Paul Schrader: On Bresson’s ‘Pickpocket’

The above video is taken from Paul Schrader’s excellent introduction to the Criterion Collection edition of Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket: ‘the most influential film in my creative life’.

Bresson’s consummate tale of crime and redemption follows Michel, a lonely young pickpocket whose days are spent working the streets, metros and train stations of Paris. His devotion to the art of pickpocketing becomes a compulsion. As his obsession grows he experiences fear, elation, a world of feeling. He takes lessons from a master and works with a criminal gang. This underworld milieux brings him into contact with his interlocutor and confessor, a police detective who resolves to apprehend him.

Schrader draws intriguing parallels between the character of Michel in Pickpocket and Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, tracing Bresson’s film back to Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street (Bresson’s inspiration for the film) and how the idea of a ‘soul in transit’ then became the inspiration for the screenplay of Taxi Driver. 

Schrader first saw Pickpocket in Los Angeles in 1969, ten years after it was made, and wrote a celebrated two-part review which he later refined in his seminal book Transcendental Style in Film. 

Schrader calls Bresson a ‘perverse’ director, in that Bresson’s style works in ways that run counter to traditional narrative filmmaking. Instead of adding elements and flourishes to underscore the story, Bresson strips things away, leaving the audience off-balance, paring the story down to its fundamental aspects. Bresson uses a rigid and austere style to ward off superficial emotional responses, intent instead on creating a ‘transformation’ – from the material to the spiritual realm. For Bresson this transition is key: ‘There must, at a certain moment, be a transformation; if not, there is no art.’ 

John Cassavetes: On Being Independent

Faces (Directed by John Cassavetes)

John Cassavetes’s fourth feature, “Faces,” from 1968, is a classic independent production made before such things were in vogue. He financed the film himself from his paychecks for acting gigs and even with a mortgage on his home; the star is his wife, the actress Gena Rowlands; he filmed in their house and edited in their garage; and when the film was completed, he distributed it himself. Then it received three Oscar nominations (Cassavetes, for Best Original Screenplay, and the film’s co-stars, Lynn Carlin and Seymour Cassel, for Best Supporting Actress and Actor). Even more important than its acclaim is its artistry: “Faces” is the core of Cassavetes’s work. He started his career as an independent, with “Shadows” (1959), which he financed with a precursor to Kickstarter, an appeal on a radio show. He then directed two Hollywood features, “Too Late Blues” and “A Child Is Waiting,” and chafed under studio restrictions. The freedom with which he made “Faces” bore aesthetic fruit. With this story of marriage on the rocks and the desperate quest for love, Cassavetes conjured an air of tragic exuberance that’s as original as it is thrilling. The liberated actors blend impulsive comedy, intense physicality, and agonized tenderness; the spontaneous camera work offers soul-baring closeups and sculptural compositions. With its unsparing confessional drama, “Faces” set the themes, the moods, and the styles for the rest of his career. It also inaugurated a new era in the history of cinema, opening possibilities that most directors have yet to confront or even admit.

– Richard Brody

In the following extract John Cassavetes discusses his approach to independent filmmaking.

It’s hard to explain what ‘independence’ means – but to those who have it, film is still a mystery, not a way out. There are other independents, of course, but they haven’t really hit the limelight yet, so not enough is at stake. To still do what you want after ten years, twenty years, is some- thing. I’ve known a lot of filmmakers who started out with enormous talents and lost momentum. I don’t say they’re selling out, but somehow if you fight the system you’re going to lose to it. That is basically the point. I don’t care whether you’re a painter or an architect, you can’t fight the system. In my mind, if you fight the system it only means you want to join it. So it is very important that you do something you like, that you’re involved in enough to hold your interest no matter how long it takes. If the film doesn’t involve you, it’s what we call a ‘stepping- stone’ picture, you know, a stepping-stone to art, and that’s all right too. Take a guy like Polanski who did pictures in Poland, Knife in the Water and later Repulsion. You could see in those works a pulse that was meaningful and creative and intense. You can’t dispute the fact that he’s an artist, but yet you have to say that Rosemary’s Baby is not art. It is a dictated design – boom, boom, boom, boom. People are used within that design to make a commercial product to sell to people. I’m not saying that is bad. I was in it. I’m fine. I’m happy. But it isn’t art. I think Dirty Dozen in its way is more artistic because it’s compulsively going forward, trying to make something out of the moment without preordaining the way the outcome is going to be.

