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.)