene where Cosmo stops off at a hamburger restaurant to pick up some meat with which to placate the guard dogs before murdering their owner. The waitress, a well-intentioned, matronly blonde, tries to convince her customer to take the burgers individually wrapped, so they won’t make a greasy mess. Cosmo obviously cannot share with her the real reason why he refuses this amenity and is reduced to repeating his request, with mounting frustration, while the bartender acts as a sympathetic bridge between the two. Classic gangster movies or film noirs often feature sharply etched cameos of garage attendants, hotel clerks, or hash slingers, but generally they perform a strict narrative function and then disappear. In this scene, however, the waitress goes beyond that point, threatening to pull you out of the hit-man narrative by insisting on her reality. Cosmo, looking tired and aggrieved, is being forced to acknowledge that every human has a distinct point of view – something he will again have to take into consideration soon enough, when he faces the old Chinese bookie, naked in the bathtub, before deciding whether to blow him away.

In Cassavetes’s cinema, these delays, these eruptions of the messy, frustrating, time-consuming, and inconvenient ways that everyone, bit player to star, asserts his or her right to be taken seriously, are not impediments to the plot but are the plot. This point is made clearer in the original, more leisurely (and, to my mind, better) version of the film, which lasted 135 minutes, as opposed to the second, tightened version of 108 minutes. In the longer version, we learn more odd details about the De Lovelies (the one who doesn’t like champagne, for instance) and get an introduction to the Seymour Cassel character at his most unctuously ingratiating. We are allowed to sink into the moment voluptuously, to see more stage routines in the nightclub, which reinforces Teddy’s/Mr. Sophistication’s role as Cosmo’s grotesque doppelgänger and makes for a better balance between crime and showbiz film. The shorter version is in some ways tougher, colder, more abstract, like a French policier; in the longer, exploratory version, Cosmo takes a while to seem completely lost, alienated. Both versions, however, end in the same ironic way, with Teddy mistaking his padrone’s philosophical spiel as proof that Cosmo “practices the best thing there is in this world – to be comfortable.” Cosmo goes off we know not where, bleeding, possibly to death, and we never see him again. The focus shifts back for the final time to the nightclub, where Teddy sings a despicably hostile rendition of “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love” to the audience (and, by extension, to us), and the last line heard in the film is a chorus girl reassuring Mr. Sophistication that they really do love him, even if he thinks they don’t. We could say the same to the now departed Mr. Cassavetes.

– Phillip Lopate: ‘The Killing of a Chinese Bookie: The Raw and the Cooked’. Courtesy of www.criterion.com 

John Cassavetes: On the Making of Husbands

Husbands (Directed by John Cassavetes)

Subtitled a ‘comedy about life, death and freedom’ John Cassavetes’ extraordinary drama Husbands tells the story of three suburban family men who react to a friend’s premature death by embarking on an extended binge, initially in New York and then London. Cassavetes conceived the film as a showcase for the acting talents of himself, Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara, basing the story around incidents from his own life and writing the dialogue after extended improvising with Gazzara and Falk. In the actors’ fully realized performances – replete with emotional outbursts and boisterous clowning – these long-suppressed characters’ identities break out in a provocative and uncompromising journey into the psyche of the American male. Cassavetes focuses on the complex emotions and relationships that constrain individual freedom, exposing the confusion and chaos that underlies the yearnings of the American dream. In the words of the film critic Geoff Andrew Husbands is ‘a marvellous example of [Cassavetes’] methods. With its ultra-naturalistic performances, its simple, meandering narrative and its long takes, it makes for a warts-and-all study of male pride, self-pity, frustration and friendship that is at once properly serious and sharply funny.’

Here is an edited extract from an interview John Cassavetes gave at the time of the film’s original release. The full version can be found in Raymond Carney’s Cassavetes on Cassavetes:

Before Husbands was a screenplay, I must have done about 400 pages of notes. I thought about it for several years. Then there was a screenplay. My first draft was abominable – all the pitfalls of that first-told tale – a slick farce predicated on men running away from their wives to the lure of the will. There are certain catchphrases that people are attracted to made famous by Time magazine, such as ‘Swinging London’ – and there‘s always someone standing around behind you who says, ‘That sounds funny,’ but when you look into the eyes of two artists who want the best for themselves and want to be associated with something that has some meaning that’s not good enough. The characters were empty. During the second half of 1968, Ben, Peter and I passed dozens of revisions of the script around everywhere we went. From Rome [where Cassavetes was acting in Machine Gun McCain] we had been to Las Vegas, New York, San Francisco [where the exteriors for Machine Gun McCain were filmed], Los Angeles and back to New York [where Gazzara lived and Cassavetes was supervising the release of Faces]. We had followed each other around using every spare moment we could find to assess the values of three men - three New Yorkers with jobs, who had passed the plateau of youth, who were married and happy and living in Port Washington, Long Island, the commuters’ paradise. That’s as far as we got in one year. Long conversations until five o’clock in the morning. Back and forth the story went.