The real tragedy is that other poor young filmmakers are coming along who will go out and conform before they’ve even opened their mouths. This whole culture – there is only one art in America, and that’s money. Raising money, and business. That’s what everyone is interested in: screwing somebody and making profit. We went to the Pratt Institute the other night and one of the kids said, ‘16mm is not for me.’ You know? ‘It’s not for me! We want to get out of this student stuff! We want to get into the real thing!!!’ I make films for the big studios, but I’ve never told them the truth. I’ve never been nice to them, and the understanding is there that I go my way and they go their way. If I can’t do what I want with them, I’ll go 16mm, and if I can’t do it there, I’ll go to 8mm.

Los Angeles is a movie town. Most of the people who work there are connected in one way or another with the entertainment industry. All of them are filled with ambition and ideas. To be an individual in Los Angeles is like being an individual in the Army. To retain a personality that comes out of a lifetime of hard work is a virtual impossibility. It is not because there is no talent and that people don’t come with the same vitality to Hollywood, but rather because the rules stress low-profile, subdued voices, mellowness, polite fear and vicious hypocrisy. The expression ‘to fit in’ is used in Hollywood. ‘To fit in’ is to give up your mind in favor of your position. Occasionally a character escapes. A single-minded fanatic, obsessed with separate visions of family, pain, driving the straight ones crazy while trying to transfer those feelings into a slick medium – a medium so regulated, so intoxicated with profits, so violently and quietly competitive that its boundaries make the Berlin Wall seem like something out of Disney.

I work with a group of people who tell me to go screw myself all the time and who disagree and say, ‘I don’t like the picture,’ and who are honest, and who work hard, and who are disciplined by themselves. And that keeps me alive. It’s staying with people that you’re comfortable with. Not that agree with you, but are comfortable with and not assuming a posture of being somebody, because you’re never going to be anybody! You just enjoy the work. It’s like somebody says, ‘When we have some money we’re going to really be happy,’ or ‘When we get this car, then things are going to change.’ They never change. The only time they ever change is when you have good times. So if you can work with people and enjoy yourself and talk only about what’s at hand, only about your movie and going into your movie and getting deeper into it and getting laughs out of it and abusing it, and treating it like a person. Because listen, that love affair’s going to last, what – a couple of months or a year? – and then you’re going to leave that movie and that’s the end of it. I haven’t seen Shadows since the day we finished it. It’s really a brutal thing, but I have no further interest once a picture has been finalized. I don’t think I will ever see Faces again. It’s like a love affair that’s gone.

We always try to think about what was the very best time of our lives. Usually it’s college or something like that. Making Faces was the very best time of my life – because of the people. I’d never met people like that, and I’m talking about every single member of that company and cast, people who made my life really worth living. I never thought once during the whole time we were making that film that there was anything else in the world except those people; they were that devoted and pure. There is a certain desire to making a film, when you really put it in and put it up and you know no limit and you’re really willing to die for the film you’re making. Now that sounds crazy. If you die for your country, it’s not so good, but in film if it’s the last thing you ever do, you want your picture to be done. With that attitude, making it that way, a man moves through life really using himself, really making something of his life.

John Cassavetes – excerpted from Cassavetes on Cassavetes, ed. R. Carney.

Sam Peckinpah: ‘Dying is not fun and games’

The Wild Bunch (Directed by Sam Peckinpah)

From its stark opening sequence, in which children observe a swarm of ants devour scorpions, through to its violent bullet-riddled ending, The Wild Bunch (1969) is an unrelenting journey into a world of nihilistic violence.

Pike Bishop (William Holden) leads an ageing gang of criminals on one final assignment in 1913: robbing a railroad store. Unfortunately, Bishop's former comrade Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), who was blackmailed into chasing down his old friend for sleazy railroad tycoon Harrigan, is waiting in ambush with a gang of bounty hunters. The group becomes aware of the ambush and mayhem ensues. A deafening chorus of gunfire, shattering glass, and whinnying horses serves as the music to an epic gunfight that would serve as the focal point of a lesser western, but serves as simple prelude to the rest of Sam Peckinpah's cruel, elegiac tour de force. 

The remaining members of the group pass the laughing youngsters again on their way out of town, who are now burning the ants and scorpions alive. 

