I could never make an unrealistic type of picture; I cannot work that way, but I admire people who can. I think Frank Capra is wonderful, and I think many of the early Lubitsch films were great. I even admire Dick Powell and his detective stories; he’s wonderfully talented in those areas and it’s a good thing he can make that kind of picture so that we can have a little variety. It would be awfully somber if people made only realistic films. However, that’s the best way I can work and if there’s no market for it then I’ll pack up as it’s the only kind of film I am interested in. I’d rather work in a sewer than make a film I don’t love. If I directed a picture like Return of the Jedi or even worked on one, I would faint – I’d faint and never get up again I’d be so ashamed. If I did The Towering Inferno it’d be all black leader. Nothing. I’d get sick. I’d take the insurance money. I couldn’t do it. I’m not interested in starting fires. I like to feel pain through what really causes pain. I don’t want to frighten people by showing them tragedy. I’ve never seen an exploding helicopter, I’ve never seen anybody go and blow somebody’s head off. So why should I make films about them? But I have seen people destroy themselves in the smallest way. I’ve seen people withdraw. I’ve seen people hide behind political ideas, behind dope, behind the sexual revolution, behind fascism, behind hypocrisy, and I’ve myself done all these things. In our films what we are saying is so gentle. It’s gentleness. We have problems, terrible problems, but our problems are human problems. I like to deal with subjects of divorce, subjects of children being battered. I don’t know – you can say, ‘Please, there is no problem at all, I’m American and I know there’s no problem here, nothing’s ever touched me!’

As Cassavetes worked on the film, Cosmo grew into a reflection on male psychology. In particular, he represented a meditation on aspects of Ben Gazzara’s off-camera personality. Gazzara was similar to Cosmo in many deep and half-veiled respects – most notably in his devotion to living a life of ‘style’ and ‘class’ and his interest in ‘looking good’ and being the center of attention in a group. Cassavetes was fascinated with this aspect of Gazzara’s personality because he shared some of its qualities, including the love of costumes, corsages and limos. (The ‘style’ issue was possibly suggested to Cassavetes by Carver’s Capone, which briefly raises it in a scene in which Capone comically attempts to play golf at a country club.) It’s hard not to see a portrait of Cassavetes’ older brother in Cosmo.

Shortly after he got married in the mid-fifties, Nicholas Cassavetes took a big gamble and left his metallurgist job to become a stockbroker at E. F. Hutton. In 1957, when the market went down, he lost thousands of dollars of his own and his friends’ investments. With the sense of dutifulness that had defined his entire life, he was overcome with feelings of personal responsibility and attempted to make good on many of the losses. He died a short time later, never having finished the repayments. The obvious question is where our responsibilities to others end and our responsibilities to ourselves begin. Cassavetes had been asking it since he created the character of Hugh in Shadows.

At the same time, Cassavetes’ hell never has other people in it. Cosmo is not someone else; he is also a portrait of the artist. Ben Gazzara says that became clear to him one day a few weeks into the shoot when he confessed to Cassavetes that he was having a difficult time bringing his character into focus. Gazzara had agreed to do the film – which after all represented a lot of unpaid work – largely as a personal favor to Cassavetes, and in hopes of recapturing the original Husbands experience, and was finding it very difficult. He told Cassavetes that he was just not having fun and couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for his role. It was just prior to filming the scene in which Cosmo picks up the girls in the limousine, and Cassavetes, crouching on the floor in front of him with a camera, put it down and started talking about the movie as tears welled up in his eyes. (If one needs more evidence of Cassavetes’ identification with his hero, it’s provided by an event that runs throughout the screenplay but was cut from the final film. Every time Cosmo goes into his club, he ‘counts the house’ – something Cassavetes habitually did every time he went to a screening of one of his own films.)

Filmmaking is a craft that I want to keep learning. I’m in love with it and I would make films for nothing, and do, and pay for them myself or with the help of my friends. I don’t feel I have a responsibility to anyone if I’m going to take my own losses. I’ve lived my whole life that way and I am really not afraid. I never mind if Gena thinks I am stupid or outspoken, ruining things for our everyday life. But I would hate it if she thought I was a coward or that I would back down on something to which we had devoted our lives. If you have something to give, you’ve got to fight for it. You really have to fight for it.

