I get up in the morning and I used to be eighteen. I’m not eighteen anymore and ninety per cent of my active life is finished. I always looked young. And suddenly I’m going to be forty-eight. I look at myself in the mirror sometimes and I tell myself, ‘What is this fucking head? Who would have such a face?’ So I understand these kind of feelings. Since I’m not particularly vain, I think of someone who has this sort of vanity, someone who would always have been told that they are what other people see in them. This particularly applies to an actor when you seem to be more than you really are, and nobody really knows you or sees your inside. And I think, ‘That’s a problem worth dealing with.’

The three generations of women were important, because the film really is about women and their points of view as professionals. Here’s an old lady, Joan Blondell, who still has all her life and sexual feelings, which you can see though we don’t go into them; and Gena, who’s a few decades down from Joan; and the young girl, who is really seventeen years old. And these three generations do haunt the waking hours of women: your powers waning, your attractiveness having to be worked on more. I think these are real things, and to put them in terms of this story really gave me fits.

In the discussion of A Woman Under the Influence, I quoted Cassavetes as saying, ‘In replacing narrative, you need an idea.’ There are several themes that link the characters and situations in Opening Night. One is the idea of the kind of weariness that settles in on many professionals as they reach middle-age. In their different ways, Myrtle, Manny and Dorothy are all experiencing feelings of exhaustion, doubt and despair about the value of their lives. They are tired of their own routines, bored with their own successes and cynical about the praise lavished on them. It is not hard to see an autobiographical dimension to this side of the film. Another idea that links the characters is men’s and women’s different responses to aging and feelings of mortality. Manny Victor and Gus Aaron respond by having affairs. Their relationships with younger women are their way of denying their age. Myrtle Gordon, Dorothy Victor and Sarah Goode respond in other ways to their fears of getting old. In the service of exploring the aging theme, Cassavetes methodically compares and contrasts the lives of more than a dozen women of different ages and situations – teenaged, middle-aged and elderly; wives, lovers and loners; childless professionals and fertile earth-mothers. As he always did before he began writing, Cassavetes did ‘research’. He talked to Sam Shaw’s wife, who was in her sixties. Cassavetes called her almost every night for a year on the telephone and talked to her for hours. He watched television talk shows and read women’s magazines. He played bridge in the afternoons with Rowlands, her mother, his mother and anyone else who would join them.

I love spending the afternoon with these women! I never talk. I just sit and listen and smile. They tell me everything! They forget I’m a man! I might as well have a dress on. Then I also read for two years all the women’s pages. Everything is how to be younger. How to stay younger. What is the answer? What is the secret? So we made a film. I’m not afraid of putting in aging. I sit up and watch the morning shows. I was watching people patting people on the cheeks all morning. If I made a movie like that they’d kill me because they’d be so embarrassed. I would never choose that because it’s exploitative. That would be taking somebody and embarrassing them.

The problems with getting old have been talked about forever. Aging is a serious problem. It’s a fear. Somebody reaches forty, it’s a bigger fear. They want to be thirty. Somebody’s thirty, they want to be twenty, you know. So they can have all the access to life. So I think I can make a movie about that and maybe some poor sucker who has the same problem can figure it out. What I am asking is, can we beat that? Can we make it unimportant? Can we put it in perspective? Can we see life? Can we afford to talk about something instead of kidding ourselves?

I think that there’s a pull and a push between whether you’re an individual, as I feel right now, or whether you are a part of society, and I think we are, all of us, pulled and pushed between these two things constantly. And you keep on saying, ‘Do I want to be what I am?’ or ‘Do I want to be part of society?’ Myrtle has two selves. One was that background of Gena Rowlands’ own personal life, of children, family, home, schooling; the problems of who you are and trying to fight for your own individual survival as you do all these other prescribed chores. The other is what you could be if none of these other things existed. The selfish, individual part of the person – your own mind’s eye view of yourself – is to me the epitome of an actress. If you would have no boundaries of commitment, you could then express so much. But in one sense, to me, it’s an anti-art film in that it says if you had your way you wouldn’t express a goddamn thing. If you had your total way. Actors, or writers, have to work under this duress – under a limited duress. You can’t be tortured, your ears can’t be torn off, your mustache pulled out hair by hair.

The film is utterly without interest and the action-centered plot allowed Cassavetes to do almost no memorable acting, with the single exception of his final scene on screen – in which he came up with the idea of playing the most evil lines he has in the entire film with diabolical gentleness. As proof that he was under no illusions about the nature of the project, during a scene in which Amy Irving said she needed a few minutes to ponder the ‘motivation’ for one of her speeches, Cassavetes turned to Kirk Douglas and sarcastically remarked loud enough for everyone to hear: ‘She thinks she’s playing Joan of Arc.’

I think that people are bored with entertainment, but they have nothing else and they would prefer to see something that has to do with their lives. Now, movie companies aim everything at a fourteen-year-old mentality. Well I’m not fourteen and I want to be aimed at too. I want to be told something different. I want to be thrilled by some aspect of life that is a little more important than rock and roll or punk rock. I’m sorry, but that’s the way I feel. There is something more in life besides just getting it off. I’m going to fight for it. It may be a losing cause, but I’ve seen too many artists come out of nothingness to believe that’s true. I would like people to believe that I’m not apologizing for making things that I feel are much, much better intentioned than other things.

I don’t think the path I’ve taken has been a deliberate choice. People do what they’re capable of doing. If I could take a lot of money from studios and enjoy myself at cocktail parties, I probably would make a conscious effort to take that route. I’m just not capable of doing it. My filmmaking is an expensive, personal madness. If I didn’t have friends like Peter and a wife like Gena, it would have been impossible for me. And it’s not possible any longer. It’s just not economically feasible, because it has become such a business. And it’s a hell of an expensive hobby to get into. We continued to do it ourselves on Chinese Bookie and on Opening Night, but it was a tremendous emotional cross to bear and really came too dangerously close to destroying our family.