Cassavetes struggled with the crew throughout the film, since the very way they thought they had to do things were methods he was opposed to. For example, he positively disliked the look of standard studio lighting, indoors and out, because he felt it made colors too garish and faces too bright and too separated from the background. He was so frustrated that for some of the exterior scenes he deliberately sent the lighting men and electricians to the wrong location so that he, Falk, Gazzara and a small group of hand-picked technicians could work in natural light.

He also saved money in a variety of ways. For example, a scene (cut from the final print) early in Husbands involved the three men coming out of Grand Central Station during the morning commuter rush hour. Cassavetes knew that if he got permits, cordoned off the sidewalk and sent the whole crew there it would take days of crowd control and tens of thousands of dollars of paying extras to get the two-minute scene. So, instead, the call sheet for that day’s shooting deliberately misdirected the entire crew to go to 34th Street and Second Avenue, while Cassavetes, Falk, Gazzara and three technicians went to the real location. The camera was positioned by prearrangement on the second-story terrace of a bank across the street from Grand Central; the three actors came out of the station during the rush hour, mingled in with a thousand ‘extras’ who cost nothing, and in an hour Cassavetes got a shot that would have taken three days on a studio shoot. As an illustration of another ingenious economy, following the rushes and supper, Cassavetes, Falk and Gazzara would frequently rehearse a scene at night in their hotel suite so that they could show up on the set the next morning and immediately proceed to shoot the first take without having the crew stand around idle for a minute. The result was that, even with his compulsive overshooting and retakes, Cassavetes was still able to send the crew home by 4 p.m. most days to avoid overtime payments. Rather than being impressed, the crew was extremely upset by this kind of behavior. They absolutely counted on deadtime and overtime, and felt that Cassavetes was cheating them out of wages that were due to them.