The world is so downbeat, so cynical; people want something to believe in. At least, people do deep down, but they’re afraid to admit to humanities out loud for fear their friends and neighbors will think they are ‘square’. I get awfully sick of the mass flip attitude. I wish we weren’t so hard-boiled. The human spirit is really at a dangerously low ebb. We need to pump adrenaline into our sentimental values, which have become so badly depleted. In this age of war fears, the destruction of everything and the fantastic progress of scientific wonders, we seem to have adopted only the rasping emotions of nerves for feelings – not emotions of the heart and soul that speak for faith and kindness and understanding. There is something important in people, something that’s dying – the senses, a universal thing. We can’t agree on politics, but maybe we can agree on senses. We are dying of sadness. The whole world is dying of sadness. We are the enemy.

People don’t want to say, ‘Yes, we are confused; we are nothing.’ It destroys all kinds of entertainment. If you really observe and put within the framework of the story some more important facet of life, if you say something that is a positive statement rather than a negative one, you have confirmed somebody’s belief. If you affirm somebody’s emotion or ideas, they don’t feel ashamed of feeling this belief. I want to stress the indomitable qualities of people, not the defeatism. Too Late Blues is a compassionate picture about people in combat with life.

Look, I admit it. I was difficult. I love to be liked, but I’ll fight anybody who tries to stop me from doing what I want to do. I’m a bigmouth. A troublemaker. Temperamental. I only care about people who care about their work. Sure, Kramer and I are now enemies. But it was good for my self-respect to fight him every inch of the way. I lost, but he’ll think twice before hiring a young director again. It’s a question of manhood. When a director works for someone, he always feels as if he is bought. You say to yourself, ‘I’m the director and I’m in charge,’ but in most cases it just simply isn’t true. So when a producer, a star, an executive steps on your toes, it’s not so much that he is interfering with your artistic judgment, but that he is making you feel less of a man if you give in, let it go. So there are battles with studio heads and producers. The pleasure I get after a confrontation is to say to myself, ‘Listen, I’m a man. I stood up for it. I can be fired. I can win or lose, but at least I said what I had to say at the right time.’ I don’t really hate Kramer anymore, though. If I’d been open enough with myself, I would have known he and I never could have dealt on the same level. I discovered something about myself, something I should have found earlier: I could no longer compromise. I wasn’t about to make another film where we didn’t say something real. If I had to describe his style of filmmaking in two words, it would be safe controversy. It didn’t say anything about the people we were talking about.

You have to fight every day to stop censoring yourself. And you never have anyone else to blame when you do. What happens to artists is that it’s not that somebody’s standing in their way, it’s that their own selves are standing in their way. There is a compromise made if you work on a commercial film and the compromise really isn’t how or what you do, the techniques you use, or even the content, but really the compromise is beginning to feel a lack of confidence in your innermost thoughts. And if you don’t put these innermost thoughts on the screen then you are looking down on not only your audience but the people you work with, and that’s what makes so many people working out there unhappy. They say, ‘Well, I’ll make a lot of money and then I’ll come back and do this later on,’ and the truth of the matter is, of course, that they never do. These innermost thoughts become less and less a part of you and once you lose them then you don’t have anything else. I don’t think anyone does it purposely, it’s just that a lot of people are not aware of losing these things. I found myself losing them too, and then suddenly I woke up and by accident, by sheer accident of not getting along with something, something inside, you know, you say, ‘No, I must struggle with this thing,’ without any knowledge of what it is making you do this. You fight and consequently you don’t work and when you don’t work you go back and reevaluate yourself, reevaluate your life, your relationship to the world or whatever it is that’s important to you. In that period of time I gathered a great deal of food, not energy anymore out of my youth, not a feeling of wanting to conquer anything, not ‘Yes, it can be done, let’s do it, what’s the problem?’ but a feeling of saying that so many people have so much to say and there are so many really worthwhile things to say that it seems impossible that we could cut ourselves off from this whole avenue of enormous excitement.

The most interesting acting Cassavetes did during this entire period (and arguably one of the two or three most interesting performances he ever turned in in anyone else’s work) was in a now-forgotten piece: a one-act play by Charles Cohen titled Flip Side, taped in Toronto on 28 September 1963 by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Cassavetes played Jerry Jarvis, a disc jockey who goes to pieces as he spins records and manically interacts with his audience in between calls to his wife to try to keep their marriage from breaking up. One of the most interesting aspects of the piece is that it showcases Cassavetes’ ability to do ‘voices’ – from Edward G. Robinson to Peter Lorre to Bela Lugosi to a Mexican pizza boy. (There was a scene in the shooting script of Husbands in which Cassavetes did a similar cascade of impersonations, but it was cut from the final film; and there is a moment at the beginning of the ‘Etude in Black’ episode he did for Columbo in which he briefly switches into a mock-British accent. He also does a little vocal mimicry in Rosemary’s Baby, Mikey and Nicky and Machine Gun McCain.)

