We made the picture as a feeling about men and what men do and how they won’t give in to the world they live in. We’d like to take people on our trip with us, to break all the conventions that bug us without being moralists about anything. We rejected the idea of delivering any kind of ‘message’. From the very beginning we made a pact that we would try to find whatever truth was left in ourselves and talk about that. Sometimes the scenes would reflect things that we didn’t like to find out: how idiotic we were or how little we had to do with ourselves, how uptight we were. We felt that it was important to find a way to have the courage to put that out on the line for whatever it was, even if the picture itself would not be exciting. One of the reasons we did that is because, I think, all three of us felt one thing, and one thing very strongly. That was the idea that there wasn’t enough individual expression, bad or good. We wanted to break down every convention that had restricted us in the past.

I’m a great believer in spontaneity, because I think planning is the most destructive thing in the world. Because it kills the human spirit. So does too much discipline, because then you can’t get caught up in the moment, and if you can’t get caught up in the moment, life has no magic. Without the magic, we might as well all give up and admit we’re going to be dead in a few years. We need magic in our lives to take us away from those realities. The hope is that people stay crazy. It’s really no fun to work with sane people, people who have a set way of doing things. On the other hand, we never drank on Husbands. I mean, we never did anything on Husbands! We were the soberest crew in the world and it was a very rowdy picture and people thought we were drinking and drugging or whatever we were doing. You know, they thought we were going crazy but we weren’t.

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.

[...] 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.’

[...] The insuperable obstacle was that the contract with Columbia stipulated a maximum 140-minute running time. To achieve it, Cassavetes ultimately had to make enormous block cuts. It was extremely hard for him to make them. At the time, he said ‘the cuts caused me real physical pain, because I loved the scenes so much’. (The reason he compressed the credits onto two title cards in the release print was in a desperate attempt to save every possible second of actual film.) Years later, Cassavetes expressed regret that he had not torn up the contract and gone with the long version.

When people were walking out of Husbands and Faces en masse I never felt bad about that because I thought that it was pain that was taking them out of the theater and I thought that it wasn’t the fact that the film was bad. It was that they couldn’t take it without changing their own lifestyles, which made both those films very successful to me. I thought at the time that Husbands was anti the lifestyle of almost everyone in America. We presented a lifestyle that went against their lifestyle. People walked out because they didn’t want to accept the fact that there could be anything wrong with the way they lived their lives.

It doesn’t matter whether audiences like it; it matters whether they feel something. I feel I’ve succeeded if I make them feel something – anything. The hope is that you don’t make it so easy for an audience that when they go to your movie they have nothing to think about except, ‘That was wonderful. Good. Next! What else are you going to entertain my great appetite with?’ I want to make you mad. Yeah, that’s going to take longer. And yeah, when we have it we’ll let you know, I mean. And we’ll put it there.

I’ve often been criticized for the unnecessary length of some of the
scenes in both Faces and Husbands. In some ways the length of the
scenes and duration of the shots are accidents in that they weren’t
planned before we actually shot them. But they are important to the
effect. I want to give the actors enough time to allow them to express
what they are feeling in a scene – I don’t want them to have to keep
down their energy or curtail their performances. The length of the
scenes allows us to capture reactions and behaviors that might never
take place if it didn’t go on and on. The pacing conforms to the time real
emotions take to happen. The scenes find their own form in the emo-
tional rhythms of the actors because they give them that freedom. We
don’t call cut and do the next shot until the first shot gets to its natural
emotional resolution, its logical outcome. The bar scene takes more real
time than usual. But if you were really in a bar, it would be a hell of a
lot longer than that. So in a sense it was tightened up. The way people
think about scenes or criticize that scene – they feel it’s too long, or too
irritable, or too this or too that. But it’s a scene you remember.

Other films are really a shorthand the way they have been done.
They’re a shorthand for living and people understand that shorthand.
You have certain labels like a home run, a double, a single, a triple –
baseball jargon – which you use to describe a very powerful scene. Dif-
ferent kinds of things stir the emotional things in you. Films are still
predicated on incidents. Incidents are exciting. They set off one thing.
You recognize certain incidents, and you go with them. Husbands is an
extremely entertaining film in spots, just as I think life is entertaining in
spots. Like life, it’s also very slow and depressing in areas. The one thing
it’s not is a shorthand film. I won’t make shorthand films, because I
don’t want to manipulate audiences into assuming quick, manufactured
truths. If I had my way, Husbands would be twice as long as it is [...]

Women hated the picture, absolutely loathed the picture, with such a passion that it was unbelievable, simply because here were three men going off to London and not only having a sexual affair, but they were really out to fall in love with someone, and that was the ultimate disloyalty to the American housewife and to the American woman, so they could never like this picture. It’s shocking in the sense that the characters display a simplicity which is so crude, so innocent, that when they’re given a chance to do what they really want, their main interest is in gambling and women. They’re not interested in the intelligence of a woman but rather that the woman fall in love with them. That’s why women are shocked by this film. The relationship between the men was such a separate thing. A lot of women see the drinking scene and they’re bored the first second they see it. They’re bored the first second there’s a drunk there. They don’t like the idea of people revealing themselves.

What life, including marriage, is all about is women versus men. There is a constant and, I think, a lovely war going on. Men and women are basically different. Women are the protectors – men can’t have children and don’t have the instinct for motherhood – and men protect the protectors. Men are built for adventure. It makes for unhappiness in a marriage when women don’t understand the basic differences between them and that men do need adventure. In Husbands the story is about three men who are seeking the adventure they need, not only an extramarital thing. While sex is marvelous, it’s not related to the rest of what marriage is. Sex is an animal thing. Indiscretions are a small part of all life. If it’s an indiscretion, it’s not really important. On the other hand, if the affair is serious, the wife has to find out why it’s serious and why her partner isn’t fulfilled within the marriage. I say that if you’re a married man you have the right to get drunk, screw around and go to the whorehouse, but not fall in love. These three men are searching for immortality and they want to relive a love that they dreamt of when they were younger. These feelings are then displaced onto women who just can’t deal with it. This is absolutely a man’s story. I think that the interest a woman could have in a picture like this would be in seeing the relationship between men done on a real level.