After establishing his stall early on with the inhumanity of cackling infants and slow-motion deaths, Peckinpah spends the next two hours thrilling us. A riveting, beautifully filmed train robbery, an exploding bridge, and a final machine-gun massacre all figure in this storey of hardened criminals caught up in the attempt to sell stolen weaponry to the dissolute General Mapache (Emilio Fernández) during the Mexican revolution. Repeated sequences of scotch consumption and hilarity hammer home the film's overall tone of cheerful submission in the face of a terrible conclusion. Any viewer who downs a shot each time the gang drinks will find themselves slurring long before the end credits, while the grizzled felons' combined laughing is almost as prevalent as gunfire.

The following article by Roger Ebert, from 1969, following a press screening of The Wild Bunch, gives an idea of the contemporary response to the film’s notorious depiction of violence and the director Sam Peckinpah’s defence of it.

Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, which is possibly the most violent film ever made, stirred up a bitter controversy. Film critics split into many camps at an extraordinary press conference, and even co-stars William Holden and Ernest Borgnine seemed slightly squeamish about the movie. But just about everyone agreed that The Wild Bunch will be this summer’s top box-office draw, for better or worse.

The film was screened for some 350 film critics during the weeklong Warner Bros. 7-Arts international film festival, festival, a showcase for six new Warners’ films. The audience reaction was extreme. Some people walked out. Others closed their eyes. When the lights went up, the applause was matched by boos and hisses. And then the arguments started. They are likely to continue all summer, providing fodder for countless articles and talk shows.

Peckinpah’s film is set in the Southwest and Mexico, circa 1913. The bunch of the title are a group of professional killers and bank robbers who have nearly reached the end of the line. They’re anachonisms, 25 years too late for the wild West, hoping to pull off one more good job and retire. A life of violence has unsuited them for anything else. They’re crude, filthy, bloodthirsty, raunchy and stupid. But they have a kind of honor and loyalty to each other.

The film opens with an extraordinary bloodbath of about seven minutes in length: a temperance parade is caught in the cross-fire between the Wild Bunch and a group of scurvy railroad gunmen led by Robert Ryan. Several civilians are gunned down just for the hell of it. The opening scene is the most violent I’ve ever seen on the screen – except for the closing scene.

By the films end, the bunch has escaped into Mexico and gotten involved in a scheme to steal U.S. army rifles for an ersatz rebel general. They’re double-crossed, caught between the general, Ryan’s men, and the Army. And in a final incredible bloodbath, some 200 men, women and horses die in an orgy of violence. You have never seen anything like it.

Having said this much, let me say that I admire The Wild Bunch and consider it an important act of filmmaking. It is easy enough to protest against the automatic violence of the Italian Westerns; it is legitimate to worry whether movie violence is somehow connected to the violence in American life. But The Wild Bunch, it seems to me presents death and violence in such definitive (indeed, even excessive) terms that it becomes, paradoxically, a statement against violence, and a reaction to it.

Peckinpah (previous credits: Ride the High Country, Major Dundee) has, first of all, made a magnificently directed and acted film. Holden, Borgnine, Ryan and Edmond O’Brien are particularly effective in roles that make their previous tough-guy characterizations look transparent. Peckinpah has marshaled an army of stuntmen and special effects men for his battle scenes and for a tremendous scene of the destruction of a bridge.

And the final bloodbath is the most effectively photographed battle since Orson Welles’ Fallstaff. Dying behind a machine gun, Holden maniacally mows down dozens of soldiers, civilians, anyone within range. I never thought, a lady in the audience complained, that I’d live long enough to see William Holden shoot a woman.

Peckinpah introduces a new technology of violence in those scenes. Blood actually spurts from gunshot wounds; we are shown the face of violence rather than the comic-strip substitute supplied by most Westerns.

All of this held little weight with most of the critics here, I gather. They considered the film to be an exploitation of violence – and they let Peckinpah and his co-stars have it with both barrels at a press conference the next morning.

I have only one question, said the lady from the Reader’s Digest. Why was this film ever made?

We wanted to show violence in real terms, Peckinpah said. Dying is not fun and games. Movies make it look so detached. With The Wild Bunch people get involved whether they like it or not. They do not have the mild reactions to it.

Why did everyone bleed so much? another lady asked.

Lady, Borgnine said, did you ever see anyone shot by a gun without bleeding?

But both Borgnine and Holden seemed to be rather dazed by the film themselves. Holden reportedly doesn’t like it much; he feels it’s too violent and needs additional cutting. Borgnine told the press conference: When I was handed the script, to be quite honest with you, I did not read into it all the controversy it seems to have stirred up. I had made violent films before, of course; Westerns and war pictures. Ths is a script about people who have outlived their time, who have anachronisms. I accepted it on those terms.

