John Cassavetes: Chasing Shadows

Shadows (Directed by John Cassavetes)

John Cassavetes’ Shadows (1959) is one of the pioneering works of American independent cinema. Made for $40,000 with a non-professional cast and crew, using rented and borrowed equipment, the film portrays several days in the lives of three African-American siblings – Hugh, Ben, and Lelia. Though most critics consider Shadows as being about the issue of race, Cassavetes always thought of the film as more personal. Almost all of the scenes were based on his own experiences and feelings at the time: from the humiliation of his early auditioning days, to Ben’s aimless detachment and cruising for girls, to the lonely, night-time wandering that lasted throughout Cassavetes’ life. Aspects of Cassavetes’ feelings and beliefs are also present in the portrayal of Lelia’s romantic impulsiveness, Rupert and Hugh’s belief in friendship and Tom’s angry speech about academic life. Most significantly of all, the relationship between self-centred drifter Ben and his dutiful brother Hugh mirrored the relationship of John Cassavetes with his older brother Nick. 

As the critic Raymond Carney claims: ‘Beyond these specific references, the general subject of Shadows was close to Cassavetes’ view of his own situation at this point in his life. He thought of himself as doing the same thing in his world as Lelia and Ben did in theirs. In their different ways, he and they were attempting to ‘pass’ for something that was not necessarily a reflection of their true identities. As would be the case with all of his subsequent works, the issues in the film were close to Cassavetes’ heart. He could not satirize or mock characters who were so similar to him.’

The following excerpts express Cassavetes’ thoughts on the making of Shadows:

We tried to do Shadows realistically. I just was as tough and as mixed up and screwed up as anyone else and made a picture about the aimlessness and the wandering of young people and the emotional qualities that they possessed.

The story is of a Negro family that lives just beyond the bright lights of Broadway; but we did not mean it to be a film about race. It got its name because one of the actors, in the early days, was fooling around making a charcoal sketch of some of the other actors and suddenly called his drawing Shadows. It seemed to fit the film. The NAACP came to us to finance it, but we turned it down. We’re not politicians. One of the things that has to be established when you’re making a movie is freedom. Everyone will get the wrong idea and say we’ve got a cause. I couldn’t care less about causes of any kind. Shadows is not offensive to anybody – Southerners included – because it has no message. The thing people don’t like is having a philosophy shoved down their throats. We’re not pushing anything. I don’t believe the purpose of art is propagandizing.

At the time I made Shadows I wished that I was a black man, because it would be something so definite and the challenge would be greater than being a white man. But now, American black men are white men so there’s no challenge and I don’t really wish to be that anymore. I don’t know about other men’s desires but it is my desire to be an underdog, to win on a long shot, to gamble, to take chances.

There is a great need in the cinema for truthfulness, but truth is not necessarily sordid and not necessarily downbeat. Unfortunately, the art films have dealt mainly with the evils of society. But society is more interesting than rape or murder. I think you can do more through positive action than in pointing out the foibles and stupidities of man. Yes, any man is capable of killing any other man, we know that, we don’t have to stress that. To say that it’s right and normal, to continue to say it, to have society and the Establishment confirm that view, is wrong.

Art films reach for the most obvious fallacies of society, such as racial prejudice. That’s been a fault of the art film – devoting itself to human ills, human weaknesses. An artist has a responsibility not to dwell on this and point it up, but to find hope for this age and see that it wins occasionally. Pictures are supposed to clarify people’s emotions, to explain the feelings of people on an emotional plane. An art film should not preclude laughter, enjoyment and hope. Is life about horror? Or is it about those few moments we have? I would like to say that my life has some meaning.

I think that there are certainly many, many wonderful things to be written about in this day and age of disillusionment and horror and impending doom. We must take a more positive stand in making motion pictures, and have a few more laughs, and treat life with a little more hope than we have in the past. Shadows is a realistic drama with hope – a hopeful picture about a lower echelon of society in the United States – how they live, how they react. The people are hopeful. They have some belief. I believe in people.

I’m not an Angry Young Man. I’m just an industrious young man. And I believe in people. I don’t believe in ‘exposés’, as exposés have just torn America apart, and the rest of the world. I don’t believe in saying that the presidential campaign is all phony, going inside it and looking at it. It’s been going on for years this way, but for the first time in history we’re going in and saying, ‘Yeah, see what they do? See how they get votes? See how this is done? See?’ Human frailties are with us. People aren’t perfect. But we have good instincts that counterbalance our bad acts. The main battle is you don’t make ugliness for the sake of ugliness. By attacking, constantly attacking everything in sight, no matter what anyone does, it’s not good enough because it can’t be trusted. And nobody, starting with the top of our government, can be believed. Everybody is a phony. So if everybody’s a phony, what’s the sense of going on, because there isn’t anybody worth making a picture about, talking about, writing about. There’s no hope in living and you might as well pack it all in and forget about it. Why should young people’s minds constantly be filled with the corruption of life? Soon they can’t do anything but believe there’s total corruption.

I adore the neo-realists for their humaneness of vision. Zavattini is surely the greatest screenwriter that ever lived. Particularly inspirational to me when I made Shadows were La Terra Trema, I Vitelloni, Umberto D and Bellissima. The neo-realist filmmakers were not afraid of reality; they looked it straight in the face. I have always admired their courage and their willingness to show us how we really are. It’s the same with Godard, early Bergman, Kurosawa and the second greatest director next to Capra, Carl Dreyer. Shadows contains much of that neo-realistic influence.

I’d like to feel that people have influenced me, but then when you get on the floor you realize you’re really alone and no one can influence your work. They can just open you up and give you confidence that the aim for quality is really the greatest power a director can have – if you’re in quest of power. In a way, you must be out for power. We wouldn’t make films if we didn’t think that in some way we could speak for everyone.

I’m not part of anything. I never joined anything. I could work anywhere. Some of the greatest pictures I’ve ever seen came from the studio system. I have nothing against it at all. I’m an individual. Intellectual bullshit doesn’t interest me. I’m only interested in working with people who like to work and find out about something that they don’t already know. If people want to work on a project, they’ve got to work on a project that’s theirs. It’s not mine and it’s not theirs. It’s only yours if you make it yours. With actors, as well as technicians, the biggest problem is to get people who really want to do the job and let them do it their own way. The labels come afterwards. If your films have no chance of being shown anywhere, if you don’t have enough money, you show them in basements; then they’re called underground films. It doesn’t really matter what you call them. When you make a film you aren’t part of a movement. You want to make a film, this film, a personal and individual one, and you do, with the help of your friends.

Shadows from beginning to end was a creative accident. I was going on Jean Shepherd’s Night People radio show, because he had plugged Edge of the City, and I wanted to thank him for it. I told Jean about the piece we had done, and how it could be a good film. I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be terrific if [ordinary] people could make movies, instead of all these Hollywood big-wigs who are only interested in business and how much the picture was going to gross and everything?’ And he asked if I thought I’d be able to raise the money for it. ‘If people really want to see a movie about people,’ I answered, ‘they should just contribute money.’ For a week afterwards, money came in. At the end it totaled $2,500. And we were committed to start a film. One soldier showed up with five dollars after hitchhiking 300 miles to give it to us. And some really weird girl came in off the street; she had a mustache and hair on her legs and the hair on her head was matted with dirt and she wore a filthy polka-dot dress; she was really bad. After walking into the workshop, this girl got down on her knees, grabbed my pants and said, ‘I listened to your program last night. You are the Messiah.’ Anyway, she became our sound editor and straightened out her life. In fact, a lot of people who worked on the film were people who were screwed up – and got straightened out working with the rest of us. We wouldn’t take anything bigger than a five dollar bill – though once, when things looked real rough, we did cash a $100 check from Josh Logan.

