Robert Harmon, on the other hand, has intentionally tried never to have a center. He is a famous writer of bestselling books about lonely women – hookers, singers and the night life. But lonely desperation has become his life as well as his subject. He is in flight from the withering emptiness that is the basic truth of his life. Whether he is teaching his eight-year-old son, Albie, how to drink beer, wrecking the car of his latest crush, Susan, or getting a hilarious lesson from her mother on how to play the kazoo [in a scene cut from the final film], Robert Harmon enjoys only the emotional novelty of a new situation. As soon as there is the threat of continuity or commitment, Robert flees. Yet he doesn’t kid himself. A piercing self-knowledge is as much a part of Robert Harmon’s strength as his moody, alcoholic self-indulgence is his weakness.

In Cassavetes’ view, melodrama was the opposite of this indomitability. Melodrama was characters stopping to feel sorry for themselves – like Lelia or Bennie in Shadows or Zelmo in Minnie and Moskowitz – but was something his most interesting figures never do.

A young man shouldn’t worry about being suckled, he should just go out and be a man. Go into a diner and sit down with a bunch of hardhats. Sit there and drink coffee with them and feel your manhood with them. Go to all the places you’re uncomfortable in and prove yourself, because someday you’re going to have to prove yourself. Do it while you’re young and you’ll never regret it.

To Rowlands: Make them laugh. Do anything you can to get them to laugh. Don’t worry. You can do it.

To Cassel and Blewitt: Whatever you do, don’t laugh! Act any way you want to, but whatever Gena does, please don’t laugh.

JC: [an aside] I don’t direct. I set up situations and sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t.

To have a philosophy is to know how to love. And to know where to put it. And to know the importance of friendships and the importance of continuity. And all the other philosophies, negative philosophies, seem to be a more modern bastardization of what philosophy is. And I don’t think a person can live without a philosophy. That is, where can you love? What’s the important place that you can put that thing because you can’t put it everywhere. You’d walk around, you gotta be a minister or priest saying, ‘Yes, my son’ or ‘Yes, my daughter, bless you.’ But people don’t live that way. They live with anger and hostility and problems and lack of money and lack of . . . with tremendous disappointments in their life. So what they need is a philosophy. What I think everybody needs in a way is to say, ‘Where and how can I love? Can I be in love so that I can live? So that I can live with some degree of peace?’ You know? And I guess every picture we’ve ever done has been, in a way, to try to find some kind of philosophy for the characters in the film. And so that’s why I have a need for the characters to really analyze love, discuss it, kill it, destroy it, hurt each other, do all that stuff – in that war, in that word-polemic and picture-polemic of what life is. And the rest of the stuff doesn’t really interest me. It may interest other people, but I have a one-track mind. That’s all I’m interested in, is love. And the lack of it. When it stops. And the pain that’s caused by loss or things taken away from us that we really need. So Love Streams is just . . . another picture in search of that grail . . . or whatever.