Cassavetes’ method was to discover what a film was about in the process of writing, rehearsing and filming it and to follow those discoveries wherever they led.

The characters in Husbands are quite different from those in Faces. I mean Faces was about people who were just getting by. These guys don’t want to just get by in life. They want to live. I don’t really know what Husbands is about at this point. You could say it’s about three married guys who want something for themselves. They don’t know what they want, but they get scared when their best friend dies. Or you could say it is about three men that are in search of love and don’t know how to attain it. Or you could say it is about a person of sentiment. Every scene in the picture will be our opinions about sentiment. I try to talk to the actors and try to find out what I really think about sentiment. It may turn harsh or bitter; but I can allow anything as long as I know we are honest. We worked with no story, basically no story except what I mentioned, and worked for a year to try to solve it and to gain, to get something out of it.

When you make a film whose interest is to take an extremely difficult subject, deal with it in depth and see if you can find something in yourself, and if other people can find other things within themselves that they will be able to develop in their personal life, it’s great. After being an actor for a few years you really don’t care about money, fame or glory anymore; those things are good, but you need something more.

Cassavetes’ elusiveness about the subject of his film was neither modesty nor coyness. He believed that to lock himself into a predetermined story or a preconceived conception of his characters’ identities was too limiting. To play a ‘character’ in a ‘narrative’ was to reduce the sliding, shifting complexity of life to cartoon clichés.

Each moment was found as we went along – not off the cuff, not without reason – but without a preconceived notion that forbids people from behaving like people and tells a ‘story’ that is predictable – and untrue. I hate knowing my theme and my story before I really start. I like to discover it as I work. In Husbands the off-the-set relationship between Gazzara, Falk and myself determined a lot of the scenes we created as we went along. It was a process of discovering the story and the theme. When you know in advance what the story is going to be, it gets boring really fast. At one point we decided that we weren’t even going to shoot in London; Peter broke into laughter and so did I. What a terrific thrill to tell the truth – to not protect some stupid idea that doesn’t work. From then on, it didn’t matter if it was London, Paris, Hamburg – or Duluth!

I believe that if an actor creates a character out of his emotions and experiences, he should do with that character what he wants. If what he is doing comes out of that, then it has to be meaningful. If Peter and Ben and I have three characters, why should a director come in and impose a fourth will? If the feelings are true and the relationship is pure, the story will come out of that. If you don’t have a script, you don’t have a commitment to just saying lines. If you don’t have a script, then you take the essence of what you really feel and say that. You can behave more as yourself than you would ordinarily with someone else’s lines. Most directors make a big mystery of their work; they tell you about your character and your responsibility to the overall thing. Bullshit. With people like Ben and Peter you don’t give directions. You give freedom and ideas.

Cassavetes and his actors couldn’t say where they were going to come out in advance because the actors were on a voyage of exploration. Acting was not about pretending to be something but about discovering what you really were. The feelings in the film were not poses but states of real emotional exposure. You were really to listen, think and react.

An actor can’t suddenly deny or reject a part of himself under the pretext of playing a particular character, even if that’s what he would like to do. You can’t ask someone to forget themselves and become another person. If you were asked to play Napoleon in a picture, for example, you can’t really have his emotions and thoughts, only yours. You could never actually be Napoleon, only yourself playing him. I’ve never wanted to play a role. Honestly, I never have! That indicates to me that you want to step forward and show someone something, and that terrifies me, really. What you want to do is be invisible as that character, so that there’s no pressure on you worrying about the outside world.

Cassavetes was committed to exploring the truth about these men and their feelings, wherever it might lead.

Husbands depicts the American man without any camouflage. It’s very difficult for some people to feel, or to see themselves in a bad form. I think that people in films are expected to be heroes, even with the anti-hero situation going on for years and years in literature. People expect too much from themselves, they want to look great. You know what actors are? They’re ‘professional people.’ They get paid for being people. If you don’t have any weaknesses, you’d be a superhero! [I try to have] the actors try not to be better than they are. The strange thing is that in this way they reveal themselves as human beings.