When I started, I thought it would only take me a few months; it took three years. I made every mistake known to man; I can’t even remember all the mistakes we made. I was so dumb! Having acted in movies, I kinda knew how they were made, so after doing some shooting, I’d shout out something like ‘Print take three!’ I’d neglected to hire a script girl, however, so no one wrote down which take I wanted – with the astounding result that all the film was printed. It was really the height of ignorance. We did everything wrong, technically. We began shooting without having the slightest idea of what had to be done or what the film would be like. We had no idea at all. We didn’t know a thing about technique: all we did was begin shooting. The technical problems of the production were endless and trying. The ‘Sound Department’ often looked at the recorder, only to see no signal whatsoever! The only thing we did right was to get a group of people together who were young, full of life and wanting to do something of meaning.

There was [also] a struggle because the actors had to find the confidence to have quiet at times, and not just constantly talk. This took about the first three weeks of the schedule. Eventually all this material was thrown away, and then everyone became cool and easy and relaxed and they had their own things to say, which was the point. Though I had to scrap most of what we shot in the first eight weeks’ shooting, later on, once they relaxed and gained confidence, many of the things they did shocked even me, they were so completely unpredictably true.

The things we got praised for were the things we tried to cure. All those things were accidents, not strokes of genius. We didn’t have any equipment, we didn’t have a dolly. And we had all this movement, so we used long lenses. And [we were] photographing in the street because we couldn’t afford a studio or couldn’t afford even to go inside some place, you know. And our sound – when we opened Shadows in England, they said, ‘The truest sound that we’ve ever seen.’ Well, at that time, almost all the pictures, certainly all the pictures at Twentieth Century Fox, were looped. You know, all the sync that the actors actually spoke on the stage was cleaned up and made to be absolutely sterile, so that there was no sound behind anything. If you saw traffic, you wouldn’t hear it. You’d just hear voices so that the dialogue would be clean. But we recorded most of Shadows in a dance studio with Bob Fosse and his group dancing above our heads, and we were shooting this movie. So I never considered the sound. We didn’t even have enough money to print it, to hear how bad it was. So when we came out, we had Sinatra singing upstairs, and all kinds of boom, dancing feet above us. And that was the sound of the picture. So we spent hours, days, weeks, months, years trying to straighten out this sound. Finally, it was impossible and we just went with it. Well, when the picture opened in London they said, ‘This is an innovation!’ You know? Innovation! We killed ourselves to try to ruin that innovation!

When it was finished, we didn’t have enough money to print [all] the sound. There was no dialogue [written down] so every take was different. So we looked at it and said, ‘What the hell are we going to print here? I don’t know what they’re saying. It looks terrific, everything’s all right, it’s beautiful – we’ll lay in the lines.’ So we had a couple of secretaries who used to come up all the time and do transcripts for us. They volunteered their services, they had nothing to do, we had all silent film. So we went to the deaf-mute place and we got lip-readers. They read everything and it took us about a year.

We used a 16mm camera, partly because it was cheaper and partly because we could do more hand-held stuff with it, and it was easier to handle in the streets. We used a [Nagra] tape-recorder and a hand-held boom. We rarely had rehearsals for the camera, even though Erich Kollmar, the cameraman, likes rehearsals. I encouraged him to get it the first time, as it happened. Erich found that the lighting and photographing of these actors, who moved according to impulse instead of direction, prevented him from using a camera in a conventional way. He was forced to photograph the film with simplicity. He was driven to lighting a general area and then hoping for the best. So we not only improvised in terms of the words, but we improvised in terms of motions. The cameraman also improvised, he had to follow the artists and light generally, so that the actor could move when and wherever he pleased. The first week of shooting was just about useless. We were all getting used to each other and to the equipment, but it was not because of the camera movement that we had to throw footage out. In fact, when you try it, you find that natural movement is easier to follow than rehearsed movement, since it has a natural rhythm. A strange and interesting thing happened in that the camera, in following the people, followed them smoothly and beautifully, simply because people have a natural rhythm. Whereas when they rehearse something according to a technical mark, they begin to be jerky and unnatural, and no matter how talented they are, the camera has a difficult time following them.

I think the important contribution that Shadows can make to the film is that audiences go to the cinema to see people: they only empathize with people, and not with technical virtuosity. Most people don’t know what a ‘cut,’ or a ‘dissolve’ or a ‘fade-out’ is, and I’m sure they are not concerned with them. And what we in the business might consider a brilliant shot doesn’t really interest them, because they are watching the people, and I think it becomes important for the artist to realize that the only important thing is a good actor.

Normally to shoot somewhere like Broadway there would be ten or a dozen gaffers [lighting men], then another five or six grips [technicians] to move the cameras and cables, and then all the producers and directors on top of that. They wouldn’t want anything [out of focus]; everything would have to be clear cut. In a [Hollywood] picture you have marks to hit, and the lighting cameraman always lights for you at a certain mark. The actor is expected to go through a dramatic scene, staying within a certain region where the lights are. If he gets out of light just half an inch, then they’ll cut the take and do it over again. So then the actor begins to think about the light rather than about the person he is supposed to be making love to, or arguing with.

In my own case I had worked in a lot of [commercial] films and I couldn’t adjust to the medium. I found that I wasn’t as free as I could be on the stage or in a live television show. So for me [making Shadows] was mainly to find out why I was not free – because I didn’t particularly like to work in films, and yet I like the medium. The actor is the only person in a film who works from emotion, in whom the emotional truth of a situation resides. If we had made Shadows in Hollywood, none of the people could have emerged as the fine actors they are. It’s probably easier technically to make a film in Hollywood, but it would have been difficult to be adventurous simply because there are certain rules and regulations that are set specifically to destroy the actor and make him feel uncomfortable – make the production so important that he feels that if he messes up just one line, that he is doing something terribly wrong and may never work again. And this is especially true, not for the stars, but with the feature players who might be stars later on, or with the small players, the one-line players who might become feature players. There’s a certain cruelty in our business that is unbelievably bad. I don’t see how people can make pictures about people and then have absolutely no regard for the people they are working with.

In the course of [the filming] the tide of outside enthusiasm dwindled and finally turned into rejection. The Shadows people continued, no longer with the hope of injecting the industry with vitality, but only for the sake of their pride in themselves and in the film that they were all devoted to. [On] the last day of shooting, I couldn’t turn on the camera. I was so fed up with doing it because there was no love of the craft or the idea or anything. We’re doing this experiment, and now it’s the last day, nobody’s here except McEndree and me. He couldn’t turn on the camera and I couldn’t turn on the camera and Ben was standing there asking, ‘Are you going to roll this thing or not?’ We’re just standing there looking at each other. We couldn’t turn on this camera because it had been such a hassle.

I went to a theater-owner friend of mine and I said, ‘Look, we want to show our film and we can fill this theater.’ It was the Paris Theater in New York and 600 people filled that theater and we turned away another 400 people at the door. About 15 minutes into the film the people started to leave. And they left. And they left! And I began perspiring and the cast was getting angry. We all sat closer and closer together and pretty soon there wasn’t anyone in the theater! I think there was one critic in the theater, one critic who was a friend of ours, who walked over to us and said, ‘This is the most marvelous film I’ve ever seen in my life!’ And I said, ‘I don’t want to hit you right now. I’m a little uptight, not feeling too hot and none of us are, so’ And he said, ‘No. This is really a very good film.’ So, like all failures, you get a sense of humor about it and you go out and spend the night – when it’s bad enough, and this was so bad that it couldn’t be repaired.