When we were actually shooting, we were all repulsed at times. There were nights when we’d finish shooting and I’d say, My God, my God! But I was always back the next morning, because I sincerely believed we were achieving something.

What about the rumors, one critic asked, that there was a near-mutiny on the set in reaction to Peckinpah’s overkill?

No mutiny, Peckinpah said.

Another critic asked: Don’t you think you may have occasionally passed over that thin line between what an audience is willing to accept, and what it isn’t? We felt that when the general slits the kid’s throat, that was the point beyond which we really had difficulty...

I know what you mean, Peckinpah said. There is a very, very thin line, and I think we operated as close to it as we dared. We hope that, for most audience, we stayed on this side of the line. But I am willing to admit that we may have passed over it at some point. We feel the violence is a catharsis, a release, but sometimes the line is hard to find.

To tell you the truth, Peckinpah added after a short pause, I really cannot stand to see the film myself anymore. It is too much an emotional thing. I saw it last night, but I do not want to see it again for perhaps five years.

– Sam Peckinpah: Dying is not fun and games, by Roger Ebert, June 1969.

Article here

Michael Winterbottom: On Adapting Jim Thompson

The Killer Inside Me (Directed by Michael Winterbottom)

The pulp writer Jim Thompson, wrote over 30 novels and is  known for writing some of the bleakest noir ever put to page. Stephen King, who claims Thompson among his favorite authors, wrote with a kind of wonder of Thompson’s desolate stories. “There are three brave lets” in Thompson’s writing, King explained in the introduction to Thompson’s Now and On Earth: “he let himself see everything, he let himself write it down, then he let himself publish it.” 

The director Stephen Frears, who adapted Jim Thompson’s The Grifters for film, was struck by the relationship between Thompson’s work and certain aspects of classical Greek tragedy. Thompson’s uncompromising noir informs and feeds back into these tragic aspects to create a vision of a hell in earth; an a stark but recognizable—vision of present day life. This relationship is particularly evident in Thompson’s 1952 masterpiece The Killer Inside Me.

Killer Inside owes much to traditional noir tropes. The principle character, small-town sheriff Lou Ford, is obsessed with setting right a wrong. His brother, he believes, was killed by a corrupt local industrialist. Ford devises a strategy to bring the man down, beyond the law, by setting his son up with a prostitute. Ford however falls in love with the woman himself, but continues with the scheme: to murder both the prostitute and the son and make it look like a murder-suicide. The plan falls apart in the best noir tradition, leading Ford to kill further to cover up his initial crime. The crimes become increasingly savage as Ford’s recklessness grows, but Ford continues to remain convinced right until the end that he’s in control of events and can, ultimately, not face the consequences. By the novel’s end, Ford is in jail and reflecting, in his typically calculated manner, on his crimes, his reasons, and his own state of mind.

British director Michael Winterbottom’s faithful recent adaptation divided critics and audiences. Here he discusses his approach to the book and adaptation in general.

Q: Your method of adapting novels—Tristram Shandy, Jude the Obscure, The Mayor of Casterbridge—is not to be strictly faithful to the story or methodology of the source text. How did that play out here?

A: Well, it was the opposite, really. When I read the book, I thought that you could almost film it. The book tells its story through dialogue. Jim Thompson is a brilliant dialogue writer and plotter. And then I approached the people who had the rights, and they already had a version of the screenplay which they’d sent me. In terms of individual scenes, it was very close to the book anyway, but the order had been changed. So my approach was to go back to the original story of the book and really keep the film as accurate and as faithful to the text as possible.

Q: What themes in the novel captivated you, and which of your own did you want to incorporate?

A: I think one of the great things about the book is the pace of the narrative. Within a few pages, the story’s being set up. Lou’s gone to meet Joyce Lakeland, there’s been a moment of violence and sex, and really from that point on, Thompson keeps the story moving so new things are constantly happening. The story unfolds incredibly fast and it was that, I think, that made me feel it would be kind of interesting to make into a film.

Q: The Killer Inside Me is structured as a first-person narrative told by a deranged personality. Was there something about the psychology of Lou Ford that especially intrigued you?

