by
Ray Carney
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If truth be told, it wasn’t entirely Polanski’s problem. Cassavetes was extremely difficult to direct. Everyone who worked with him testified to the fact, even directors who personally liked him and enjoyed his performances. Don Siegel, who was the closest of personal friends and almost always responsive to Cassavetes’ suggestions on the set, was regularly exasperated by his antics. In Siegel’s view, Cassavetes seemed to treat every encounter as a test of his manhood. He seemed to have a chip on his shoulder and a hair-trigger for perceived insults or slights. He positively enjoyed arguing, and treated the most politely framed request as a putative challenge or threat. In short, in his interactions with other men he was, at least at moments, not very different from some of the male characters in Faces.
Hollywood films rely on a distancing strategy that is absent from Faces. They comment on experience; they judge it; they tell us what to think about it; they offer interpretations. Cassavetes doesn’t provide any of these abstract ways of understanding. This is what makes all of his films so emotionally and intellectually demanding (and drives some viewers out of the theater). A viewer is not given a short-cut around unedited, raw experience. He is not given an interpretation that allows him to stand above, beyond or outside of the characters and experiences; he must muddle through them, be involved with them, be actively engaged with them, make sense of them and change his mind about them as he goes along. Faces captures the extent to which Cassavetes honestly enjoyed his characters and appreciated the performances of the actors who played them, without making distancing judgments about them. The result is a movie that takes away the characteristic interpretive ‘aboutness’ of other films and plunges a viewer into an intellectually unglossed, unsimplified, uninterpreted experience. Cassavetes himself felt the difference when he watched Faces.
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[...] Studying the footage, rearranging it and experimenting with the effect of different shot selections, Cassavetes created at least five separate, entirely different edits of the film. One of the reasons he overshot so massively in all of his work was precisely so that he could do this – so that he could change the narrative, the relationships, the emotional through-line and the tones of scenes during the editing process to reflect what he learned in the course of shooting the film or realized as he studied the material in the editing room. Ben Gazzara said he was impatient with Cassavetes and got as angry as he ever got with him over what was wrong with Tanner’s edit, but, though it took him a long time to see it, in the end he realized that, ‘In editing, he went on a voyage of finding the film. You thought you knew what the film was already, but he saw things in it all the time, new and different things, and took the time to explore them.’