I could see the flaws in Shadows myself: It was a totally intellectual film – and therefore less than human. I had fallen in love with the camera, with technique, with beautiful shots, with experimentation for its own sake. All I did was exploiting film technique, shooting rhythms, using large lenses – shooting through trees, and windows. It had a nice rhythm to it, but it had absolutely nothing to do with people. Whereas you have to create interest in your characters because this is what audiences go to see. The film was filled with what you might call ‘cinematic virtuosity’ – for its own sake; with angles and fancy cutting and a lot of jazz going on in the background. But the one thing that came at all alive to me after I had laid it aside a few weeks was that just now and again the actors had survived all my tricks. But this did not often happen! They barely came to life.

– Excerpts from ‘Raymond Carney: Cassavetes on Cassavetes’.

 

Focus On: Elaine May’s ‘Mikey and Nicky’

Mikey and Nicky (Directed by Elaine May)

Elaine May is a writer and filmmaker and actor and improviser, but beyond that, she is an artist whose career-long quest for truth has driven her to create work that has taken many forms but always sought to cast aside the easy crutches of cliché and convention to express something profound and real about the human condition.

She first exploded into the public consciousness in the late 1950s, as one half of Nichols and May. She and Mike Nichols were the smartest of the smart set, selling albums hand over fist and changing comedy with their sophisticated long-form improvisation. They were less interested in setups and punch lines than in exploring the complexity, wonder, and absurdity of the world we live in.

After the duo broke up, May wrote plays and dabbled in movies, first as an actor and later as a filmmaker. After costarring in Luv (opposite Jack Lemmon and future Mikey and Nicky star Peter Falk) and Carl Reiner’s Enter Laughing (both 1967), May not only adapted the short story on which the brilliant 1971 dark comedy A New Leaf is based and directed the film but was also heartbreaking and hilarious as its female lead, Henrietta Lowell, a daffy botanist and heiress who is on a more cerebral and sublime frequency than the rest of us. She’s so irresistible that Henry Graham, a W. C. Fields–like misanthrope played by Walter Matthau, abandons his plan to murder her for her money. That, in May’s world, is a happy ending: a man maturing beyond his desire to kill a woman oblivious enough to want to spend the rest of her life with him.

A New Leaf could have been a star-making film for May as an actor. She was deservedly nominated for a Golden Globe for best actress in a comedy or musical. Yet (though she occasionally acts to this day) she chose a different path, continuing her directorial career with another discomfiting study of human nature. Lenny Cantrow (Charles Grodin), the protagonist of May’s The Heartbreak Kid (1972), isn’t out to kill anybody, but he’s murderously callous about breaking the heart of his vulnerable new wife, Lila (Jeannie Berlin, May’s daughter)—on their honeymoon, no less—in order to pursue the shiksa goddess Kelly Corcoran (Cybill Shepherd). This painfully hilarious cult classic doubles as a potent allegory for Jewish assimilation. Lenny gets the girl, but this outcome registers more as tragedy than triumph. It’s a “happy ending” that’s actually achingly sad: getting what he wants most in the world is probably the worst thing that could happen to Lenny.

As a director, May specializes in deeply nuanced portrayals of intense, complicated relationships, just as she did in her groundbreaking stage work with Nichols and May. Where other filmmakers might cut away to give audiences room to breathe, May remains close to her dramatis personae in ways that are sometimes uncomfortable for audiences and characters alike. She is adept at getting viewers to empathize with the prickly, complex antiheroes she creates with such care and craft. In The Heartbreak Kid, for example, she pits the Waspy mortification of Eddie Albert’s patriarch against Grodin’s sweaty Jewish desperation and then ratchets up the tension and unblinking awkwardness to levels both hilarious and borderline unbearable.

May is keenly attuned to the often fraught relationships between men and women as well, but her sharpest focus is on the grubby desperation of male schemers controlled by greed, by lust, by a need to realize their seedy, selfish goals at any cost. Presented from the perspective of these profoundly flawed men, her films are all, on some level, explorations of the world of masculinity, with all its foibles and messy contradictions.

Her genius for finding the squirmy humanity within toxic characters finds its purest and most heartbreaking expression in Mikey and Nicky, on which filming began in 1973 but which wasn’t released till 1976, following all manner of ill will and out-and-out warfare between May and Paramount, the studio that financed the film. At one point, May even hid reels of her own footage so that Paramount could not wrest it from her and release the movie in a bastardized form.

Mikey and Nicky is in many ways May’s first drama, but it can just as easily be described as her darkest and most penetrating comedy. Then again, May seems profoundly uninterested in glib dichotomies like comedy and drama, hero and villain, good and bad, friend and foe. Her obsession is with people and relationships, which rarely fit into such tidy categories.

In search of a new kind of emotional realism, May shot for far longer than planned, and often left the camera running long after a scripted scene had ended, pushing her collaborators and herself in obsessive pursuit of a tricky and delicate cinematic vision. You can practically feel the prolonged shooting schedule in the overwhelming air of exhaustion that hangs heavy over Mikey and Nicky, the sense that we’re entering a long, sad story at its weary end.

We begin, appropriately enough, in total darkness, accompanied by the reassuring white noise of city street sounds—Mikey and Nicky is as bracingly dark visually as it is thematically. May’s film is Godfather-like in its comfort with shadows and darkness. In it, nighttime isn’t just a time of day, it’s a world unto itself, one that its title characters have been haunting long before the events of the film.

Nicky (John Cassavetes), a low-level Philadelphia bookie who is hiding out after stealing from a crime boss, is deeply, deeply tired but also sick—with fear that his luck and his time on earth are both running out, and also with an ulcer born of too much stress and too little self-care. He is marinating in his own sweat, paranoid, holed up in a dingy hotel room in desperate need of help and human kindness. He seems to have burned every other bridge, so he calls on Mikey (Peter Falk), one of his oldest and most dependable friends, to help save him from the hit man he is convinced is after him.

To be a man in Mikey and Nicky is less a condition than an affliction, but before Mikey lashes out with incoherent violence, there is tremendous sweetness in the way he treats his friend, in the way he holds him in his arms while Nicky weeps over the seemingly intractable jam he finds himself in. The warmth and kindness Mikey shows his friend at a low ebb in what appears to be a lifetime full of them makes the inevitable betrayal to come even more devastating.

As a film actor, Cassavetes’s impact and influence rank with those of Marlon Brando. Like Brando, he specialized in raw, violent tenderness—see his turn as the grieving, carousing family man Gus in his own Husbands (1970), for example. He was a macho bruiser of a performer, but beneath Nicky’s anger and incoherent, drunken rage lies a powerful hunger for connection, for salvation. Cassavetes begins the film in a place of weary, scared, wired, vibrating intensity that he maintains to the bitter end. He’s burning with desperation even in his most hushed moments.

In other words, he gave his costar plenty to play off. Falk’s idiosyncratic delivery, dry humor, and quiet intelligence as a performer are most famous from his television role as the rumpled detective Columbo, which he took on right around the same time he met Cassavetes, in 1967, and kept for nearly four decades. It was Falk who passed May’s Mikey and Nicky script to Cassavetes, though they would end up shooting Cassavetes’s Husbands and A Woman Under the Influence (1974) together first. In all three films, Falk plays some version of a family man in whom tenderness and violence perpetually struggle for the upper hand. In Mikey, he has the less showy but arguably more challenging role, as a nurturer who cannot show his true face to his old friend without exposing the simultaneously deadly and banal betrayal at the film’s core.