The goal was to explore emotional realities, however ugly, embarrassing, or painful they might be:

The job that has to be done here is for three men to investigate themselves – honestly, without suppression. It’s very difficult for someone to reveal themselves. It’s very difficult to say what you really mean, because what you really mean is painful. I can’t help being like most everybody else sometimes, pushing down what I feel so far that even when I hear my own feelings described, it sounds alien, foreign, unconnected. The most terrifying thing for me is to face myself utterly and truthfully. While working on [Husbands], I was forced to ask myself questions I never asked myself before. Ben and Peter had to do the same thing. We had to open ourselves up and look at ourselves, and we all have hang-ups. Is it really better to be a man-child or to be a man? I don’t know. The minute you settle down and say, ‘That’s it. I’m closing shop. I know what I am,’ then you’re a man, no longer a man-child. And none of us are really all that open, and we’re a little defensive. So the three of us would sit down and talk and improvise and give ourselves a problem by putting ourselves in a real situation and trying to find out the honest answers. And I’d write the scene, and rewrite, and we’d improvise again. Every actor – every good actor – does this or tries to do this with every part he plays. What we have given to the film as actors has been what we are. Where we have failed is when we couldn’t reach ourselves and the essence of what we really feel, or we were too shy or inhibited to let it out.

The only thing that counts is that you’re all doing the same thing, you’re testing each other, testing yourself. In that situation each actor is thinking, ‘How far up can I reach?’ That’s selfish – and honest. I don’t think Peter and Benny were too concerned about how far I could go as a director; they were thinking about how far they could go as actors. And, in a realistic sense, Benny couldn’t go any place unless Peter was good and unless I was good. So we knew we had to work on that level, and in order to do that, we had to get tight with each other.

As it did in Faces, Cassavetes’ references to ‘improvisation’ in post-release interviews created misunderstandings about his working methods. It is clear that, for him, improvisation was a way of refining a script – not of doing without it:

I think you have to define what improvisation does – not what it is. Improvisation to me means that there is a characteristic spontaneity in the work which makes it appear not to have been planned. I write a very tight script, and from there on in I allow the actors to interpret it the way they wish. But once they choose their way, then I’m extremely disciplined – and they must also be extremely disciplined about their own interpretations. There’s a difference between ad-libbing and improvising, and there’s a difference between not knowing what to do and just saying something. [I believe in] improvising on the basis of the written work, and not on undisciplined creativity. When you have an important scene, you want it written; but there are still times when you want things just to happen.

Illustrations of how Cassavetes worked. Here he is planning and directing the scene involving Harry, his wife, and his mother-in-law:

I realized in making the picture, that it was more difficult dealing with three guys and what three guys wanted, than it was dealing with one guy and what he wanted. I was constantly aware of the structural problems. One of us had a turn, and then another, and then another. Somehow the picture had to start taking over so that nobody had any more turns. What is happening evolves out of the action, but there is no specific importance to individual incidents. This scene with Ben evolved because we knew that people would say, ‘Gee, you never saw one wife.’ That just kept ringing in my mind. I didn’t want people to approach me on the street and say, ‘Isn’t it wonderful? You never saw a wife in that.’ That’s kind of a nightmare. We decided to show the one wife. To do that we had to come up with some kind of relationship that would be meaningful for the other two guys. We wrote a very quick scene. We got the actors in, and got a stage. It was all very stagy. I knew that it would pay off once he choked the mother-in-law.

On the set:

Ben, you’ll go into the bathroom and start to shave. Your mother-in-law comes in. I don’t know what I’ll do with her, maybe I’ll have her sit on the edge of the tub and watch you. There are three things you have to keep in mind – one, she’s a mother, that’s what she is first of all; two, you like her and she likes you – she’s an intelligent woman and she knows that what’s wrong with the marriage is that you try too hard; three, she’s the enemy and don’t you forget it – because if the marriage breaks up, she’s not going with you.

The scene with the ‘Countess’ was inspired by an extra in the casino scene. Cassavetes’ comments illustrate his willingness to do anything necessary to get a good performance – even to the point of making the actor uncomfortable.

You see that woman sitting there and you’ve got to have her in the scene. So I took that lady and Peter and I wrote a scene [on the spot] and gave it to him. The secretary wrote it out and gave it to Peter and to the lady, and she looked at it. Peter was all right, but how could she catch up? She was just sitting there. She was out of place. She didn’t know what to expect. All the camera crew and everybody else was looking at this woman. What was going to happen? She had a few lines, and she had to, in a sense, be romantic. Sometimes it’s utter and total cruelty to elicit something pretty out of somebody. You have to be cruel to somebody sometimes, but it is only cruel in some kind of a social bullshit way. I mean, we’re all there to get something good. The woman was tight. She didn’t know what was expected of her, and it was too late for her to find out in the course of the filming. I would say terrible things to her, just awful things. She would fight them off like a lady. She reached a point where she could do everything by herself. She was grateful for that attitude of not giving a shit of what anybody else thought, because everything bad had already happened. From there on in, she just started to play. She was herself, which she had to be. Peter played the scene with her. It was very good, and she was very good. I would say things like, ‘Look at that face.’