A: Obviously, if you read a book and want to make it into a film, there have to be lots of things you like about it. There’s something about the way Lou narrates his own story that makes you feel sort of close to him, and makes you feel as well that’s something going to happen to redeem him. And what’s brilliant about the way Jim Thompson tells the story is you’re constantly feeling that you’re going to come to this moment of knowledge—and then the book ends! [Laughs] There’s a great story in the middle of the [narrative] that Lou Ford tells. He’s read somewhere that there was a guy who was happily married, who had a wife and a couple of children, and then he got a girlfriend in the neighboring town, and he’s happy with the girlfriend. And one day they discover the girlfriend had been killed and that the wife and children had been killed as well. And as he’s telling the story, he wonders, Why does someone do that? People do these things for no apparent reason, without any explanation. Newspapers are still full of stories like that, about people who seem to live normal lives, love their children and wives, and then they decide to destroy everything, to tear everything up. Lou is that sort of character. The people who he kills are quite close to him. A lot of people in the story love him, a lot of people love him despite the fact that he’s been violent towards them. So there’s a sense of the kind of waste that violence creates, which [anchors] the movie, rather than the psychology of why he does it. There are psychological explanations in the book, but it’s more the sense of that pointlessness and waste, and the tenderness of the situation that attracted me.

Q: A lot of readers of Thompson’s novels have seen aspects of Greek tragedy at play in his work.

A: For me, it’s Shakespearean as well. There’s a sense of this person who people do love, he does have this ability to inspire trust and faith. And yet, whether because of what happened in his childhood or what his father did to him, he feels worthless in a sense. When he’s destroying other people, he’s trying to destroy himself. He feels like he’s not worthy of being happy or being loved. So you have all this kind of stuff going on. Obviously, there’s a big play on fathers in the novel: the relation- ship between Lou and his father, but also between Lou and Sheriff Bob Maples, who’s a sort of alternative father figure, and between Chester Conway and Elmer Conway, who’s another bad father. There’s a pattern of relationships with fathers and surrogate fathers that runs through it. So it’s an incredibly rich book, you know, it’s not necessarily a naturalistic novel. But it’s full of human emotions.

Q: I’m just wondering if Thompson’s connections to cinema interested you at all.

A: In terms of his own writing?

Q: Yeah, his writing for Kubrick, for instance.

A: That would not be a reason for me to make a film of this book. The reason is because it’s a great book and when I read it, I felt it would be a really interesting film to make, and completely different from the films I normally write. In the end, when you choose a film, it’s for that reason. The material is interesting. It’s not that surprising that Jim Thompson had a connection to cinema because he’s brilliant at dialogue, he’s brilliant at stories, and the worlds he writes about in his novels seem like worlds that would be interesting for cinema. I think with Kubrick—I’m not sure what kind of credits he got on the two collaborations [The Killing and Paths of Glory]—I think he got an “additional dialogue” credit on one. I was talking to his daughter, who came onto the set, and she was saying that, you know, he did a lot more work on it than that. So that’s kind of fascinating, but it wasn’t the reason for making the film, obviously...

Q: In general, you invoke genre—road movies, for example—without retaining all the expected codes. Did you see yourself trying to steer clear of certain noir conventions with this film?

A: Only in the sense that from the beginning we didn’t want to do a pastiche of the 1950s. We didn’t want to shoot it in a particular style because of genre or the content of the story. So it’s not a particularly noir-looking film. Jim Thompson is a great writer, but he’s a very simple, direct writer. He’s very focused on the story and the character and what’s happening and why are they doing that. Really, he’s writing very lean and kind of spare. So it was trying to be true to that more than [make it] look or feel like a noir fifties’ film. So in that sense, perhaps, we got away from generic convention, I’m not sure. But basically, it’s okay, this is how the book works, and [we said] let’s find an approach to the film that will be in keeping with that...

Q: In the past, when you’ve made period dramas like Jude or The Claim, you always manage to retain a very contemporary language and feel to the way you dramatize things. Is that something you’ve continued here, with The Killer Inside Me?

A: Well, I think Jim Thompson’s stories are actually very contemporary, and one of the things is that it’s someone writing in the early fifties about small-town Midwest America, talking about the sex and violence that goes on behind closed doors. The dialogue we’re using in the film is very much taken from the book. Even so, it feels very contemporary because when you read the novel, it’s very fresh. You really don’t feel you’re reading a creaky old period piece.

– Excerpted from Michael Winterbottom. Interviews. Edited by Damon Smith, 2009.

John Cassavetes: On Writing ‘Husbands’

Husbands (Directed by John Cassavetes)

In 1970s Husbands the film's opening subtitle describes it as a "comedy about life, death, and freedom," and these are indeed the film's principal themes. Shaken by the loss of a close friend, three friends embark on a persistently raucous study of what may have been and what might come next. Their introspection results in a profound sense of self-evaluation, but the men are primarily living for the moment as they confront unpleasant truths about themselves, their mortality, and their relationships.