Part of Mikey and Nicky’s dark night of the soul involves a feverish, self-defeating pursuit of sex. Nicky’s wife has kicked him out, and in his desperation and horniness, he has fallen into a poignantly pathetic sexual relationship with the fragile Nell (Carol Grace, devastatingly vulnerable and sad in one of her only film performances). The scene involving her plays like a warped burlesque of heterosexual courtship, with all of the niceties and formalities stripped away, leaving only a lonely woman’s desperate need for affection, no matter how disingenuously offered, and a man’s beastlike need to satisfy his urges. It’d be a moment of visceral awkwardness even if Mikey did not afterward try to have sex with Nell himself, and erupt into violent rage when his seduction attempt is rejected. If you’re a woman in this milieu, you are hated and abused for putting out too easily but punished for not putting out at all. Mikey’s reaction is all the more shocking coming from a character who has up to this point served as Nicky’s conscience, and from an actor as inveterately warm and innately likable as Falk.

The artfulness of May’s direction, meanwhile, lies in its relative invisibility. Like Cassavetes, she is more invested in capturing the underlying emotional reality of a scene than in flashy camera movement or ostentatious visual style. It is all about serving the actors and the moment. And it is a testament not only to the spontaneity and rawness Cassavetes and Falk bring to their roles and to their lived-in chemistry but also to that patient direction—as well as to May’s tough, naturalistic script—that Mikey and Nicky’s dialogue often feels as immediate as if it were improvised in the moment, though virtually none of it was.

For the film’s titular duo, this is a night unlike any other: an endgame, a bleak reckoning. For everyone else, however, it’s just another night. That’s true even of Kinney (Ned Beatty), the man hired to kill Nicky. The same year Mikey and Nicky was barely released, Beatty devoured the screen as a verbose evangelist for big business in Network. Cinema is full of colorful hit men, but Beatty and May upend expectations by crafting a portrayal that bears no trace of the pyrotechnics of his Network performance, making his gunman as unremarkable as possible. He’s just an ordinary guy with an unusual occupation, who goes about his deadly business with a grudging sense of obligation no different, really, from that of an insurance salesman eager to make his quota.

In one of the film’s most quietly incisive moments, Kinney grouses that, after expenses, he’ll barely make any money killing Nicky. Forget morality or legalities: in the sad, sorry world of Mikey and Nicky, where everyone has a price, killing barely even makes sense from an economic perspective.

For Kinney, killing a man he knows only from a photograph is strictly business. For Mikey and Nicky, however, everything is intensely, painfully personal. The same was obviously true of May when she stubbornly birthed this masterful, darkly comic exploration of toxic masculinity through a combination of prickly genius and indefatigable force of will. This was her first wholly original script, based on a play she’d started writing decades before and inspired by real people she’d encountered during her youth. Not to mention the fact that A New Leaf had been taken from her and recut by Paramount, and she had no intention of letting that happen again.

It’s not too much of a stretch to say that the short-fingered vulgarians at Paramount took a hit out on Mikey and Nicky, creatively speaking. They did not understand the movie, nor could they control its strong-willed auteur, so they tried to kill it by taking it out of her hands.

In October 1975, the studio filed a lawsuit against May, claiming ownership of the film, kicking off a series of suits and countersuits between the director and Paramount for control. At one point, the studio sued her and her husband at the time, David Rubinfine, for criminal contempt after he allegedly smuggled some of the film to a colleague to keep it out of Paramount’s hands.

May was finally able to finish an edit of Mikey and Nicky in time for a Christmas 1976 opening, but the release was token at best. The film’s saga was far from over, however. In 1978, May, along with Falk and former Paramount executive Julian Schlossberg, bought the movie back from the studio, and they rereleased it to a more appreciative audience several years later.

Despite her success as a screenwriter and sought-after script doctor on films like Heaven Can Wait (1978), May ended up paying a huge price personally and professionally in an industry where men who fight to realize their vision are considered inspirational while women who do the same are considered “difficult” and cited as grim cautionary tales. She was given the opportunity to direct only one more feature, 1987’s Ishtar, and even that only through the intercession of the film’s producer and star, Warren Beatty.

In many ways, Mikey and Nicky fits perfectly into the uncompromising milieu of the New Hollywood of the late sixties and seventies, with its unrelenting darkness, moral ambiguity, and focus on troubled, unlikable dwellers on the grubby fringes of American society. It is unique, however, in being a major New Hollywood film written and directed by a woman (unbelievably, May was only the third woman to direct a Hollywood film in the sound era). It’s even more unusual in that it’s the furthest thing from what Hollywood would consider a women’s movie, then or now. It’s as insightful about masculinity as Cassavetes’s own dramas about the often ugly world of men.

Perhaps that’s why it has taken the movie so long to be appreciated and seen. A woman ventured boldly into cinematic territory long considered the exclusive domain of men. To the folks in the executive suite, it did not seem to matter that May had made a masterpiece, only that she had made a movie that would be hard to package for a mass audience, even in the heady days of the midseventies.

May set out to use her genius and the overlapping brilliance of Cassavetes and Falk to articulate brutal, profound truths about the joy, horror, and complexities of human experience, as illuminated by the strange codes of a certain subset of insecure, violently overcompensating, crime-prone American men, and a tortured conception of friendship as a messy combination of hatred, love, and everything in between. She succeeded spectacularly, and Mikey and Nicky is an essential reminder that great, deeply personal art endures long after commercial considerations have been rightfully consigned to history.

– Nathan Rabin: Mikey and Nicky: Difficult Men. 

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John Cassavetes: Under the Influence

A Woman Under the Influence (Directed by John Cassavetes)

John Cassavetes wrote A Woman Under the Influence (1974) primarily to provide his wife Gena Rowlands with a significant role. Initially envisioned as a trilogy of interconnected plays, the theatrical possibilities seemed intimidating considering Rowland's Mabel character's emotional and physical demands; one single film would suffice. After convincing the American Film Institute to name him filmmaker-in-residence, providing him with access to equipment and facilities, and providing students with on-the-job training— all of which was provided for free — production on one of Cassavetes' most successful films began shortly thereafter. 

Nick's (Falk) and, particularly, Mabel Longhetti's chaotic lives is instantly apparent as she scrambles to prepare for a night alone with her husband. For the first of many times, one wonders whether there is a true reason for the mayhem, whether Mabel reacts with self-induced terror, or whether the fear stems from an underlying medical problem. Mabel is the first Cassavetes character to exhibit clinical insanity. Her childish spontaneity and unpredictability contribute to the unease in her relationship with Nick. Meanwhile, as sincere as Nick may be in his own way, he lacks the emotional capacity for genuine care and understanding. Mabel is challenged about her condition and committed, but Nick becomes increasingly deranged, irresponsible, and deadly in the days that follow. When Mabel is not present, a clear co-dependency emerges. 