It’s terrific for Peter to try to pick up that woman. It’s right that he would pick her up, because she is the safest woman in the place. It was very easy for him to talk to her. Peter was all right, because he was really comfortable. He was more comfortable in that scene than in a lot of other scenes, because it was right. The situation was right. He would go over and talk to that woman. She’s a terrific woman.

I’m a great believer in spontaneity, because I think planning is the most destructive thing in the world. Because it kills the human spirit. So does too much discipline, because then you can’t get caught up in the moment, and if you can’t get caught up in the moment, life has no magic. Without the magic, we might as well all give up and admit we’re going to be dead in a few years. We need magic in our lives to take us away from those realities. The hope is that people stay crazy. It’s really no fun to work with sane people, people who have a set way of doing things.

The use of a professional crew presented a host of problems.

The most boring thing in the world is to direct a film, set the camera here, mark the actors, get your focus and light it. The sound should be clear and the shot should be good – [but] professional accuracy seems to me to have nothing to do with content and since the only people in the film that are truly interested in what the film has to say are the actors, it seemed to me the best choice to make an alliance with them rather than the usual alliance with the crew. The director of a film has a tremendous advantage over the actors and there is no way that he won’t use that advantage. He is usually the friend of some 50 odd technicians on the floor and when there is a disagreement between actor and director, the actor is not arguing with one man, but with 51. In front of a crew, I’m always in the position of being in the right and it’s easy to blame the actor and to look hurt. But then I’m only destroying him, turning him into an enemy, destroying his dreams and ours too. If I defend myself I’m only destroying myself and I’ve never liked directors because this is the attitude they take. The problem for me, therefore, was the same problem that most actors face, they are outnumbered – they are pressed into conformity by the schedule, by accepted sociability, by heart-warming good mornings and pleasant good nights, platitudes that take up valuable time, being invited to dinner, cliques of crew that say I like him or I don’t like him; insipid arguments over the content when the scene is good and deathly silence when it’s bad; that feeling that one gets when someone is being shrewd with you and does not want to offend you enough to lose his next job; that getting-behind-you-for-the-moment dialogue revolts the person talking and the person listening at once. It’s amazing the hate I can feel to people who pretend they’re doing it and are not, that are lying, and know they are lying. They’re the ones who insist on behaving in a manner which says: ‘Please don’t reveal or expose me, because I have to live. I’m a person!’ Those are the ones I always feel like saying to: ‘Why don’t you live someplace else, because I don’t want you around!’ I hate people who become stagnant and just go through life and retreat from any kind of creating or loving. For them life is a vacuum and even when they get ideas they are afraid to do anything about it. I don’t really feel sorry for those people. I just hate them. For that reason, the choice of the crew becomes extremely important. They have to understand that what they’re doing – no matter how hard they’re working – is only to help what’s going on in front of the camera. Audiences are not watching the technical processes as hard as they’re watching the actors. If the actors are good, the picture looks good – I mean, the actual photography looks better when the actors are better.

– ‘On the making of Husbands’. Excerpted from Cassavetes on Cassavetes by Raymond Carney.

John Cassavetes: On Writing for Films

A Woman Under the Influence (Directed by John Cassavetes)

As a director, Cassavetes was a genius at portraying domestic issues. For Husbands (1970), Cassavetes assembled a high-profile ensemble. Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara, and Cassavetes himself portrayed a trio of suburban husbands who, reeling from the death of a friend, embark on a spree of drink, escape, and sex that includes a sojourn in London. Husbands was initially panned by critic Pauline Kael as “banal,” but others compared it to the work of Bergman and found episodes of rare power in the largely improvised relations between the three leads.

The moderate success of Husbands enabled Cassavetes to secure a deal to make Minnie and Moskowitz (1971). More optimistic than any of his other films, Minnie and Moskowitz was Cassavetes’s reworking of a screwball comedy. Seymour Cassel played a parking-lot employee who falls for a museum worker (Rowlands), who is recovering from the fallout of a relationship with a married man (Cassavetes).

Funny and infused with a lighter spirit, Cassavetes next project was a return to psychodrama with A Woman Under the Influence (1974), an unrelenting and raw account of a Los Angeles housewife’s mental breakdown. Intended initially as a theatrical vehicle for Rowlands, who balked at the role’s stage demands it was brought to the screen instead by Cassavetes’s Faces International production company. 

Peter Falk was cast as the loutish husband, and Rowlands’s magisterial portrayal of the tormented woman at the heart of the film earned her an Academy Award nomination for best actress. Despite some criticism that Cassavetes had diluted  the power of the performances by allowing some scenes to go on for an extended time, A Woman Under the Influence was Cassavetes’ most successful film to date. Moreover, it earned Cassavetes his only Academy Award nomination for best director. It looked like Cassavetes had taken on the film industry and won: he had found a formula to write and produce deeply personal films on his own terms, while winning praise from the industry which he secretly despised.

