Every single person on the picture, in the crew, was an actor. It makes a great difference. Actors really understand actors, and they’re really rooting for them. If something is very difficult for a performer, and the technicians are there, there’s pressure to get on with it; the technicians want to do their job. But if the technicians are actors, they’re not so concerned with being proficient in their technical responsibilities and they watch the performance, and they like it when it’s good. There were times when George Sims or somebody shooting a scene would be laughing so hard that the camera would shake. This didn’t make the actors feel bad; it made them feel good. It made them feel terrific. A man some- times is humorous with a certain person only because that person thinks he is funny. The minute that person doesn’t think he’s funny, there’s an edge taken off the humor. The same way a woman thinks a man is attractive, or a man thinks a woman is attractive. The minute that doesn’t any longer exist, there is a certain area of their relationship that’s cut off. The people that are watching the actual filming and participating in it from the outside are the third character, and they have a definite effect on these performers.

To tell the truth as you see it, incidentally, is not necessarily the truth. To tell the truth as someone else sees it is, to me, much more important and enlightening. It’s what these people are thinking, what they’re feeling. That’s the drama of the piece. Everybody just refers to their own experiences, and they call that truth. Within each person lives an image of himself and the idea is for the actor to bring that out without violating it. I am a moralist in that I believe the greatest morality is to acknowledge the freedom of others; to be oneself and not to be in judgment of others who are different from you. My trouble is that I always see the other fellow’s point of view! Sometimes I want to hit him for it – but at least I see it.

People talk about improvisation as if I say, ‘Everybody does what they want,’ and I take a camera and a movie comes out. It doesn’t work that way. Anybody who knows anything about film knows that’s crazy. Unless you’re shooting a war maybe, and even there you have to look for action. There are no accidents in this sense of the specific. A camera breaking down, a location not available, me being broke – those are accidents! You stay up all night long and worry a film to death. To make the assumption that things just happen like that is amazing to me. It doesn’t happen that way with actors.

After Shadows I realized that things work better when they’re written down beforehand. There are fewer problems. Once the script is written, people can act more freely. Otherwise there’s too much tension. It’s too hard to deal with. What happens is that the audience gets the impression of improvisation because the actors interpret their roles themselves.

The truth of actors’ feelings was used to test the truth of the work. John Marley and Seymour Cassel, in effect, helped to ‘write’ Faces’ ending. As was usual, the final scenes were not worked out until the shoot was almost done. Cassavetes told Cassel he wanted him to ‘squeeze by Marley’ on the stairs as he came up to the bedroom. Cassel expressed shock and said, ‘I’m not going past that guy. I’d be too afraid to. I’d rather take my chances running across the roof and jumping.’ Cassavetes then turned to Marley. When he asked him how he would really respond if he had lived through this series of events, culminating with his wife telling him she hates her life and doesn’t love him, Marley said he would leave, since ‘I would not put up with that shit for more than a minute.’ Cassavetes privately disagreed with the conclusion, but instead of rejecting it outright, said, ‘OK. Let’s try it. Let’s see if it works. Let’s do a rehearsal right now.’ After Marley got slapped by Carlin, he headed down the stairs and out of the house but only got as far as the kitchen before he turned around. The rehearsal revealed an ending very close to the one Cassavetes finally used.

As in Shadows, and as would be the case in all of his subsequent films, Faces’ actors were encouraged to draw on the deepest aspects of their personalities and attitudes in their playing. Cassavetes’ secret to making this work was to operate in such a deep way that the actors didn’t realize what was going on. Their performances became explorations of parts of themselves they didn’t know were there, and which would only be discovered later, if ever. The characters Cassavetes created were sufficiently different from the actors in superficial respects that the actors didn’t recognize the similarity to themselves, which meant that they played their roles unselfconsciously and unguardedly. But, at the same time, the roles tapped into deep structures of feeling and personality that enriched their performances and made them profoundly revealing.