A Woman Under the Influence contains several passages of extraordinary tenderness, complete with genuine companionship, fumbling, and sensitivity. Simultaneously, Nick's incapacity to comprehend Mabel's condition results in explosive aggression and threats of violence. He dominates Mabel by being gruff, impatient, and even brutally honest, while she is brimming with vitality and excitement. Mabel is thus a prototypical Cassavetes character, one who reflects the director's own style of filmmaking. As with Cassavetes' movies, she creates unsettling scenarios, yet as though abandoning the urge for analysis that Cassavetes frequently employed with his films, one of Nick's most egregious errors with Mabel is to rationalise her behaviour. While Cassavetes claims that Mabel's unease is unsurprising, adding, "I don't cast 'totally competent' women in my films because I don't know any 'completely competent' people,"15 Carney also draws connections to his own autobiography. If Moskowitz embodies Cassavetes' swagger, Mabel embodies his self-doubts, uncertainties, and sorrows, he writes. 

A Woman Under the Influence concludes with a shaky acclimation process for both the spectator and the protagonists. However, as with Faces and Husbands' unresolved conclusions, the question of whether anything has been accomplished remains. Have Mabel and Nick confronted the underlying nature of their marital and psychological conflicts? Though there is no straightforward resolution, the film's conclusion is satisfying, if only because it establishes a state of respite in which, despite the mayhem, love persists. Cassavetes' work, as Carney puts it, is "stunningly hopeful....[he] never abandoned the promise of possibility." A Woman Under the Influence strikes the ideal balance between Cassavetes' continually erratic style and a more linear causal progression. As an obvious showcase for Rowlands, the picture has a solitary star focus, and it got two Academy Award nominations, for her and for Cassavetes as director, in large part due to her exceptional performance.

“If there’s one quality that separates John Cassavetes’s movies from almost everybody else’s, it’s the density of detail in the storytelling. His films need to be read closely, from beginning to end. There are no lulls with Cassavetes, no lapses in rhythm; the films aren’t broken down the way most are. You have to apprehend them from gesture to gesture, breath to breath. Very few filmmakers in the sound era have chosen to work this way, at least in the realm of fiction. Only Carl Theodor Dreyer, of whom Cassavetes was a great admirer, comes to mind. This is not to slight filmmakers with a different approach to their art, who either break up their scenes in clearly articulated units (Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Bresson), build tableau effects that take the action into an eerie timelessness (Stanley Kubrick), isolate a certain visual or behavioral event as the focal point of a given shot (Jean Renoir), or dig into the marrow of time to make an event out of duration itself (Andy Warhol, Andrei Tarkovsky). Every approach is equally valid, none more elevated than the rest. Die-hard Cassavetes devotees do him no favors when they buy into his own pronouncements and claim that his methods allowed him a greater purchase on the truth (whatever that is) than other filmmakers. “My films are the truth,” he once said during a personal appearance with a filmmaker of my acquaintance; needless to say, my acquaintance was more than a little put off. Yet such pretentiousness is easily forgiven in a man like Cassavetes, just as it’s easy to make allowances for the pomposity contained within Bresson’s book of maxims. When you consider how far against the grain they both went, it’s understandable that they would each accord their own idiosyncratic working methods the status of scientific breakthroughs or archaeological finds.”

– Kent Jones.

In the following extracts John Cassavetes discusses the personal and creative process that led to the writing of his masterpiece A Woman Under the Influence.

I absolutely wrote A Woman Under the Influence to try to write a terrific part for my wife. Gena wanted to do a play. She was always complaining we’re living in California, she loves the theater and everything. Gena really wanted to do a play on Broadway. And I had always fancied that I could write a play. She wanted something big. She said, ‘Now look, deal with it from a woman’s point of view. I mean deal with it so that I have a part in this thing!’ And I said, ‘OK,’ and I went off and had been thinking about it for a year anyway. And I had taken seven or eight tries at bad plays and came up with this play, which was not the play that the movie was, but it was based on the same characters.

And Gena read it and said, no, she wouldn’t do it. And I’m very stubborn so I didn’t realize that she liked the part but that on the stage, to play that every night, would kill her. I had no concept of that because we’re all obsessed, everyone’s obsessed, that is, in this stupid thing. And so I wrote another play on the same subject with the same characters, deepening the characters and making it even more difficult to play. And I gave it to Gena and she said, ‘I like that tremendously. I like the first one too, but I don’t think I could do that on Broadway.’ So I wrote another play, and so now there were three plays! And I took them to New York and I got a producer to produce the plays on Broadway and I thought it was a terrific idea to do these three plays on consecutive nights with matinees, see? [Laughs.] And Gena’s not a particularly ambitious woman in the trade, as it goes. Although, if she sees a good part, she’ll kill herself for it, but I mean kill herself performing it, but not getting it. I mean, it’s either given to her, or she’ll play with the kids or do something else or go out. When Gena read the plays she said, ‘No one could do this every night!’ She feared they would take her to a sanitarium if she became that keyed up over a long period of time! So then I said, well, all right, let’s try to make it a movie.

I can’t just go out and make what I want. I have to go through a whole big process of crap, talking to people and talking to people, proving to them that whatever we are going to do is going to make money. If I can prove it to them that my intentions are to make money, then they will let me make any film I want. But it becomes increasingly more difficult to tell them that since I’m not concerned with making money. You con people and you lie to them. You try to keep a little part of yourself when somebody says to you, ‘You figure it’s the greatest picture ever made?’ You try to keep a little part of yourself alive. So I went through all the processes of calling people in Wisconsin and Idaho and, you know, big industrialists, and trying to find out how to raise the money. And we couldn’t raise anything, not anything!

We had some readings of the play and started to work on the script and got involved in it. I have a definite person in mind when I write, which is why I like to work with people who are very close to me. I know the way they think, so I try – presume, if you will – to put down some of those thoughts, not in their own terms but in the character’s terms. I often get extremely close to someone’s real personal problems, but that’s our hope – no fictitious emotion. Knowing who the two central actors would be, I revised the screenplay. I wrote it for Peter Falk, as he would expect me to. I study his speech patterns and study the way he works, and how he really feels about it, and then start to write off that.

Gena tells everyone that it’s hard to live with me because there is nothing she can say that I don’t write down. I see Gena around the house and with the kids and I tape record what I see. I do tape record things and exaggerate them and blow them up and the incidents are not the same. I mean, I’m not a writer at all! I just record what I hear. As prattle. What people are concerned with in a day’s living. I have a good ear for prattle. Every line in your life is eaten up by the movies you do.

When I first start writing there’s a sense of discovery. In some way it’s not work, it’s finding some romance in the lives of people. You get fascinated with their lives. If they stay with you, then 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 A Woman Under the Influence. The words kind of spell out the story in a mysterious way. I deal with the characters as any writer would deal with a character. There are certain characters that you like, that you have feeling for, and other characters stand still. So you work until you have all the people in some kind of motion.

Making a film is a mystery. If I knew anything about men and women to begin with, I wouldn’t make it, because it would bore me. I really feel that the script is written by what you can get out of it and how much it means to you. What the film is about is not deliberate in the original intention. I mean, I know that the subject is going to be a family. But I don’t know what my initial motivations are. You’re interested in where you’re going. The idea of taking a laborer and having him married to a wife whom he can’t capture is really exciting. I don’t know how you work on that. So I write – I’ll do it any way I can. I’ll hammer it out; I’ll kick it out; I’ll beat it to death – anyway you can get it. I don’t think there are any rules. The only rules are that you do the best you can. And when you’re not doing the best you can then you don’t like yourself. And that’s very individual with everyone.

