The most interesting acting Cassavetes did during this entire period (and arguably one of the two or three most interesting performances he ever turned in in anyone else’s work) was in a now-forgotten piece: a one-act play by Charles Cohen titled Flip Side, taped in Toronto on 28 September 1963 by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Cassavetes played Jerry Jarvis, a disc jockey who goes to pieces as he spins records and manically interacts with his audience in between calls to his wife to try to keep their marriage from breaking up. One of the most interesting aspects of the piece is that it showcases Cassavetes’ ability to do ‘voices’ – from Edward G. Robinson to Peter Lorre to Bela Lugosi to a Mexican pizza boy. (There was a scene in the shooting script of Husbands in which Cassavetes did a similar cascade of impersonations, but it was cut from the final film; and there is a moment at the beginning of the ‘Etude in Black’ episode he did for Columbo in which he briefly switches into a mock-British accent. He also does a little vocal mimicry in Rosemary’s Baby, Mikey and Nicky and Machine Gun McCain.)

Filmmaking was always personal. Shadows was a reflection on the uncertainties of his own youth; Faces and Husbands were ways of working through questions about middle age. Almost everything Richard and Freddie say and do is anchored in Cassavetes’ real-life relationship with Fred Draper, whom he knew from his AADA days. But the overlap between life and art runs deeper than events. It is as if Cassavetes’ personality (every part of it – from his crazy competitiveness and bravado to his petty jealousies and irrational rages to his feelings of doubt and insecurity) is divided among Faces’ characters and given voice by them. They are versions of him. According to George O’Halloran, there was, in fact, an enchanted evening during the making of the film when, with the whole male cast and crew present in his living room eating and drinking late at night, Cassavetes sat down at the piano and improvised a succession of serenades to each of them one after another, telling each how he was a version of himself – someone he had wanted to be or had been at some other point in his life; someone who had done things he wanted to do; someone who figured a wish, a dream or a secret part of him that no one else knew about.

[...] I was bugged about the millions of middle-class marriages in the United States that just sort of glide along. Couples married ten, fifteen years, husbands and wives who seem to have everything – big house, two cars, maid, teenage kids – but all these creature comforts have made them passive. Underneath, there’s this feeling of desperateness because they can’t connect. I would see married couples who were lying to one another, who had nothing to do with one another in their lives. If their tastes coincided they felt that they were quite remarkable in their marriage. And people would say, ‘Oh, they’re so wonderful together.’ But they come home, they just look at each other and they say, ‘How are you? How was the day? What happened?’ and they have no love. The picture was a plea for returning to some kind of real communication. Most couples aren’t even aware that they can’t communicate. The whole point of Faces is to show how few people really talk to each other. These days, everybody is supposed to be so intelligent: ‘Isn’t it terrible about Nixon getting elected?’ ‘Did you hear about the earthquake in Peru?’ And you’re supposed to have all the answers. But when it gets down to the nitty-gritty, like, ‘What is bugging you, mister? Why can’t you make it with your wife? Why do you lie awake all night staring at the ceiling? Why, why, why do you refuse to recognize you have problems and deal with them?’ The answer is that people have forgotten how to relate or respond. In this day of mass communications and instant communications, there is no communication between people. Instead it’s long- winded stories or hostile bits, or laughter. But nobody’s really laughing. It’s more an hysterical, joyless kind of sound. Translation: ‘I am here and I don’t know why.’

I agree with a lot of what the kids are saying, but it really disgusts me that most white militants hate middle-class people – and are middleclass themselves. That really makes me ill, because those kids ought to understand why their parents are middle-class, know about their parents’ fears; but instead of caring, they’d rather hate. Ideals must be achieved by caring.

The absence of judgments takes us to the very heart of Cassavetes’ genius – and the reason his work confused (and still confuses) many critics and viewers. Faces is not satiric or ironic. It does not mock its characters. Cassavetes does not, in the Altman way, sit in judgment of them, separate from them, superior to them. Like Husbands after it, the film loves its main characters. It sees their problems, but sympathizes with their plights. To a large degree Cassavetes functioned – both in his life and his work – outside the confines of normal judgments of good and evil, better and worse, right and wrong that most of us live our lives within. One might say that, whatever the causes, from a young age Cassavetes freed himself from the ‘censoring’ part of the soul – the part that says not to do something because rules of society or ethics say so. He did not live by customary codes of conduct. That meant that he could be wildly original, iconoclastic and creative at times; but also petty, selfish, cruel and manipulative, apparently without compunction or regret, at other times. There is no reason to mince words about the negative side of Cassavetes’ behavior, since the evidence is abundant in any random selection of Hollywood biographies. He shamelessly tricked, conned and used many of the people around him. He charmed and sweet-talked people when it served his purposes, and bullied or brazenly abused them if they got in his way. He fast-talked his way around problems. He flew into childish rages and threw temper tantrums when things went against him. He was a lot like Freddie, Richard and McCarthy (and like the character he plays in Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky, which I take to be the closest depiction of what his personality was actually like, at least at times).

