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To have a philosophy is to know how to love. And to know where to put it. And to know the importance of friendships and the importance of continuity. And all the other philosophies, negative philosophies, seem to be a more modern bastardization of what philosophy is. And I don’t think a person can …

To Rowlands: Make them laugh. Do anything you can to get them to laugh. Don’t worry. You can do it.

To Cassel and Blewitt: Whatever you do, don’t laugh! Act any way you want to, but whatever Gena does, please don’t laugh.

JC: [an aside] I don’t direct. I set up situations and sometimes they w…

A young man shouldn’t worry about being suckled, he should just go out and be a man. Go into a diner and sit down with a bunch of hardhats. Sit there and drink coffee with them and feel your manhood with them. Go to all the places you’re uncomfortable in and prove yourself, because someday you’re g…

In Cassavetes’ view, melodrama was the opposite of this indomitability. Melodrama was characters stopping to feel sorry for themselves – like Lelia or Bennie in Shadows or Zelmo in Minnie and Moskowitz – but was something his most interesting figures never do.

Robert Harmon, on the other hand, has intentionally tried never to have a center. He is a famous writer of bestselling books about lonely women – hookers, singers and the night life. But lonely desperation has become his life as well as his subject. He is in flight from the withering emptiness that…