The preparations for the scripts I’ve written are really long, hard, intense studies. I don’t just enter into a film and say, ‘That’s the film we’re going to do.’ I think, ‘Why make it?’ For a long time. I think, ‘Well, could the people be themselves, does this really happen to people, do they really dream this, do they think this?’ There were weeks of wrestling to get the script right. I knew hard-hat workers like Nick, and Gena knew women like Mabel, and although I wrote everything myself, we would discuss lines and situations with Peter Falk, to get his opinion, to see if he thought they were really true, really honest. The actors discussed the clothes the characters would be wearing, the influence of money on their lives, the lives of the children, why they sleep on the ground floor, etc. Everything was discussed, nothing came from me alone. We write a lot of things that aren’t in the movie, as background. So that when we got to the scene, you might rewrite on the spot, but we might have already gone in three, four, five, seven, eight, nineteen different versions of the scene.

I do a full and total screenplay and then the actors come to me and tell me what they don’t like. We get together for several weeks, in the evenings, for example, and read the script together. We get on well together, we’ve known each other and worked together for a long time. The actors come up with various suggestions and I ask them to write them down because sometimes I don’t understand what they are trying to say. Gena, for example, read the finished script and said, ‘I hate this woman. What does she do? What clothes does she wear?’ I replied that, at this stage, I didn’t care what she wore. But for her this is important; and she’s right, I had given a superficial response.

I try to get deeper into the characters and find out what the actors want to play. In what they want to play, somehow they’re adding to the film. They’re adding their own sense of reality and perceptions I wouldn’t know from my relatively limited point of view. It’s a necessary part of the process for me. If for me a line is right, I won’t let the actors change it, but will allow them latitude in interpretation.
After Minnie and Moskowitz, I thought, ‘All right, I would like to make a picture to really say something.’ The most important thing in my life, in Gena’s life and in the lives of our intimate friends was the idea of marriage. We were deeply concerned with the change in illusions that marriage engenders over a period of years and the overwhelming need to understand the problems of retaining the family. Out of that came the characters, the feelings for the characters and, in a more specific sense, the complex delineation of the woman in the film.

The film was born out of my despair and questioning of the meaning of my life. As I thought about this, and, later, during the filming, I became very conscious of certain problems that were unknown and foreign to me. I’ll use anything I can to straighten out a problem – even write a movie about it. When I finally saw the finished film, I was shocked by the reality of these problems.

Usually we put film in such simple terms while being endlessly involved in talking about our personal experience. We admit how complex it is. But it’s as though we never look into a mirror and see what we are. So the films I make really are trying to mirror that emotion so we can understand what our impulses are; why we do things that get us into trouble; when to worry about it; when to let them go. And maybe we can find something in ourselves that is worthwhile. Look at it this way: if I were writing a picture and I used a situation which none of us were involved in or interested in, then I’d feel ashamed about doing it – and so would everybody else. So I use absolutely everything I can find in our own lives, in our friends’ lives, to make what we’re doing interesting. But you’d better do it honestly, and you’d better cure all those personal problems that might be holding back something you want to say.

I don’t think audiences are satisfied any longer with just touching the surface of people’s lives; I think they really want to get into a subject.

Love within a family is a universal subject, but one that’s always treated lightly. We’ve learned to gossip about life instead of living it. A woman is either a married housewife who is happy or a married housewife who is unhappy. It’s not that simple. It is possible to be married and in love and unhappy too. And love fluctuates. Marriage, like any partnership, is a rather difficult thing. It has been taken rather lightly in the movies. Family life is so different than what has been fed into us through the tube and through radio and through the casual, inadvertent greed that surrounds us. Films today show only a dream world and have lost touch with the way people really are. For me the Longhetti family is the first real family I’ve ever seen on screen. Idealized screen families generally don’t interest me because they have nothing to say to me about my own life.

I spend months and years working out the philosophical intent of each picture. We create such problems in making a film by being so nuts as to say, ‘What’s underneath these characters? What are we really try- ing to say? Why are most movies so exploitative? Why don’t we go in and try to find out what people are really thinking? Even if we don’t know how to answer the question.’ The idea was to take all the experiences that I’ve had, all the family and love that’s been given, all the bitterness – to take all that and say, ‘OK, we’ve had all this,’ and put it all together.

In replacing narrative, you need an idea. What you do is take an idea that you have about a situation and then translate it into a dramatic situation that seems as normal as everyday life so the audience doesn’t see the idea. So it doesn’t show. Of course the idea itself has to be good – it really has to be first-rate. And the idea in A Woman Under the Influence was a concept of how much you have to pay for love. That’s kind of pretentious, but I was interested in it. And I didn’t know how to do it, and none of the other people knew how either, so we had to work extremely hard. But you have to deal with philosophic points in terms of real things. Children are real. Food is real. A roof over your head is real. Taking the children to the bus is real. Trying to entertain them is real. Trying to find some way to be a good mother, a good wife – I think all those things are real. And they are usually interfered with by the other side of one’s self – which is the personal side, not the profound, wonderful side. And that personal side says, ‘Hey, what about me? Yeah, you can’t do this to me.’ But if you’re in the audience, the audience is saying, ‘Hey, what about me?’ All the way through A Woman Under the Influence the characters are not thinking about themselves – and therefore the audience is allowed to ask that because the characters can’t. In that way, the film was a little unreal. Because in life people stop and say, ‘What about me?’ every three seconds.

I knew that love created at once great moments of beauty and that on the other hand it makes you a prisoner. It just seems to me that women are alone and they are made prisoner by their own love. If they commit to something then they have committed to it and it’s a torture. And it’s true. I mean, I see it in my relationship to Gena. Within such a system men have always been in a more favorable position – they are allowed to test themselves against the rest of the world since they are in contact with it. But I feel it too. A man feels that also. And nobody knows how to handle it. Nobody knows how to handle it.

This is complicated in turn by other characters and their lifestyles that come and go within the structure of the film. The interrelations between the characters must not be made too easy; like people in life, each presents unique problems, so that even though they come from the same class background and share similar experiences, problems still arise. To make sure it wouldn’t be sentimental, when I finished the script I crossed out all the references to love except one.

I think we’re just reporters, all of us basically. We report from a certain editorial point of view on what we feel, on what we see and on what is important to us. A story like this is not newsworthy really – it’s not Watergate, it’s not war; it’s a man and woman relationship, which is always interesting to me.

– Extract from Raymond Carney: Cassavates on Cassavetes.

On John Cassavetes’ Style

Faces (Directed by John Cassavetes)

“John Cassavetes’ Faces is the sort of film that makes you want to grab people by the neck and drag them into the theater and shout: "Here!" It would be a triumphant shout. Year after year, we get a tide of bilge that passes for "the American way of life" in the movies.

“We know it isn’t like that. We don’t live that way and neither does anyone we know. What Cassavetes has done is astonishing. He has made a film that tenderly, honestly and uncompromisingly examines the way we really live.

“The central characters are middle-aged, middle-class and rather ordinary: a man and his wife. They have everything in the world they desire, except love and a sense of personal accomplishment. They’ve become consumers in the most cruel sense of that word: Their only identity is as economic beings who earn and spend money to sustain a meaningless existence. They don’t do anything, or make anything, or create anything. They use.

“This is not only a crisis but a trap, because society has left them stranded without any means of breaking out. During a long night when their marriage reaches the breaking point, they discover only two ways to kick loose: alcohol and adultery. One of the problems with this class of society is that it provides so few ways to boil over.”

– Roger Ebert.