Just as Cassavetes accepted his own imperfections, and those of his friends, he accepted his characters’. He didn’t ask them to clean up their acts. He respected their emotional disarray. He did not hold their failures of communication against them. He empathized with their struggles. The artistic importance of the result was that in these de-idealizations viewers saw the tortured chambers of their own souls revealed to themselves as if for the first time. [...]

People who are making films today are too concerned with mechanics – technical things instead of feeling. Execution is about eight per cent to me. The technical quality of a film doesn’t have much to do with whether it’s a good film. I feel like vomiting when some director says to me, ‘I got the most gorgeous shot today.’ That is not what’s important. We have to move beyond the current obsession with technique or angles. It’s a waste of time. A movie is a lot more than a series of shots. You’re doing a bad job if all you’re paying attention to is camera angles: ‘All right, how can we photograph it? We’ll get the lab to do some special effects there. Say, let’s use a hand-held camera for this shot.’ You end up making a film that is all tricks, with no people in it, no knowledge of life. There is nothing left for the actor to bring to it, since there is no sense, meaning or understanding of people. How you shoot a film is a diversion. I think anybody can shoot a film. Look at the most commercial things in the world – television commercials. They’re magnifi- cently photographed. What are we wasting our time doing that for? It has nothing to do with life. Now we’re making that a value. Pretty photography is part of our culture. I wanted to do a film that would allow the actors the time and room to act.

Every single person on the picture, in the crew, was an actor. It makes a great difference. Actors really understand actors, and they’re really rooting for them. If something is very difficult for a performer, and the technicians are there, there’s pressure to get on with it; the technicians want to do their job. But if the technicians are actors, they’re not so concerned with being proficient in their technical responsibilities and they watch the performance, and they like it when it’s good. There were times when George Sims or somebody shooting a scene would be laughing so hard that the camera would shake. This didn’t make the actors feel bad; it made them feel good. It made them feel terrific. A man some- times is humorous with a certain person only because that person thinks he is funny. The minute that person doesn’t think he’s funny, there’s an edge taken off the humor. The same way a woman thinks a man is attractive, or a man thinks a woman is attractive. The minute that doesn’t any longer exist, there is a certain area of their relationship that’s cut off. The people that are watching the actual filming and participating in it from the outside are the third character, and they have a definite effect on these performers.

To tell the truth as you see it, incidentally, is not necessarily the truth. To tell the truth as someone else sees it is, to me, much more important and enlightening. It’s what these people are thinking, what they’re feeling. That’s the drama of the piece. Everybody just refers to their own experiences, and they call that truth. Within each person lives an image of himself and the idea is for the actor to bring that out without violating it. I am a moralist in that I believe the greatest morality is to acknowledge the freedom of others; to be oneself and not to be in judgment of others who are different from you. My trouble is that I always see the other fellow’s point of view! Sometimes I want to hit him for it – but at least I see it.

People talk about improvisation as if I say, ‘Everybody does what they want,’ and I take a camera and a movie comes out. It doesn’t work that way. Anybody who knows anything about film knows that’s crazy. Unless you’re shooting a war maybe, and even there you have to look for action. There are no accidents in this sense of the specific. A camera breaking down, a location not available, me being broke – those are accidents! You stay up all night long and worry a film to death. To make the assumption that things just happen like that is amazing to me. It doesn’t happen that way with actors.

After Shadows I realized that things work better when they’re written down beforehand. There are fewer problems. Once the script is written, people can act more freely. Otherwise there’s too much tension. It’s too hard to deal with. What happens is that the audience gets the impression of improvisation because the actors interpret their roles themselves.

The truth of actors’ feelings was used to test the truth of the work. John Marley and Seymour Cassel, in effect, helped to ‘write’ Faces’ ending. As was usual, the final scenes were not worked out until the shoot was almost done. Cassavetes told Cassel he wanted him to ‘squeeze by Marley’ on the stairs as he came up to the bedroom. Cassel expressed shock and said, ‘I’m not going past that guy. I’d be too afraid to. I’d rather take my chances running across the roof and jumping.’ Cassavetes then turned to Marley. When he asked him how he would really respond if he had lived through this series of events, culminating with his wife telling him she hates her life and doesn’t love him, Marley said he would leave, since ‘I would not put up with that shit for more than a minute.’ Cassavetes privately disagreed with the conclusion, but instead of rejecting it outright, said, ‘OK. Let’s try it. Let’s see if it works. Let’s do a rehearsal right now.’ After Marley got slapped by Carlin, he headed down the stairs and out of the house but only got as far as the kitchen before he turned around. The rehearsal revealed an ending very close to the one Cassavetes finally used.