The following is an excerpt from a rare interview with John Cassavetes by Nicholas Pasquariello published in The Daily Californian, May 1975, in which he discusses the writing and themes of A Woman Under the Influence which starred Gene Rowlands and Peter Falk. Two years in the making, independently-produced,  financed largely by family and friends, and with an extraordinary performance from Gena Rowlands, it remains one of Cassavetes’ most popular and provocative films. This interview was conducted during the editing of the film.

D.C.: How did you write A Woman Under The Influence?

Cassavetes: When I first start writing, there’s a sense of discovery. In some way it’s not just working, it’s finding some romance in the lives of these people. You get fascinated with their lives. If they stay with you than you want to do something – make it into a movie, put it on in some way. It was that which propelled us to keep on working at it. I wrote it originally as a play for Gena [Rowlands] and then Peter [Falk] read one of the plays and he said he’d like to act the part. I say ‘Why, I mean, the husband’s part is not nearly as good as the woman’s part.‘ He said, ‘Well, I still like it and I’d like to do it.’ So I began with that in mind, knowing who the two central characters are, and wrote a screenplay in about a month, and then revised it.

I have a very funny view on writing for films. It keeps changing, but my current view on writing for films is that dialogue should be tied up so heavily with the incident that you don’t feel dialogue and you don’t feel talk, rather you feel the emotions of the people.

D.C.: How much improvisation was involved in the making of A Woman Under The lnfluence?

Cassavetes: Hardly any. On Faces there was none either. On the first picture I did, Shadows, was all improvised, Faces was not, Husbands was about fifty-fifty, Minnie And Moskowitz was all written and this one was all written.

D.C.: Can you tell me the story of A Woman Under The Influence, as you now see it?

Cassavetes: It’s about a woman, it’s about her husband. The influence is the male, and she’s terribly in love with this man, and she’s crazy. He’s in love with her, and she counts on him. The rest of the story involves their lives, how they resolve the problem of her being crazy and him being sane, and being in love with each other.

You deal with an impossible situation, a woman who is really nuts, who can only function with the deepest love and respect from her mate, and when she has that she functions just admirably fine. When it’s taken away in the slightest form, if the man is human and has a bad mood, the woman goes totally berserk. Ordinarily you just let that woman go and say she’s a pain in the ass. Outside of having sympathy for her, she’d be impossible, but he happens to be in love with her, so strongly that it’s taken two people who absolutely have no right to be together except that they’re in love with each other, and they find a way to work it out through enormous difficulties.

He’s a working man, a guy that lays sewer pipes. He has a gang and they work outside in the fields, and they’re quite happy. She’s a prisoner in her household, not really caring about anything except a love affair that exists between herself and her husband. It’s impossible for him really to cope, to understand fully his need for her. And he has an enormous need for her. Every scene in the picture is dealing with their mothers, their friends, their families. Everything is on a level that he doesn’t understand, he can’t comply with, because he doesn’t think that she has any friends except himself.

People love her, and when she goes insane and comes back from the institution, when she’s so-called cured, no one likes her that way, they want her to be what she was, in a controlled area. He’s the only one that can make it that way, that can make her that way. A Woman Under the Influence really is about all women being crazy, because I believe that’s true (laughter).

D.C.: Don’t you think all men are crazy, too?

Cassavetes: I think they wish they were crazy (laughter). Our [men’s] stakes are not as high, and our weapons are greater. Their [women’s] weapons are sharp and finely honed and steeled, but their problems remain constant. And sometimes they can’t use their weapons, and then they don’t know what to do because they have no way of fighting, and then they go crazy. So, a woman who is absolutely in love with a man cannot in any way compete, because she’s in love with him, and so she’s not in competition with him. But I do believe at the end of the picture that love is possible, not only possible but it’s practical and appealing and not maudlin and quite noble.

Ben Gazzara: Working with John Cassavetes

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (Directed by John Cassavetes)

Ben Gazzara was born August 28, 1930 in New York City, the son of Sicilian immigrants. After studying at The Actor’s Studio, Gazzara established himself on Broadway in the original productions of Cat On a Hot Tin Roof and A Hatful of Rain in 1955. Otto Preminger’s film Anatomy of a Murder made him a star with his powerful portrayal of a murder suspect on trial.

Gazzara’s first collaboration with John Cassavetes was the 1970 drama Husbands in which he co-starred with Cassavetes and Peter Falk as friends who go on an extended binge following the death of a mutual friend. 