“Cassavetes wiped away the old vocabulary of doing films. A lot of this came from his New York actors, the street-life sound, and from the ability the new lightweight equipment gave the filmmaker. When I saw Shadows, with the camera right in that house giving such a direct communication with the human experience, with conflict and love and all of this, it was as if there were no camera there at all, as if you were living with these people. Once we saw that, we all realized that you can’t sit around and talk about making a film, you gotta just go do it. He exemplifies independence: Don’t be taken in by them. Do what you feel, what you feel in your heart. Don’t be cut down. He was like an uncle in the way he talked to you about this.”

– Martin Scorsese.

John Cassavetes took his first serious move towards being an actor in 1949, when he enrolled at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Following graduation, he performed in provincial theatre and enlisted in the Army Reserves, where he was a member of the performing arts organisation. Cassavetes began his career in the early 1950s, landing tiny television parts and appearing in his first credited film, The Night Holds Terror (Andrew L. Stone, 1955). He met Gena Rowlands, who was also a student at the institution, during this period. On 19 March 1954, the two married, and though their partnership was not always easy – professionally or emotionally – it was one of the great cinematic partnerships. From 1954 until 1956, Cassavetes appeared in dozens of television shows, including a notable role in Don Siegel's film Crime in the Streets. Cassavetes was also preparing for his directorial debut prior to securing the main part in the television series Johnny Staccato (1959–60). 

As Cassavetes described it, "Shadows [1959] started as a dream on 13 January 1957 in a New York loft." That loft was home to The Cassavetes-Lane Workshop, a collaborative effort between Cassavetes, theatre director Burt Lane, and a group of young actors who workshopped scenes based on initial character sketches and situations. The objective was to turn these improvisations into a full length film. Cassavetes issued a plea to listeners on Jean Shepherd's Night People radio programme to help finance the production of a film, through donations. While race was a factor in the creation of Shadows, Cassavetes rejected any overt message. While the film's premise was oprn to debate, the creative nature of the endeavour was unmistakable: "it was an experiment throughout, and our primary purpose was to learn," Cassavetes said. 

The film's grainy starkness, improvised dialogue, jerky editing, occasionally incongruous mise-en-scene, and dramatic changes in focus and lighting all contributed to Shadows' energy. The unaffected performances of Ben Carruthers, Lelia Goldoni, and Hugh Hurd – who play a trio of siblings threatened by racial ignorance and the parameters of racial identity – are aided by Cassavetes' penchant for long takes; when a scene went wrong, he would restart it from the beginning to give the actors time to settle in and bring the characters to their fullest realisation. Shadows is unmistakably a film of its day, replete with the urban bustle, banter, and brooding posturing associated with the "Beat Generation." Individuals lecture about art and ruminate about life in this bohemian atmosphere. Sexual and relationship conversations range from casual and unimportant to intense and therapeutic. The film's wider storey is concerned with the instability of family relations, a theme that runs through most of Cassavetes' work. 

Following three preview screenings of Shadows, a 15-day round of reshoots resulted in around an hour of new, more polished content. Some, particularly writer and director Jonas Mekas, who saw and loved the rougher early version, saw the final release as a commercial surrender. Contrary to its finishing title, which implies that the film is an improvisation, the majority of what made it into the final cut was written. While several street shots were shot on the fly, disguising the camera and filming from a distance to avoid being stopped by police due to the crew's lack of permissions, numerous interiors were constructed sets at the Variety Arts studio. The much-lauded aesthetic of the picture was born of necessity and inexperience. “The things for which we were applauded were the ones for which we attempted to cure,” Cassavetes later said. Elsewhere, he said, "We had no idea how to make a film. I never saw myself as a director.” Nonetheless, he was now a director in demand. Cassavetes was quickly and rather unexpectedly awarded a contract with Paramount, which included the option to direct a picture of his choosing with a modest budget, studio staff, and famous cast. Although Too Late Blues (1961) was an attractive project on paper, the six-week production, rigid filmmaking philosophy, and lack of opportunity for spontaneous creativity resulted in a conventional, predictable work.

Despite its production conditions, Too Late Blues carries over a recurring Cassavetes subject from Shadows - that of creative integrity in the face of opposing objectives. This drama about trendy musicians and their professional and personal conflicts is inhabited by rowdy men bound by volatile relationships, as they are so often in Cassavetes' work, who find themselves at odds over individual objectives. Additionally, the extra subplot of a troubled relationship between John "Ghost" Wakefield (Bobby Darin) and Jess Polanski (Stella Stevens) provides surprising sexual candour, but is otherwise clichéd and cold.

Too Late Blues employs a more controlled and balanced approach than Shadows, giving the picture a more consistent, although less energising, visual identity. Even the debates get more sophisticated within the boundaries of the clearly scripted. In contrast to Shadows' narrative variety, with its sometimes shaky but always dynamic structure, Too Late Blues' tempo becomes mired down in forced seriousness. The film makes a determined effort to be trendy, with language that Tom Charity describes as a "self-conscious mixture of jazz jive and hardboiled poetics." However, Marshall Fine says that Too Late Blues seemed "naive and square" even in 1961. In the end, it's a solid sophomore effort, though one that was artistically compromised. 

Cassavetes' follow-up production, A Child is Waiting (1963), was produced by Stanley Kramer, the renowned "problem cinema" producer. With Burt Lancaster and Judy Garland appearing as instructors at a school for the mentally disabled, this is the most apparent example of polished, Hollywood shine in Cassavetes' work. The film's visuals are accompanied by a mournful soundtrack, and though it successfully tugs at the melodramatic heartstrings, its tone is usually subdued. It is also possible that this is Cassavetes' most sentimental work. A less personal endeavour, A Child is Waiting touches on recurring Cassavetes themes, including the search for meaning and purpose in life, the notion of normality in an aberrant world, and the difficult balance between professional obligation and personal emotion. Nonetheless, the picture marked a low point in Cassavetes' unto then, brief career as a filmmaker. Conflicts with the frail Garland, disagreements with Lancaster, and interference from a possessive Abby Mann, the original novel's author, were worsened by subsequent confrontations with Kramer over the final edit. 

Cassavetes' much more distinctive follow-up was a more striking effort – a feature-length home movie funded entirely out of his own earnings. Faces (1968) is a fascinating, uncomfortably personal portrayal of middle-age melancholy and the resulting breakdown of connection. Faces was "a triumph of begging, borrowing, and on occasion, stealing whatever was required to create it." The six-month production (which took place mostly at night to allow everyone to work their day jobs) resulted in 150 hours of video, which was culled from a screenplay that weighed in at roughly 320 pages. Faces came to an end after three years of post-production labour with a rough cut of 230 minutes. Despite its logistical difficulties, Faces benefited from being an entirely autonomous production from conception to finish, which meant no aesthetic sacrifices. 

Faces is Cassavetes at his most emotional. The penetrating titular close-ups of the people at their most energetic establish a deep familiarity via jagged cutting and extremely erratic shot choices. The film's coarseness depicts the manner in which everyone involved behaves. Men may be vulgar, with intermittent and caustic cruelty, while women may be rowdy, with their own social/sexual norms of behaviour. Each group is ready to criticise the other, rather than admitting their own vulnerabilities and frailties. The film is a whirlwind of audiovisual components, making it impossible to discern what is scripted and what are ad hoc digressions. The air is filled with screaming, laughter, enthusiastic gesticulations, and constant movement. The speech loops endlessly in mostly meaningless interactions, and there is no traditional plotline to speak of. Faces, on the other hand, is a character-driven depiction of lives ruled by an ever-changing variety of emotions. Physical and spoken interactions are verbose, and responses are unpredictable, reflecting and affecting the film's formal elements. When merely filming in the trenches of fierce conflict, the turbulence is captured in painful detail and for an extended period of time. The viewer, like the protagonists, is pushed through emotional trauma.