Filmmaking was always personal. Shadows was a reflection on the uncertainties of his own youth; Faces and Husbands were ways of working through questions about middle age. Almost everything Richard and Freddie say and do is anchored in Cassavetes’ real-life relationship with Fred Draper, whom he knew from his AADA days. But the overlap between life and art runs deeper than events. It is as if Cassavetes’ personality (every part of it – from his crazy competitiveness and bravado to his petty jealousies and irrational rages to his feelings of doubt and insecurity) is divided among Faces’ characters and given voice by them. They are versions of him. According to George O’Halloran, there was, in fact, an enchanted evening during the making of the film when, with the whole male cast and crew present in his living room eating and drinking late at night, Cassavetes sat down at the piano and improvised a succession of serenades to each of them one after another, telling each how he was a version of himself – someone he had wanted to be or had been at some other point in his life; someone who had done things he wanted to do; someone who figured a wish, a dream or a secret part of him that no one else knew about.

[...] I was bugged about the millions of middle-class marriages in the United States that just sort of glide along. Couples married ten, fifteen years, husbands and wives who seem to have everything – big house, two cars, maid, teenage kids – but all these creature comforts have made them passive. Underneath, there’s this feeling of desperateness because they can’t connect. I would see married couples who were lying to one another, who had nothing to do with one another in their lives. If their tastes coincided they felt that they were quite remarkable in their marriage. And people would say, ‘Oh, they’re so wonderful together.’ But they come home, they just look at each other and they say, ‘How are you? How was the day? What happened?’ and they have no love. The picture was a plea for returning to some kind of real communication. Most couples aren’t even aware that they can’t communicate. The whole point of Faces is to show how few people really talk to each other. These days, everybody is supposed to be so intelligent: ‘Isn’t it terrible about Nixon getting elected?’ ‘Did you hear about the earthquake in Peru?’ And you’re supposed to have all the answers. But when it gets down to the nitty-gritty, like, ‘What is bugging you, mister? Why can’t you make it with your wife? Why do you lie awake all night staring at the ceiling? Why, why, why do you refuse to recognize you have problems and deal with them?’ The answer is that people have forgotten how to relate or respond. In this day of mass communications and instant communications, there is no communication between people. Instead it’s long- winded stories or hostile bits, or laughter. But nobody’s really laughing. It’s more an hysterical, joyless kind of sound. Translation: ‘I am here and I don’t know why.’

I agree with a lot of what the kids are saying, but it really disgusts me that most white militants hate middle-class people – and are middleclass themselves. That really makes me ill, because those kids ought to understand why their parents are middle-class, know about their parents’ fears; but instead of caring, they’d rather hate. Ideals must be achieved by caring.

The absence of judgments takes us to the very heart of Cassavetes’ genius – and the reason his work confused (and still confuses) many critics and viewers. Faces is not satiric or ironic. It does not mock its characters. Cassavetes does not, in the Altman way, sit in judgment of them, separate from them, superior to them. Like Husbands after it, the film loves its main characters. It sees their problems, but sympathizes with their plights. To a large degree Cassavetes functioned – both in his life and his work – outside the confines of normal judgments of good and evil, better and worse, right and wrong that most of us live our lives within. One might say that, whatever the causes, from a young age Cassavetes freed himself from the ‘censoring’ part of the soul – the part that says not to do something because rules of society or ethics say so. He did not live by customary codes of conduct. That meant that he could be wildly original, iconoclastic and creative at times; but also petty, selfish, cruel and manipulative, apparently without compunction or regret, at other times. There is no reason to mince words about the negative side of Cassavetes’ behavior, since the evidence is abundant in any random selection of Hollywood biographies. He shamelessly tricked, conned and used many of the people around him. He charmed and sweet-talked people when it served his purposes, and bullied or brazenly abused them if they got in his way. He fast-talked his way around problems. He flew into childish rages and threw temper tantrums when things went against him. He was a lot like Freddie, Richard and McCarthy (and like the character he plays in Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky, which I take to be the closest depiction of what his personality was actually like, at least at times).

Just as Cassavetes accepted his own imperfections, and those of his friends, he accepted his characters’. He didn’t ask them to clean up their acts. He respected their emotional disarray. He did not hold their failures of communication against them. He empathized with their struggles. The artistic importance of the result was that in these de-idealizations viewers saw the tortured chambers of their own souls revealed to themselves as if for the first time. [...]

People who are making films today are too concerned with mechanics – technical things instead of feeling. Execution is about eight per cent to me. The technical quality of a film doesn’t have much to do with whether it’s a good film. I feel like vomiting when some director says to me, ‘I got the most gorgeous shot today.’ That is not what’s important. We have to move beyond the current obsession with technique or angles. It’s a waste of time. A movie is a lot more than a series of shots. You’re doing a bad job if all you’re paying attention to is camera angles: ‘All right, how can we photograph it? We’ll get the lab to do some special effects there. Say, let’s use a hand-held camera for this shot.’ You end up making a film that is all tricks, with no people in it, no knowledge of life. There is nothing left for the actor to bring to it, since there is no sense, meaning or understanding of people. How you shoot a film is a diversion. I think anybody can shoot a film. Look at the most commercial things in the world – television commercials. They’re magnifi- cently photographed. What are we wasting our time doing that for? It has nothing to do with life. Now we’re making that a value. Pretty photography is part of our culture. I wanted to do a film that would allow the actors the time and room to act.