As in Shadows, and as would be the case in all of his subsequent films, Faces’ actors were encouraged to draw on the deepest aspects of their personalities and attitudes in their playing. Cassavetes’ secret to making this work was to operate in such a deep way that the actors didn’t realize what was going on. Their performances became explorations of parts of themselves they didn’t know were there, and which would only be discovered later, if ever. The characters Cassavetes created were sufficiently different from the actors in superficial respects that the actors didn’t recognize the similarity to themselves, which meant that they played their roles unselfconsciously and unguardedly. But, at the same time, the roles tapped into deep structures of feeling and personality that enriched their performances and made them profoundly revealing.

The amateur has no preconceived notions of how it should be done; the professional has: he’s gone to school, learned techniques, knows what will work – his choices, his selections, are usually better. The amateur has no selection: it’s a very pure thing. So the professional gets a little jealous while the amateur begins to pick up a few things. Somewhere in the course of the film they come together and aid each other: the professional takes purity from the amateur, and the amateur takes on a cer- tain amount of professionalism. The professionals set the pace for everyone else so that all actors function the same way on the set. That’s why I like to mix professionals with amateurs in my films: amateurs work amazingly hard. What professionals can give amateurs in the way of help, amateurs can give professionals in the way of inspiration. I think every single person in the world can act. They may not be Garbo, but they can empathize with a character. They don’t need any skill except for living. If he can make someone laugh, or feel emotion in life, he can do it on the screen.

[...] Cassavetes had a falling out with him. Although at that point McEndree had devoted more than two years of his life to Faces, leaving his own family on a farm in Kansas while he worked on the film day and night, first in Los Angeles and subsequently in London (while Cassavetes acted in Rosemary’s Baby), Cassavetes summarily informed him that he was off the film. (As an insight into the way Cassavetes’ mind worked, when his problems with McEndree surfaced during the shoot, he told him that they should ‘use’ their disagreement to deepen their acting in Devil’s Angels.)

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.

My films are about personal things – marriages breaking up, love transformed by mutual treachery, the difficulty that two people have in communicating even though they live together. These are the problems which I have tackled and which concern me and concern others. Sometimes people find this painful to accept or they think that my ideas are wrong or simply they’re not interested in the difficulties which exist in communicating with others. But I am very interested in this. With my actors I try to explore it and try and relate it to their daily lives. I can’t ask people who are comfortable with their lives, with no problems, to be spectacularly interested in my work. It’s not made to please people. Many press agents told me, ‘For God’s sake, don’t sell the movie on middle age.’ But I’m sure there are some middle-aged people around. I always feel left out of most other movies. They have nothing to do with me.

I don’t care if people like our films or not. As long as I can make these films and say what I want and work with people I love and who are not afraid to express themselves, whether it’s popular or not. If we want to give Faces away to universities, we will do that. If we want to bury the film and never let anyone see it, we can do that. In other words, it’s ours. So that if it plays in a festival, fine. If it doesn’t play in a festival, fine. If people love it, fine. If they don’t, OK too.

It isn’t a desperate situation like A Child Is Waiting. These people aren’t trapped, they are always conscious of having a choice. My films strip characters of some of their illusions. Bring them to a little bit of understanding. The people come to some small awareness.

The main problem is finding an area where conflict is real and tangible. Contemporary filmmakers must find new areas of conflict, new kinds of problems. The traditional conflicts of poverty versus riches, of good versus evil, no longer reflect our situation. We’ve reached a state in which we have what we want: enough to eat, a wife, a roof over our heads and acceptance in society. The problem has become, ‘What’s the problem?’ In this country, people die at twenty-one. They die emotionally at twenty-one. Maybe even younger, now. For those of us who are lucky not to die at twenty, we keep on going, and my responsibility as an artist is to help people get over twenty-one. The films are expressive of a culture that has had the possibility of attaining material fulfillment while at the same time finding itself unable to accomplish the simple business of conducting human lives. We have been sold a bill of goods as a substitute for life. What is needed is a reassurance in human emotions; a reevaluation of our emotional capacities.

We always try to think about what was the very best time of our lives. Usually it’s college or something like that. Making Faces was the very best time of my life – because of the people. I’d never met people like that, and I’m talking about every single member of that company and cast, people who made my life really worth living. I never thought once during the whole time we were making that film that there was anything else in the world except those people; they were that devoted and pure. There is a certain desire to making a film, when you really put it in and put it up and you know no limit and you’re really willing to die for the film you’re making. Now that sounds crazy. If you die for your country, it’s not so good, but in film if it’s the last thing you ever do, you want your picture to be done. With that attitude, making it that way, a man moves through life really using himself, really making something of his life.