The amateur has no preconceived notions of how it should be done; the professional has: he’s gone to school, learned techniques, knows what will work – his choices, his selections, are usually better. The amateur has no selection: it’s a very pure thing. So the professional gets a little jealous while the amateur begins to pick up a few things. Somewhere in the course of the film they come together and aid each other: the professional takes purity from the amateur, and the amateur takes on a cer- tain amount of professionalism. The professionals set the pace for everyone else so that all actors function the same way on the set. That’s why I like to mix professionals with amateurs in my films: amateurs work amazingly hard. What professionals can give amateurs in the way of help, amateurs can give professionals in the way of inspiration. I think every single person in the world can act. They may not be Garbo, but they can empathize with a character. They don’t need any skill except for living. If he can make someone laugh, or feel emotion in life, he can do it on the screen.

[...] Cassavetes had a falling out with him. Although at that point McEndree had devoted more than two years of his life to Faces, leaving his own family on a farm in Kansas while he worked on the film day and night, first in Los Angeles and subsequently in London (while Cassavetes acted in Rosemary’s Baby), Cassavetes summarily informed him that he was off the film. (As an insight into the way Cassavetes’ mind worked, when his problems with McEndree surfaced during the shoot, he told him that they should ‘use’ their disagreement to deepen their acting in Devil’s Angels.)

If truth be told, it wasn’t entirely Polanski’s problem. Cassavetes was extremely difficult to direct. Everyone who worked with him testified to the fact, even directors who personally liked him and enjoyed his performances. Don Siegel, who was the closest of personal friends and almost always responsive to Cassavetes’ suggestions on the set, was regularly exasperated by his antics. In Siegel’s view, Cassavetes seemed to treat every encounter as a test of his manhood. He seemed to have a chip on his shoulder and a hair-trigger for perceived insults or slights. He positively enjoyed arguing, and treated the most politely framed request as a putative challenge or threat. In short, in his interactions with other men he was, at least at moments, not very different from some of the male characters in Faces.

Hollywood films rely on a distancing strategy that is absent from Faces. They comment on experience; they judge it; they tell us what to think about it; they offer interpretations. Cassavetes doesn’t provide any of these abstract ways of understanding. This is what makes all of his films so emotionally and intellectually demanding (and drives some viewers out of the theater). A viewer is not given a short-cut around unedited, raw experience. He is not given an interpretation that allows him to stand above, beyond or outside of the characters and experiences; he must muddle through them, be involved with them, be actively engaged with them, make sense of them and change his mind about them as he goes along. Faces captures the extent to which Cassavetes honestly enjoyed his characters and appreciated the performances of the actors who played them, without making distancing judgments about them. The result is a movie that takes away the characteristic interpretive ‘aboutness’ of other films and plunges a viewer into an intellectually unglossed, unsimplified, uninterpreted experience. Cassavetes himself felt the difference when he watched Faces.

It isn’t a desperate situation like A Child Is Waiting. These people aren’t trapped, they are always conscious of having a choice. My films strip characters of some of their illusions. Bring them to a little bit of understanding. The people come to some small awareness.

The main problem is finding an area where conflict is real and tangible. Contemporary filmmakers must find new areas of conflict, new kinds of problems. The traditional conflicts of poverty versus riches, of good versus evil, no longer reflect our situation. We’ve reached a state in which we have what we want: enough to eat, a wife, a roof over our heads and acceptance in society. The problem has become, ‘What’s the problem?’ In this country, people die at twenty-one. They die emotionally at twenty-one. Maybe even younger, now. For those of us who are lucky not to die at twenty, we keep on going, and my responsibility as an artist is to help people get over twenty-one. The films are expressive of a culture that has had the possibility of attaining material fulfillment while at the same time finding itself unable to accomplish the simple business of conducting human lives. We have been sold a bill of goods as a substitute for life. What is needed is a reassurance in human emotions; a reevaluation of our emotional capacities.

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. Sometimes 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.