Gazzara followed this with his seminal role in Cassavetes' extraordinary The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, playing Cosmo Vitelli, an L.A. nightclub owner in debt to the mob. The Killing of a Chinese Bookie draws from the influences of film noir while Gazzara’s portrayal of a seedy strip club owner,  dedicated to preserving his image of refined, suave gentility in the face of the unsavoury atmosphere he's surrounded by and his own desires, has a striking nobility as he veers towards his own doom and faces the disintegration of his dreams, his tenuous relationships, of his whole world. To save his way of life, Cosmo must commit a terrible crime. Death haunts the film. The killing is of the self, of the very dreams that define a man. Gazzara is extraordinary in the role in a challenging exploration of masculinity.

Gazzara then appeared in Cassavetes’ compelling Opening Night as stage director Manny Victor who struggles with the unstable star of his show played by Cassavetes’ wife Gena Rowlands. 

Gena Rowlands plays an actress who witnesses the death of an ardent teenage fan while in the middle of rehearsals for a show. She thereafter starts to grapple with the drama of her own life. The show is headlined by a dazzling performance by Rowlands, in which John Cassavetes's Opening Night metaphorically illustrates a performer who, for his or her own personal reasons, makes a role her own, and which is a metaphorical representation of the director's highly unique, emotionally fraught creative process. 

Gazzara plays the harassed director, more than a little in love with Rowland’s character, but senses a disaster in having tied his career to hers, while Cassavetes himself plays her leading man and former lover.

Ben Gazzara was interviewed by Alex Simon in 2004 on his work with Cassavetes:

When did you and John first meet? 

Ben Gazzara: We were young actors in New York together. We were friendly, would say ‘hi’ to each other, but we were also rivals, up for the same parts and things, so we never became friends at that point. I was doing this TV series here in LA years later called Run For Your Life, and he was doing a couple pilots over at Universal. I asked him ‘If they both sell, which show are you going to do?’ He said ‘Neither of them. I don’t worry about that stuff. I’m not doing it for the money. I’m doing it for the raw stock and a hand-held camera, because I’m going to shoot a picture up at my house.’ And of course, that was Faces. So, time goes on, and I’m finished with the series, and I saw very little of John, and I’m leaving the studio the day I finished shooting the 86th episode, the final show of my series, and John is driving off the lot. He says ‘Ben, did Marty (Baum, their agent) tell you?’ I said ‘No, tell me what?’ ‘We’re gonna do a picture together!?’ I said ‘Oh, okay.’ I thought, ‘bullshit!’ because you hear that all the time, as an actor. Sure enough, a week later, we go to the old Hamburger Hamlet on the strip, and he tells me I’m going to be the star of Husbands, more or less.

He said ‘I’m going to Europe to shoot this gangster picture (Machine Gun McCain, 1968). I think I can get the money from this Italian producer.’ So I said, ‘okay, sure,’ still not quite believing him. I had to go to Czechoslovakia to do a war picture with George Segal and Robert Vaughn (The Bridge at Remagen, 1969), then the day the Russians moved in, that day in August, I get a call from John: ‘Ben, don’t get killed! I got the money! I got the money to make the picture!’ So I went to London, and we started rehearsing Husbands. That was 1968. And for me, it was like getting out of jail. As a young actor, I was in on the creation of projects. My first plays in New York were written around improvisation, which is what I love. Being on the TV series, sure I was making a lot of money, but I was playing the same guy in the same fuckin’ predictable situations. But here, I was free, able to let it go.

Husbands (Directed by John Cassavetes)

Tell us more about the experience of doing Husbands.

Well, John and I became dear, dear friends. We did a couple films together after that and we would’ve done more.

What was the process like, working with John?

A lot of people had the misconception that John improvised his films, which wasn’t true. We rehearsed for two or three weeks before we shot. Occasionally a scene would be completely improvised, but only occasionally. The rehearsal was in order to give the impression of it happening for the first time, and also for the purpose of rewriting. John loved to rewrite on his feet. He’d just tear things apart, and try six, seven different ways of doing things. So by the time you got on the floor, with the camera present, you were pretty secure with where you were. John’s films were made through his actors. He loved being surprised during rehearsals and wanted you find things within yourself that would even surprise you. He wasn’t afraid of taking any trip you wanted to take. The only thing John hated was if you didn’t try, if you didn’t ‘put it up,’ as he used to say. ‘Put it up!’ So I felt right at home, because that way of working was my idea of joy: where everything is open and everything is possible and nobody can do wrong. There is no wrong. It might not be right, but it ain’t wrong.

Emotionally, John’s films can be very tough to watch. Did they take a toll on you as an actor? 