Husbands is an emotional experience, one that is difficult to pin down or easily digest. Filmed and acted with a gruelling directness, with certain sequences proceeding without narrative progression and little character revelation. It emanates unceasing activity and conversation, and Cassavetes' probing camera, which remains subjective and observational, captures with an unrestrained, almost random reality. “ Like life, it’s also very slow and depressing in areas,” writes Tom Charity. “The one thing it’s not is a shorthand film.” Private macho bravado seeps into the public realm, signifying a self-centeredness and recklessness regardless of the context. The men's interactions with women are clumsy, inarticulate. Cassavetes continued to edit the picture seemingly searching for a satisfactory version. Despite its brilliant exuberance, humour, despair, darkness and indulgences, or perhaps because of it, the final result was a critical and commercial failure.

Perhaps Geoff Andrew comes closest to best describing the great achievement of Husbands:

“But Cassavetes no more condoned the men’s boozily boisterous behaviour than he condemned it. He wasn’t interested in judging his characters as they embark on their binge, first in New York, then in London, following a friend’s funeral. Rather, his concern was always to represent human behaviour, in all its flawed, self-contradictory perversity, as honestly as he could. And if that meant showing a trio of middle-aged New York commuters being irresponsible, selfish, petulant, boorish, even boringly repetitive at times, so be it. The truth isn’t always attractive.

“The truth is fascinating, however, and it’s important. More to the point here, it’s also rare in American cinema, since film has usually been primarily regarded – by the Hollywood studios, at any rate – not as art but as a) a means of making money, and b) a source of entertainment, pure and simple. So endings should be clear, closed and happy, characters should be easily categorisable as good or bad, and stories should adhere to conventions already known to be popular.

“Husbands is a marvellous example of his methods. With its ultra-naturalistic performances, its simple, meandering narrative (‘story’ is far too strong a word for what happens) 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.

“It’s the kind of brave, devil-may-care film that shows up the artistic timidity – and, indeed, the dishonesty (be it emotional, social, political or psychological) – of so much mainstream cinema. Small wonder Cassavetes remains one of the most important influences on filmmakers keen to preserve their independence. He understood, and repeatedly proved, that one didn’t have to tell lies in order to be entertaining. After all, what could be more interesting than life as it’s lived by recognisably real human beings?”

In the following excerpts John Cassavetes discusses his approach to writing a screenplay, how it relates to his life and how artistic freedom determines the path the script takes.

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 most of the interiors of Machine Gun McCain were filmed] 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.

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 ter- rific 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.

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.

You made a role yours not by ‘acting’, but by believing in it, by adding something of yourself to it, by playing it personally.

I get bored seeing two people that are supposed to be in love, who kiss, screw or whatever they do. I get bored by that because they’re only supposed to do those things. I don’t really believe that they’re doing that, and I couldn’t care less. It always struck me when I used to go see pictures as a kid at Times Square that when it came to the love scenes everybody used to boo. But once in a while you’d see a picture like Red Shoes, and no matter how tough the audience was, they would root for the love story because these people didn’t pretend to be in love with each other – they were in love with each other.

All the people I meet make up my films. I make movies not about somebody else’s, but my life!
But the deepest connection between the actor and the character is their shared sense that it is critical to seize the moment and not let life pass you by.

Some people can’t wait. That’s the only reason I’m attracted to people. Because we don’t want to let the moments go by. Those are the ones I am attracted to. We might not be here tomorrow. I make every picture like it’s the last day of my life. You got anything to say, you put it in there now. Don’t hold back. What are you waiting for?

I make my films out of my problems. You know, I have problems, you have problems. You won’t admit it. I will admit it because I’m an artist. My job is to put emotions out on the surface. Not to report on other people’s emotions, but to put your own emotions out on the surface. My brother had died at thirty and I loved him and my life changed. That’s all. Simple as that. It was over so quickly, and I just had no room in my life. When someone dies that young there is no time to say good- bye. I was young and working and everything else and I couldn’t do anything except stagger around for a while, then try to reevaluate where I was. So I made a picture. I didn’t make a picture about my dead brother; I made a picture that was affected by the death of a best friend and these three men. I dedicated Husbands to him. You ask me why I do these things? I don’t know why I do them. I hope it means something to certain people that have suffered loss and don’t know how to express it.

– Excerpts from Raymond Carney: Cassavetes on Cassavetes.