Cassavetes began Faces with no expectations, yet the picture became a box office success, winning multiple accolades and critical acclaim and grossing more than US$8 million. It "offers a very profound dissection of male and female role-playing – and the explosive intensity of honest behaviour when the roles are shed," Fine writes. Cassavetes believed the filmmaking process to be the happiest period of his life.

In the following extract from his book ‘Cassavetes On Cassavetes’ the film critic and writer Raymond Carney discusses Faces interspersed with extracts from John Cassavetes discussing his attitude toward the film.

Raymond Carney: American viewers were divided in their opinion. Though many appreciated Faces, at least as many had major problems with it. One frequently voiced objection was that Cassavetes failed to explain his characters’ motives and the causes of their behavior. As early as Too Late Blues he had argued that he didn’t want to explain too much because the work the viewer had to do was an important part of the experience. Faces went even further in this direction – confounding viewers’ expectations, placing them in a problem-solving stance and forcing them to stay in the flow of experience.

John Cassavetes: The first part of the script was structured very carefully to set up a whole new pattern of thinking so that the audience could not get ahead of the film. Most people think, ‘Oh yes, this is what’s going to happen in the next moment.’ What happens with Faces, though, is that the first half of the film really bugs people because it doesn’t fit an easy pattern of behavior. Well, I don’t know anyone who has an easy pattern of behavior. I know people who are just sensational one minute and absolute bastards the next. Terribly funny one minute and morose the next. And these moods come from specific things that I can’t put my finger on because I don’t know their whole life. And we can’t put their whole life on the screen. So I’ve got to depend on the actor to identify with his role enough that he can express those things. And to get it on the screen is something miraculous.

It’s antagonism. With Faces you’re getting so many vibrations from people and you’re seeing people behave so honestly, when they stop you get irritated. You identify with a character and then he does something you don’t want him to do, it becomes personal. You can’t stand for it not to have the answers every moment. You don’t want to waste your time going through their self-exploration. You want them to get right down to it and give you the answers. Other movies make me bored. I want them to go faster, you know. Hurry up. I want it to go faster because I’m not interested in it. I like things that evolve.

Although at the end of the following statement Cassavetes confuses the 183-minute version of his film with the final edit, his point is still valid.

JC: People prefer that you condense; they find it quite natural for life to be condensed in films. And then you discover that people prefer that because they’ve already caught on to what you wanted to say and are ahead of you. So that there’s a sort of competition between them andyou, and you try to shake them up rather than please them: you show them that you know what they’re going to say so as to be more honest than they can imagine. For example, when Faces opens, the couple are lying in bed, laughing. The audience wants to join them but they’re not included yet. The characters dictate the terms to the audience.

Other viewers were frustrated by Cassavetes’ unwillingness to explain his characters’ problems in psychological terms – holding the viewer on the outside of opaque, impenetrable surfaces. Cassavetes felt that tracing behavior back to psychological causes was to simplify it.

JC: I’m a very literal man. I never look for anything underneath. I don’t know why people always want to understand, work out hidden meaning and motivations. Surely the only reason for trying to work out someone’s motivation is if you’re scared of them. Otherwise you just feel for people, don’t you? You love them or you hate them. This is a film about people’s surfaces, isn’t it?

Another issue for many viewers was what they felt to be Cassavetes’ toughness or cynicism, at least in part because of his avoidance of the stock-in-trade of Hollywood filmmaking: swoony, romantic relationships between characters and between the viewer and a character. Cassavetes readily acknowledged this aspect of his style.

JC: The movie hates ‘sensitivity’. Sensitivity is hypocrisy in the self-pitying way. True sensitivity should be truly honest. That’s what we strove for: brutal, unsentimental honesty.

A related issue was that Cassavetes’ characters almost never verbally expressed love or affection for one another. (Later in life, Cassavetes said he actually went through the scripts of both ‘A Woman Under the Influence’ and ‘Gloria’ and deleted lines of dialogue where a character used the word ‘love’.)

JC: I really resent being liked openly. I don’t find any challenge in being liked. It’s a form of agreement and very often agreement doesn’t really get anywhere. I always feel that when someone says ‘I love you’, they really mean ‘I hate you’. It seems to me something’s wrong when someone has to express that or wants to hear it. It expresses some fear or doubt.

In a parallel vein, the highest compliment Cassavetes could pay his characters was to say that they weren’t ‘sentimental’ – meaning that they didn’t feel sorry for themselves, or stop and bemoan their situation, but gamely ‘went on’, doing the best they could with the hand they were dealt. (He would later argue that that is what made the central character in ‘The Killing of a Chinese Bookie‘ admirable.)

JC: In Faces there’s this scene with Florence, the middle-aged lady, and the hippie. I get a lump in my throat every time I see it. Gets me every time. Here’s this beat-up broad out to seduce a young guy she picked up at a discotheque and she tries everything and doesn’t care how ridiculous or pathetic she looks. She wants this guy and she wants to get him in the sack. I think she might have succeeded if that younger chick hadn’t been there too, all cool and available. The point is the middle-aged lady tried. She fought; she struggled; she wouldn’t give up. Isn’t it better to fight to see your fantasies realized – fight and lose, rather than suffer and dream away in silence? What I love about all of the characters in Faces is that they don’t quit. They will make jackasses of themselves but they try to keep going. It doesn’t matter if you’re wrong if you try.

The excitement of watching Faces is to see a different point of view, not a romanticized point of view like a Hollywood movie would make it or a self-justifying point of view as some other filmmakers might make it, but to see totally unedited behavior, to look at a life experience without any point of view outside of the people themselves. I think that is some- thing different from other movies. It’s fascinating to me. And painful too. I sit there not as the maker of the film. I’m looking at the film as an outsider. Not as a film. I’m relating to certain characters in the thing that are part of me. Some of them behave as I behave. And some don’t. But I like or dislike them not on the basis of my writing, but on the basis of their acting, on the basis of what they mean to me. I don’t think thedirector creates anything. I liken it to a reporter’s function – if it happens, something’s going to come out, and if it’s dull, nothing in the world is going to save it.

Even at the peak of ‘Faces’ success, Cassavetes understood that popularity was a trap.

JC: My films are about personal things – marriages breaking up, love transformed by mutual treachery, the difficulty that two people have in communicating even though they live together. These are the problems which I have tackled and which concern me and concern others. Some- times people find this painful to accept or they think that my ideas are wrong or simply they’re not interested in the difficulties which exist in communicating with others. But I am very interested in this. With my actors I try to explore it and try and relate it to their daily lives. I can’t ask people who are comfortable with their lives, with no problems, to be spectacularly interested in my work. It’s not made to please people. Many press agents told me, ‘For God’s sake, don’t sell the movie on middle age.’ But I’m sure there are some middle-aged people around. I always feel left out of most other movies. They have nothing to do with me.

I don’t care if people like our films or not. As long as I can make these films and say what I want and work with people I love and who are not afraid to express themselves, whether it’s popular or not. If we want to give Faces away to universities, we will do that. If we want to bury the film and never let anyone see it, we can do that. In other words, it’s ours. So that if it plays in a festival, fine. If it doesn’t play in a festival, fine. If people love it, fine. If they don’t, OK too.

– Extract from Cassavetes on Cassavetes, by Raymond Carney.