Cosmo is trapped in a conformist world. This is somebody who will do anything if enough pressure is put on him. I don’t have a lot of respect for people who buckle under to the conventional non-approach to things. Yet I’ve been plagued by the same temptations: to be liked, to be secure, to be a member of our society. At forty-six, I woke up and found myself part of the Establishment. I don’t want to be a member of the Establishment, but how the hell do you talk about a society you’re not really a part of? Are you above it, so pure and good that you can rationalize the lives of people you don’t know anything about? It’s not unhealthy for me to sometimes want to be a member of society. The picture says something to me: that we might sell anything mindlessly – even our own lives.

In the deepest part of his mind or soul or whatever it is – Cosmo is alone. He is set adrift in a boat, naked in the hot sun. Walking in the desert, drifting in the air without a parachute. He walks and talks like Cosmo . . . but the feel of his body is alien to him. The heart is not his . . . He has gone from the child to the adult and there is no turning back. All the innocence of his previous years seems distant and without recollection of their details. Nothing goes together and yet he can see everything much too clearly. A waitress’s face strikes him . . . the bar looks like it needs to be redone. The bartender moves with too much effort, and sudden insightful flashes of doom wall up his mind. He watches Mr. Sophistication. He views Sherry behind. The comic sings . . . ‘Imagination is funny’ . . . The hard, coarse strains of the too heavy tape hurt his side and he looks down to see blood.

Another respect in which Cassavetes and his protagonist are similar is that they were both interested in the power of art and the imagination to transform reality. The routines Cosmo choreographs and his night out with his girls testify that his real love is not naked bodies but the costumes that adorn them. Cassavetes and Shaw frequented strip-clubs less to see exposed skin than to study the art of concealing it. Cassavetes was, in fact, quite conservative in his attitude toward nudity – in life and in art. There are no ‘love scenes’ in his work and extremely few moments in which you see anyone unclothed. Here and in Love Streams, when it came to playing nude scenes, Cassavetes was extremely deferential to his actresses, never asking them to do anything they were personally uncomfortable with or that would violate their sense of modesty. The reason why the two girls Robert Harmon sleeps with in Love Streams are not naked is that, when they expressed shyness about removing their clothes, Cassavetes allowed them to keep them on. In a similar vein, he told his actors and crew to be extremely respectful when they shot the dressing-room scenes in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. The line – ‘What kind of strip-joint is this? Nobody takes their clothes off’ – was actually something Gazzara improvised on the spot in response to Cassavetes’ decision to allow his actresses to stay clothed for some of the stage acts.

We’re becoming a voyeuristic society. I also think we’re starting to lose faith in the idea that one man and one woman can totally please each other in bed. Sex is becoming something of a community activity; more and more people have to hop into the sack together in order for all of them to achieve sexual satisfaction. That kind of thing finally robs sex of all its delicious and very private pleasures. When sex becomes commonplace, when the girl you want is trying out half your suburban community and the same is true of you, where are the romantic and secret pleasures you need out of sex? I don’t like sex to be ordinary and rational and organized and sane. That was what kept me away from meeting Elia Kazan. As a young man, I saw him with these three girls going upstairs in a club. I never wanted to have anything to do with him after that. Maybe I would have liked him. Maybe I am a prude. But it just shocked me. I want more out of life – more than the knowledge that I can perform.

[...] When you go all the way that way, it isn’t really about making movies anymore. It’s about trying to find yourself, to understand yourself, through a character. Too many actors and directors lie according to fashion. They earn millions of dollars without really knowing why; they listen to advice about payments on a house which they can’t afford, so that in the end they are no longer artists but businessmen. Most people who work for a studio simply want to make financially and critically successful movies. That’s not my goal. My criteria are that I enjoy it, that it puts into question some of the feelings that I or others have, that the actors have good parts and that the characters express themselves with a certain amount of dignity, even if they show themselves in a ridiculous light.

I get up in the morning and I used to be eighteen. I’m not eighteen anymore and ninety per cent of my active life is finished. I always looked young. And suddenly I’m going to be forty-eight. I look at myself in the mirror sometimes and I tell myself, ‘What is this fucking head? Who would have such a face?’ So I understand these kind of feelings. Since I’m not particularly vain, I think of someone who has this sort of vanity, someone who would always have been told that they are what other people see in them. This particularly applies to an actor when you seem to be more than you really are, and nobody really knows you or sees your inside. And I think, ‘That’s a problem worth dealing with.’

The three generations of women were important, because the film really is about women and their points of view as professionals. Here’s an old lady, Joan Blondell, who still has all her life and sexual feelings, which you can see though we don’t go into them; and Gena, who’s a few decades down from Joan; and the young girl, who is really seventeen years old. And these three generations do haunt the waking hours of women: your powers waning, your attractiveness having to be worked on more. I think these are real things, and to put them in terms of this story really gave me fits.