In the discussion of A Woman Under the Influence, I quoted Cassavetes as saying, ‘In replacing narrative, you need an idea.’ There are several themes that link the characters and situations in Opening Night. One is the idea of the kind of weariness that settles in on many professionals as they reach middle-age. In their different ways, Myrtle, Manny and Dorothy are all experiencing feelings of exhaustion, doubt and despair about the value of their lives. They are tired of their own routines, bored with their own successes and cynical about the praise lavished on them. It is not hard to see an autobiographical dimension to this side of the film. Another idea that links the characters is men’s and women’s different responses to aging and feelings of mortality. Manny Victor and Gus Aaron respond by having affairs. Their relationships with younger women are their way of denying their age. Myrtle Gordon, Dorothy Victor and Sarah Goode respond in other ways to their fears of getting old. In the service of exploring the aging theme, Cassavetes methodically compares and contrasts the lives of more than a dozen women of different ages and situations – teenaged, middle-aged and elderly; wives, lovers and loners; childless professionals and fertile earth-mothers. As he always did before he began writing, Cassavetes did ‘research’. He talked to Sam Shaw’s wife, who was in her sixties. Cassavetes called her almost every night for a year on the telephone and talked to her for hours. He watched television talk shows and read women’s magazines. He played bridge in the afternoons with Rowlands, her mother, his mother and anyone else who would join them.

I love spending the afternoon with these women! I never talk. I just sit and listen and smile. They tell me everything! They forget I’m a man! I might as well have a dress on. Then I also read for two years all the women’s pages. Everything is how to be younger. How to stay younger. What is the answer? What is the secret? So we made a film. I’m not afraid of putting in aging. I sit up and watch the morning shows. I was watching people patting people on the cheeks all morning. If I made a movie like that they’d kill me because they’d be so embarrassed. I would never choose that because it’s exploitative. That would be taking somebody and embarrassing them.

The problems with getting old have been talked about forever. Aging is a serious problem. It’s a fear. Somebody reaches forty, it’s a bigger fear. They want to be thirty. Somebody’s thirty, they want to be twenty, you know. So they can have all the access to life. So I think I can make a movie about that and maybe some poor sucker who has the same problem can figure it out. What I am asking is, can we beat that? Can we make it unimportant? Can we put it in perspective? Can we see life? Can we afford to talk about something instead of kidding ourselves?

I think that there’s a pull and a push between whether you’re an individual, as I feel right now, or whether you are a part of society, and I think we are, all of us, pulled and pushed between these two things constantly. And you keep on saying, ‘Do I want to be what I am?’ or ‘Do I want to be part of society?’ Myrtle has two selves. One was that background of Gena Rowlands’ own personal life, of children, family, home, schooling; the problems of who you are and trying to fight for your own individual survival as you do all these other prescribed chores. The other is what you could be if none of these other things existed. The selfish, individual part of the person – your own mind’s eye view of yourself – is to me the epitome of an actress. If you would have no boundaries of commitment, you could then express so much. But in one sense, to me, it’s an anti-art film in that it says if you had your way you wouldn’t express a goddamn thing. If you had your total way. Actors, or writers, have to work under this duress – under a limited duress. You can’t be tortured, your ears can’t be torn off, your mustache pulled out hair by hair.

The film is utterly without interest and the action-centered plot allowed Cassavetes to do almost no memorable acting, with the single exception of his final scene on screen – in which he came up with the idea of playing the most evil lines he has in the entire film with diabolical gentleness. As proof that he was under no illusions about the nature of the project, during a scene in which Amy Irving said she needed a few minutes to ponder the ‘motivation’ for one of her speeches, Cassavetes turned to Kirk Douglas and sarcastically remarked loud enough for everyone to hear: ‘She thinks she’s playing Joan of Arc.’

I think that people are bored with entertainment, but they have nothing else and they would prefer to see something that has to do with their lives. Now, movie companies aim everything at a fourteen-year-old mentality. Well I’m not fourteen and I want to be aimed at too. I want to be told something different. I want to be thrilled by some aspect of life that is a little more important than rock and roll or punk rock. I’m sorry, but that’s the way I feel. There is something more in life besides just getting it off. I’m going to fight for it. It may be a losing cause, but I’ve seen too many artists come out of nothingness to believe that’s true. I would like people to believe that I’m not apologizing for making things that I feel are much, much better intentioned than other things.

I don’t think the path I’ve taken has been a deliberate choice. People do what they’re capable of doing. If I could take a lot of money from studios and enjoy myself at cocktail parties, I probably would make a conscious effort to take that route. I’m just not capable of doing it. My filmmaking is an expensive, personal madness. If I didn’t have friends like Peter and a wife like Gena, it would have been impossible for me. And it’s not possible any longer. It’s just not economically feasible, because it has become such a business. And it’s a hell of an expensive hobby to get into. We continued to do it ourselves on Chinese Bookie and on Opening Night, but it was a tremendous emotional cross to bear and really came too dangerously close to destroying our family.

It was almost comical that he had gained the reputation as the man who worked without a script. Writing had been a passion throughout his life. He wrote and revised dozens of scripts and plays over the course of the next few years, and systematized a practice he had begun more desultorily in the mid-1970s of holding dramatic readings at his house on the weekends. Neither Cassavetes nor Rowlands enjoyed the L.A. party scene, so rather than going out and making the rounds the couple would invite friends like Ben Gazzara, Peter Falk, Meade Roberts, Paul Stewart, Rob Reiner, Elaine May, Carol Kane, Seymour Cassel and Ted Allan to their house to sight-read scripts by Cassavetes and others – new scripts, old scripts, revised scripts, scripts written by friends and acquaintances, and old classics. During the week, when he wasn’t busy acting in someone else’s film, Cassavetes either rewrote the Saturday night material or worked on other scripts in his office.

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 is the basic truth of his life. Whether he is teaching his eight-year-old son, Albie, how to drink beer, wrecking the car of his latest crush, Susan, or getting a hilarious lesson from her mother on how to play the kazoo [in a scene cut from the final film], Robert Harmon enjoys only the emotional novelty of a new situation. As soon as there is the threat of continuity or commitment, Robert flees. Yet he doesn’t kid himself. A piercing self-knowledge is as much a part of Robert Harmon’s strength as his moody, alcoholic self-indulgence is his weakness.

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.

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 going to have to prove yourself. Do it while you’re young and you’ll never regret it.