[...] To an interviewer who visited the workshop, Cassavetes somewhat vaguely described the classes as being designed to teach students to act ‘naturally’, so that their work didn’t look ‘staged’ or ‘artificial’. He said his goal was to bring ‘realism’ back to acting, and that the highest compliment that could possibly be paid to one of his actors was to say that he or she didn’t appear to be ‘acting’, but simply ‘living’ his character. The journalist regarded the explanation as fairly trite until Cas- savetes added that the ‘artificiality’ of the expression of emotion was more than a dramatic problem. It was a problem in life. The young actor argued that most lived experiences were as ‘staged’ and ‘artificial’ as most dramatic experiences, and that the real problem ‘for modern man’ (as Cassavetes inflatedly put it) was ‘breaking free from conventions and learning how to really feel again’. It was a daring leap: lived experience could be as much a product of convention as dramatic experience, and in fact the one sort of convention could be the subject of the other. It was the first and most succinct statement of the subject of Shadows and all of Cassavetes’ later work.

The workshop was founded as a conscious alternative to the Actors Studio. Cassavetes had both personal and intellectual differences with Lee Strasberg’s group. To start with, he was resentful about the power the Studio exerted over casting directors, which he felt was what had held him back early in his career. He was also scornful of what he called the ‘guru’ aspects of the Studio and pointedly described his and Lane’s school as ‘anti-guru’. He felt that the Method was more a form of psychotherapy than acting, and believed that although figures like Clift, Brando and Dean had had a salutary influence on acting in the late forties and early fifties, by the mid-fifties the Method had hardened into a received style that was as rigid, unimaginative and boring as the styles it had replaced ten years earlier. The slouch, shuffle, furrow and stammer had been turned into recipes for profundity. The actor filled the character up with his own self-indulgent emotions and narcissistic fantasies. (The dismissive term Cassavetes and Lane used to described this process was ‘organized introversion’.) Normal, healthy, extroverted social and sexual expression between men and women dropped out of drama. Inward-turned neuroticism became equated with truth. The result was lazy, sentimental acting.