Only when they were drawing to an end. It was always very tough to say goodbye to the experience, especially on Husbands, because there was a lot going on there. It was about friendship. We became friends, and who knew if we were ever going to see each other again, because most films are ‘I’ll call ya, I’ll call ya, I’ll call ya,’ and nobody ever calls anybody. But John was the glue that really kept my friendship with Peter together. Since John died, Peter and I see each other very infrequently. But when John was alive, we all used to see each other constantly.

He also did that cameo in your film Capone (1975) playing the gangster Johnny Torrio.

Yeah, he did that as a favor, he was so sweet. He walked on the set, did the scene, went back to his office on the lot! For no money! He didn’t get paid for that.

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (Directed by John Cassavetes)

There are many filmmakers now, particularly on the independent scene, who have been highly influenced by John’s work. He’s left a lasting legacy.

I know, isn’t that interesting? When he was making these films, he couldn’t get a dime to make them. And now, every kid in film school is talking about his work. That was the thing about John, a lot of guys could get beaten down by rejection, but ‘no’ didn’t exist for him.

‘That which does not kill you makes you stronger.’ 

That’s right! The major studios didn’t want to do it, fine. He put up his own money. ‘I’ll do it!’ The people at the studios just didn’t get it, didn’t get the stories, didn’t get the characters.

John wasn’t afraid to have characters that weren’t necessarily likeable. Your character in Husbands, for example, was a real son of a bitch on many levels, but you still cared about the guy! 

I know. Well, he was scared, and he was ignorant. John loved that. He used to say ‘I love ignorance.’ What he meant was, the ignorant are ingenuous, but they would vent with such a strong belief. John used to say, I don’t know if he was serious or not, that he was going to make Husbands II, and the opening would be on the Grand Canal in Venice. I would be with a new, young wife, he and Peter would pull up and we’d all meet on motor boats. Wouldn’t that have been a great opening?

Yeah. They probably would’ve been there for a dental convention, right?

(laughs) Yeah, that’s right!

Let’s talk about Cosmo Vitelli, a great character. 

In his heart, in his gut, although he’s an unsophisticated man, he’s really an artist. He lives in his art, his art being this cockamamie strip show he puts on at this seedy fuckin’ joint he owns. That’s his life. And when these gangsters come to take that away, it’s thing he cares about the most. To the point of, in one of my favorite scenes, when he’s on his way to do the hit and could possibly get killed doing it, he stops to call to see how the show is going! To me, that film was a metaphor for John’s life: the never-ending battle against those nuisances who try to keep you from doing your work. (pause) Do you think Cosmo died in the end?

Yeah, absolutely. I think he sat down in front of his club and bled to death, but like a good captain, he stayed with his ship, and in that sense, he won the battle. 

Yeah. And you know something, John and I never talked about that, about whether Cosmo died or not. I never asked him and he never asked me.

But it doesn’t really matter because ultimately, that’s not what the film is about. 

Right.

Opening Night (Directed by John Cassavetes)

Let’s talk about Opening Night.

Again, we have a film about the theater. John’s theater life was very limited. He was the stage manager for a play called The Fifth Season, but I don’t think he ever acted on Broadway. But, obviously his love of the theater and memories of the theater were present here, because it’s a remarkable film. Not only is it about the theater, but it’s about aging. It’s about doing good work and what you have to call on in order to do good work. The work was the thing that was most important to John.

Was it all downhill working with other directors after you had been directed by John? 

I wouldn’t say ‘downhill,’ but it was certainly different. It such a rare and unique experience being in on the creation of an event. It’s rare to find a director with the lack of ego to do that.

- Ben Gazzara from ‘Alex Simon: Remembering John Cassavetes’. Full article here.

The Art of John Cassavetes

The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie (Directed by John Cassavetes

"Cassavetes made things hard to understand. That's why a work of art exists."

Born on December 9th, 1929, in New York City,  John Cassavetes, went to Mohawk College and Colgate University after graduating from high school, then attended the New York Academy of Dramatic Arts before graduating in 1950. After appearances in minor films in the early his first major break was when he landed a part on the long-running television series “Johnny Staccato”.

Cassavetes started his filmmaking career by financing his first picture, Shadows, using the money he had gained through television work. Notable for its improvised acting, street locations, realistic portrayal of New York life, and experimental direction, Shadows was an instant critical success.

Invited to Hollywood to work on higher-budgeted studio pictures both Too Late Blues (released in 1961) and A Child Is Waiting (released in 1962) didn't have the enthusiasm or improvisational energy of Shadows. 

Cassavetes continued to work as a jobbing actor throughout the 1960s. Starring in The Killers (1964), The Dirty Dozen (1967), and Rosemary’s Baby (1968). By 1968, however, Cassavetes had moved back into the director's chair to create films based on his own scripts.

