Activity

When people were walking out of Husbands and Faces en masse I never felt bad about that because I thought that it was pain that was taking them out of the theater and I thought that it wasn’t the fact that the film was bad. It was that they couldn’t take it without changing their own lifestyles, wh…

[...] The insuperable obstacle was that the contract with Columbia stipulated a maximum 140-minute running time. To achieve it, Cassavetes ultimately had to make enormous block cuts. It was extremely hard for him to make them. At the time, he said ‘the cuts caused me real physical pain, because I l…

[...] Studying the footage, rearranging it and experimenting with the effect of different shot selections, Cassavetes created at least five separate, entirely different edits of the film. One of the reasons he overshot so massively in all of his work was precisely so that he could do this – so that…

Cassavetes struggled with the crew throughout the film, since the very way they thought they had to do things were methods he was opposed to. For example, he positively disliked the look of standard studio lighting, indoors and out, because he felt it made colors too garish and faces too bright and…

I’m a great believer in spontaneity, because I think planning is the most destructive thing in the world. Because it kills the human spirit. So does too much discipline, because then you can’t get caught up in the moment, and if you can’t get caught up in the moment, life has no magic. Without the …