The Art of John Cassavetes

The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie (Directed by John Cassavetes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Raymond Carney on John Cassavetes

Paul Schrader: Steps to Writing a Script

Taxi Driver (Directed by Martin Scorsese)

The films of the 1970s, according to the author Robert Kolker, are part of "a cinema of loneliness." Nothing, he believes, better captures contemporary man's loneliness than Taxi Driver. The book's cover depicts Robert DeNiro strolling through New York's streets, past the posters of long-gone porno cinemas that formerly dotted the city's central business district prior to the introduction of the video. 

Since the film's 1976 release, other interpretations have been made. According to some, it is a resctionary and violent picture that conveys a very conservative message. Others regard it as a reflection of the turbulent decade of the 1970s in America, presenting a nightmare vision that ensued following the demise of the hippie dream. The truth is that the film does not provide answers; rather, it raises more questions. 

According to the film's writer Paul Schrader, Travis Bickle – the cab driver played by Robert DeNiro – is not a victim of a socially imposed loneliness or wrath; it is rather an existential type of rage that confronts us with Scorsese's and Schrader's religious crises after they abandoned their studies in theology to pursue careers in film. 

Martin Scorsese's failed attempt to attend Catholic seminary is well known while Paul Schrader was born into a strict Calvinist family where he was not permitted to see films until the age of eighteen. 

“I believe that what makes the film so vivid is what has made all my collaborations with Scorsese so interesting – says Schrader, who has collaborated with the Italian-American director on films such as "Raging Bull" and "The Last Temptation of Christ" – which is that we share a similar moral foundation – a kind of closed-society Christian morality, though mine is rural and Protestant and his is Roman Catholic. 

Scorsese and Schrader's work is frequently described as a quest for atonement. Their troubled and obsessed characters exemplify contemporary man's state of being stuck in his own contradictions. These are characters like Travis who are buried in an urban inferno, continuously battling their sins via a catharsis of violence and horror. 

“At the time I wrote it,” Schrader explains, “I was obsessed with guns, suicidal, drinking heavily, and obsessed with pornography in the manner that a lonely person is.” According to the writer, "all of those elements are included in the script." According to the filmmaker, "the book I reread just before sitting down to write the script was Sartre's Nausea, and if anything serves as a model for Taxi Driver, it is that." 

In his paranoid solitude, Robert DeNiro's character spirals into a violent fantasy that culminates in a bloodletting. Taxi Driver, like "Hardcore" or "Light Sleeper," is an urban epic about vice and evil that contrasts with Travis's quest for purity. These are ethically ambiguous creatures trapped in a neon inferno who battle their own selves in order to transcend their misery and reach some measure of serenity. 

Drawing on his own battle with his demons, Paul Schrader clarified the screenwriting development process in an interview with Richard Thompson from 1976 when ‘Taxi Driver’ had just opened. Below are excerpted comments from that interview. 

Paul Schrader: I think there are three steps to writing a script. First, you have to have a theme, something you want to say. It doesn’t have to be a particularly great thing, but you have to have something that’s bothering you. In the case of Taxi Driver, the theme was loneliness. Then you find a metaphor for that theme, one that expresses it. In Taxi Driver, that was the cabbie, the perfect expression of urban loneliness. Then you have to find a plot, which is the easiest part of the process. All plots have been done; they’re fairly easy, you just work through all the permutations until the plot accurately reflects the theme and the metaphor. You push the theme through the metaphor and you should come out with the plot.

Schrader reveals how he arrived at his plot for ‘Taxi Driver’:

Two things happened which tied the project [Taxi Driver] together: a Harry Chapin song called ‘Taxi,’ in which an old girlfriend gets into a guy’s cab; and [Arthur] Bremer shot [Presidential Candidate, George] Wallace. That was the thread which led to the script. Maybe I shouldn’t admit to this, but why not be honest? After all, there’s really nothing new on the face of the earth.

Elaborating on his method Schrader goes on to explain:

One of the problems with screenwriters is that they think first in terms of plot or in terms of metaphor, and they’re going the reverse way; it’s awfully hard to do. Once you have a plot, it’s hard to infuse a theme into it, because it’s not an indigenous expression of the plot; that’s why you must start with the theme and not the plot.

Metaphor is extremely important to a movie. A perfect example is Deliverance, where you have point A and point B, and four men going from A to B—the first time [theme] for the men, the last time [metaphor] for the river. On the strength of that metaphor, you could put the Marx Brothers in that boat and something would happen. When somebody walks up to you and says, ‘I’ve got a great idea for a Western and this is the twist,’ you know right off the bat that they’re in trouble, because they’re coming at it the wrong way. Maybe they’ll be able to write a novel that sells, make a lot of money, and live in Beverly Hills; but it’s not interesting to me; not something I really care about.

Taxi Driver (Directed by Martin Scorsese)

As Pipeliner [his first script] was falling through, I got hit with two other blows to the body at the same time: my marriage fell through, and the affair that caused the marriage to fall through fell through, all within the same four or five months. I fell into a state of manic depression. I was living with someone at the time, and she got so fed up with me that she split. I was staying in her apartment waiting for the cupboard to run out of food.

I got to wandering around at night; I couldn’t sleep because I was so depressed. I’d stay in bed till four or five P.M. then I’d say, ‘Well, I can get a drink now.’ I’d get up and get a drink and take my bottle with me and start wandering around the streets in my car at night. After the bars closed, I’d go to pornography. I’d do this all night, till morning, and I did it for about three or four weeks, a very destructive syndrome, until I was saved from it by an ulcer; I had not been eating, just drinking.

When I got out of the hospital I realized I had to change my life because I would die and everything; I decided to leave L.A. That was when the metaphor hit me for Taxi Driver, and I realized that was the metaphor I had been looking for: the man who will take anybody any place for money; the man who moves through the city like a rat through the sewer; the man who is constantly surrounded by people, yet has no friends. The absolute symbol of urban loneliness. That’s the thing I’d been living; that was my symbol, my metaphor. The film is about a car as the symbol of urban loneliness, a metal coffin.

I wrote the script very quickly, in something like fifteen days. The script just jumped from my mind almost intact ...When you’re writing films, you’re dealing with a kind of nascent, primitive force that’s alive.

The Yakuza (Directed by Sidney Pollack)

Schrader goes on to recall:

Before I sat down to write Taxi Driver, I re-read [Jean-Paul] Sartre’s Nausea, because I saw the script as an attempt to take the European existential hero, that is, the man from The Stranger, Notes From The Underground, Nausea, Pickpocket, Le Feu Follet, and A Man Escaped, and put him in an American context. In so doing, you find that he becomes more ignorant, ignorant of the nature of his problem. Travis’s problem is the same as the existential hero’s, that is, ‘should I exist?’ But Travis doesn’t understand that this is his problem, so he focuses it elsewhere, and I think that is a mark of the immaturity and the youngness of our country. We don’t properly understand the nature of the problem, so the self-destructive impulse, instead of being inner-directed, as it is in Japan, Europe, any of the older cultures, becomes outer-directed. The man who feels the time has come to die will go out and kill other people rather than kill himself. There’s a line in The Yakuza which says, ‘When a Japanese cracks up, he’ll close the window and kill himself; when an American cracks up, he’ll open the window and kill somebody else.’ That’s essentially how the existential hero changes when he becomes American. There is not enough intellectual tradition in this country, and not enough history; and Travis is just not smart enough to understand his problem. He should be killing himself instead of these other people. At the end, when he shoots himself in a playful way, that’s what he’s been trying to do all along.

- Paul Schrader interviewed by Richard Thompson,  Film Comment magazine, March-April 1976.