In Faces, the characters' struggles with suburban life continued the style first seen from Shadows, and the writing and photography mirrored the actors' spontaneous performances. However, although some found the unscripted sequences exhausting compared to traditional Hollywood scenes, a lot of others were persuaded by Cassavetes' capabilities to depict more truthful and poignant situations. 

His subsequent movie Husbands, in which he played alongside Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara was a searing, funny, painful semi-improvised account of three best friends grappling with life and death as a result of the death of a close friend.

Though neither Faces nor Husbands were popular with the general moviegoing public, both films were important in helping to pave the way for future Hollywood films to include more film verité techniques.. For the most part, Cassavetes' most successful pictures blend the techniques of the experimental with the commercial. Though the screenplay for A Woman Under the  Influence (1974) was complete, much of the improvised and spontaneous performance of the early Cassavetes films was kept. Starring Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk it delved into the breakdown of a woman's marriage, and delved into her complex emotional state.

The following extract is from a piece by Raymond Carney on Cassavetes’ working methods. 

Cassavetes' insights came from life, not from theory – which is of course the best place to get them. It's the opposite to how most critics function, which is why a critic has to be very, very careful about the conclusions he draws. The films didn't begin as ideas. Shadows didn't begin as a study of “beat drifters” or “race relations.” It was Cassavetes' effort to give voice to the mixed-up feelings he had as a young man (particularly about his relation to his brother). Faces and Husbands didn't originate as analyses of the “male ego” or studies of the frustrations of “suburban life.” They were Cassavetes giving voice to his own personal disillusionments about marriage, middle-age, and his career. They were documentaries of everything he knew and felt at that point in his life – not sorted out into a series of “points” or “critiques” or “views.”

That's actually a fairly unusual way to proceed. La Dolce Vita was released three years before Cassavetes wrote Faces, and has some superficial similarities with it (as well as being referred to in it). I sat through a screening the other night at Harvard and the scenes practically had labels on them. This one was an attack on the idle rich. That one was a critique of on the superficiality of journalists. This other one commented on the vapidity of modern architecture. The majority of films are organized this way. Look at Nashville, Welcome to the Dollhouse, Magnolia, and American Beauty. They have theses. They make points. The characters represent generalized views and ideas – and the critics eat it up! They love abstract movies, since they make their jobs easy. Films that originate in ideas can be translated back into ideas with almost nothing lost in the translation. These films are eminently discussible. You can write an essay about them. Because ideas are abstract. They are simple. They say one thing. They stand still.

Cassavetes' work resists that kind of understanding. Every time we want to lasso a character or a scene with an idea, it scoots away from us. The incredibly detailed behaviors, facial expressions, and tones of voice that comprise his scenes defeat generalizations. The characters in Faces and Husbands are too changeable, too emotionally unresolved to be pigeonholed intellectually. As Cassavetes says in Cassavetes on Cassavetes, they may be bastards one minute but they can be terrific the next. In A Woman Under the Influence just when we're about to decide that Nick Longhetti is a “male chauvinist,” he says or does something kind and thoughtful. Just when we want to turn Mabel into an “oppressed housewife,” she sleeps with another man to show us she is not under the thumb of her husband and has genuine emotional problems. The racial incident at the center of Shadows invites an unwary critic to view the main drama of the film as being about race, but the film's narrative and characterizations subvert the attempt. The racial misunderstanding at the center of the film is largely a device to create other, more interesting, more slippery dramatic problems for them to deal with. The characters are given such individualized emotional structures of feeling that it becomes impossible to treat them generically as racial representatives. We can't factor out their personalities. Character is at the heart of Cassavetes' work, always displacing incident as the center of interest, and the particularity of the characterizations in all of the films prevents us from treating the characters' situations in a depersonalized way, which is what ideological analysis always requires to some extent.

I'm convinced that this aspect of Cassavetes' work is the reason that during his lifetime reviewers wrote off his work as being confused or disorganized. They wanted to be able to label characters and situations, and when they couldn't, decided it was the films' fault. They wanted to be able to stabilize their relationship to an experience by being able to maintain a fixed point of view on it. In Shadows, they wanted to be able to conclude that Lelia and Ben were victims of racial prejudice; in Faces, that the figures were being morally judged; in Husbands, that the three men were being satirized. When the movies defeated such easy relationships to the experiences they presented, the critics wrote them off as muddle-headed, self-indulgent actors' exercises. 

Cassavetes made things hard to understand. That's why a work of art exists. Otherwise, you might as well write an essay about your subject. Real art is never reducible to the sort of moral lessons and sociological platitudes that Spike Lee or Oliver Stone give us or that reviewers and academic critics want. Art speech is a way of experiencing and knowing far, far more complex than the ways journalists, or history, sociology, or film professors think and talk.

- Raymond Carney on John Cassavetes