McSorley gave Cassavetes a crash-course in screenwriting, and the two men worked together intermittently over the next five years on a variety of projects. Cassavetes later said that McSorley taught him the three most important things he knew: 1) that character was more important than plot, and that the most important thing of all was to present characters truthfully; 2) that the artist should not explain or define too much, or ‘do too much thinking for the audience’, but that the story should ‘evolve, so that people could understand it only gradually as it went along’; 3) that ‘style is truth’ and all that really mattered was that every scene should be as true to life, truthful about the characters and their real feelings and behavior, as possible.

If a man gets paid, say, $300,000 for directing a picture, it is hard for him not to compromise. When you work in a major studio, when the studio owns the story, you have to be very clear in your own mind why you are there. If you are there primarily to make money, then compromise is all right, in fact it becomes obligatory. In my case, I have to know when to draw the line, and I have to be prepared to quit at any time. If I am prepared to quit rather than give in to changes, then I am safe. It is only when you are not prepared to do this that you are in trouble. I don’t want to get into a thing about New York and Hollywood. Gena and I like it here, the swimming pools and all that, but it makes it harder to fight. A movie or TV producer calls you into his office and pleads with you not to do this or that. It is too controversial, not commercial. You think of the life out here, then wind up doing something he wants you to do. They have a wonderful way of just simply saying no and then inviting you to go out and play golf with them later on, or to dinner that same night. So, it becomes very, very difficult to fight with personal friends.

The world is so downbeat, so cynical; people want something to believe in. At least, people do deep down, but they’re afraid to admit to humanities out loud for fear their friends and neighbors will think they are ‘square’. I get awfully sick of the mass flip attitude. I wish we weren’t so hard-boiled. The human spirit is really at a dangerously low ebb. We need to pump adrenaline into our sentimental values, which have become so badly depleted. In this age of war fears, the destruction of everything and the fantastic progress of scientific wonders, we seem to have adopted only the rasping emotions of nerves for feelings – not emotions of the heart and soul that speak for faith and kindness and understanding. There is something important in people, something that’s dying – the senses, a universal thing. We can’t agree on politics, but maybe we can agree on senses. We are dying of sadness. The whole world is dying of sadness. We are the enemy.

People don’t want to say, ‘Yes, we are confused; we are nothing.’ It destroys all kinds of entertainment. If you really observe and put within the framework of the story some more important facet of life, if you say something that is a positive statement rather than a negative one, you have confirmed somebody’s belief. If you affirm somebody’s emotion or ideas, they don’t feel ashamed of feeling this belief. I want to stress the indomitable qualities of people, not the defeatism. Too Late Blues is a compassionate picture about people in combat with life.

Look, I admit it. I was difficult. I love to be liked, but I’ll fight anybody who tries to stop me from doing what I want to do. I’m a bigmouth. A troublemaker. Temperamental. I only care about people who care about their work. Sure, Kramer and I are now enemies. But it was good for my self-respect to fight him every inch of the way. I lost, but he’ll think twice before hiring a young director again. It’s a question of manhood. When a director works for someone, he always feels as if he is bought. You say to yourself, ‘I’m the director and I’m in charge,’ but in most cases it just simply isn’t true. So when a producer, a star, an executive steps on your toes, it’s not so much that he is interfering with your artistic judgment, but that he is making you feel less of a man if you give in, let it go. So there are battles with studio heads and producers. The pleasure I get after a confrontation is to say to myself, ‘Listen, I’m a man. I stood up for it. I can be fired. I can win or lose, but at least I said what I had to say at the right time.’ I don’t really hate Kramer anymore, though. If I’d been open enough with myself, I would have known he and I never could have dealt on the same level. I discovered something about myself, something I should have found earlier: I could no longer compromise. I wasn’t about to make another film where we didn’t say something real. If I had to describe his style of filmmaking in two words, it would be safe controversy. It didn’t say anything about the people we were talking about.

You have to fight every day to stop censoring yourself. And you never have anyone else to blame when you do. What happens to artists is that it’s not that somebody’s standing in their way, it’s that their own selves are standing in their way. There is a compromise made if you work on a commercial film and the compromise really isn’t how or what you do, the techniques you use, or even the content, but really the compromise is beginning to feel a lack of confidence in your innermost thoughts. And if you don’t put these innermost thoughts on the screen then you are looking down on not only your audience but the people you work with, and that’s what makes so many people working out there unhappy. They say, ‘Well, I’ll make a lot of money and then I’ll come back and do this later on,’ and the truth of the matter is, of course, that they never do. These innermost thoughts become less and less a part of you and once you lose them then you don’t have anything else. I don’t think anyone does it purposely, it’s just that a lot of people are not aware of losing these things. I found myself losing them too, and then suddenly I woke up and by accident, by sheer accident of not getting along with something, something inside, you know, you say, ‘No, I must struggle with this thing,’ without any knowledge of what it is making you do this. You fight and consequently you don’t work and when you don’t work you go back and reevaluate yourself, reevaluate your life, your relationship to the world or whatever it is that’s important to you. In that period of time I gathered a great deal of food, not energy anymore out of my youth, not a feeling of wanting to conquer anything, not ‘Yes, it can be done, let’s do it, what’s the problem?’ but a feeling of saying that so many people have so much to say and there are so many really worthwhile things to say that it seems impossible that we could cut ourselves off from this whole avenue of enormous excitement.