The Gospel of John Cassavettes
Spiritual father of American Independent Cinema
John Cassavetes was born in New York City on December 9th, 1929. After graduating from high school, he attended Mohawk College and Colgate University before graduating from the New York Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1950. Throughout the early 1950s he worked as an actor in films including FOURTEEN HOURS (1951) and TAXI (1953). By the late 1950s he had made a name for himself, with roles in a number of movies including 1958’s SADDLE THE WIND. His big break came with a regular role on the television series "Johnny Staccato" between 1959 and 1960.
Financing his first film with the money he had made in television, Cassavetes embarked on his directorial debut. Working from only a skeleton script, SHADOWS (1959)was an experiment in improvisational acting and directing. A low-budget sixteen millimeter production with a jazz soundtrack by Charles Mingus, the film appealed to an audience longing for less mediated art forms.
Winning five awards from the Venice Film Festival, Cassavetes found himself suddenly in the position of making higher-budget films within the studio system. In 1961 he made TOO LATE BLUES followed in 1962 by A CHILD IS WAITING, but neither had the excitement or improvisational energy of SHADOWS. Resentful of studio interference in his work, Cassavetes went back to acting, appearing in a number of films including THE KILLERS (1964), THE DIRTY DOZEN (1967), and ROSEMARY’S BABY (1968). By 1968, however, Cassavetes returned to directing, this time working independently. He used the money made from acting to independently finance his directorial work.
FACES (1968), a film about the difficulties in a suburban marriage, continued in the vein of SHADOWS, with a loosely drawn script and cinematography that worked in response to the improvised method of the actors. Though some found the work tedious (unscripted scenes going on far longer than Hollywood would have allowed), many realized in Cassavetes the possibility for more genuine and moving moments. After FACES, Cassavetes embarked on HUSBANDS (1970), in which he starred with Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara. The film centered around three friends dealing with life and mortality after the death of a mutual friend.
Though neither FACES nor HUSBANDS were very popular with the mainstream moviegoing audience, both were pivotal in the integration of cinema verité traditions in future Hollywood films. This crossover of the experimental and popular was clear in Cassavetes most successful film. Though A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE (1974) was produced with a complete script, it retained much of the intuitive and spontaneous acting of Cassavetes’ earlier films. Staring Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk, the film investigated the mental illness of a woman and the disintegration of her marriage. Financed independently by the cast and crew, A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE was a popular and critical success.
Throughout the late 1970s and into the 1980s, Cassavetes continued to work as both an actor and director. He directed THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE (1976), OPENING NIGHT (1977), and the 1980 film GLORIA which again starred Gena Rowlands, and which many believe was one of her finest performances. By the time of his death in 1989, Cassavetes had directed twelve films, creating a body of work that addressed serious topics and paved the way for a more vibrant American cinema.
John Cassavetes:
Inventor of Forms
by Adrian Martin
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Adrian Martin is film critic for The Age (Melbourne) and author of Phantasms (1984) and Once upon a Time in America (BFI, 1998), and the editor of Film: Matters of Style (Continuum, 1992).
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Today, when we so much fail to grasp that being an auteur means first having a style, it's good to remember that John Cassavetes was also a wonderful inventor of forms. The inventor of his own medium: the path he chose was that of style.
“To a remarkable degree, Cassavetes' films are not created with general stylistic effects or narrative forms of organisation (the way meanings in most other American films are) but emanate from the faces, bodies, and voices of specific performers. While, in American film, we watch how the frame is composed, how a character is lighted, how the camera moves or doesn't move, etc., Cassavetes' work cultivates different ways of seeing and hearing. We are not looking at the lighting or framing, but attending to butterfly flutters of feeling in a character's face; we are not listening to the sound design, but vibrating to birdsong vocal tremulations in a character's voice.”
- Ray Carney, 1999
“Don't make it easy to make the scene work, because then there's no scene.”
- John Cassavetes, 1983
These days, the language used to praise the films of John Cassavetes is sometimes barely distinguishable from the language once used to damn them. They are deemed wild, spontaneous, reckless, excessive, uncontrolled and uncontrollable. Yesterday that was a bad thing; in these Dogma-driven, digital days it is a good thing.
Lovers and haters alike tend to fix on a single register in Cassavetes: emotion, and plenty of it, great messy streams of it, what the director called the "tough and crazy" truth of the heart. Some see only behaviour - and the exuberant, overflowing performance of that behaviour - on screen in Cassavetes' work. Such viewers inevitably end up half admiring, half excusing the on-the-run technical means developed in order to capture and imprint this behavioural emotion. Much Cassavetes appreciation comes in the secretly defensive, slightly embarrassed form of apologia.
Who, indeed, can doubt the power of emotion in Cassavetes? We are undoubtedly starved, day and night, by the clean, clear, parched simulacra that pass for models of feeling in everything from Lasse Hallström to Lars von Trier. Every moment of Cassavetes' cinema is testament to waves of cloudy sentiment, knots of frazzled reaction, gestures that begin to express one fleeting state of an individual's soul and end up expressing another, such as we believe we have never seen on screen before or since.
Moments like: Mad Mabel's "five reasons" for holding on to her marriage and family (A Woman Under the Influence [1975]); little Phil hunched down in the back of a cab, his expression passing from the registration of anger to confusion to idiot bliss as the lights and shadows of the street play on his face and his protector's voice says from off screen "you'd practically split your sides laughing..." (Gloria [1980]); a diva who takes a slap from her co-star on stage during every performance, and every time reacts differently, unexpectedly, from some vertiginous, inner space where acting and reality have long ago lost their differentiating, ritual borders (Opening Night [1978]).
At present, with the appearance of the primarily biographical texts John Cassavetes: Lifeworks and Cassavetes by Cassavetes, the director is in danger of becoming more of a figurehead than a filmmaker. The cult around Cassavetes currently celebrates his independent spirit, his maverick ways of financing and shooting movies, his self-distribution, his 'extended family' mode of production. The music documentary Songs for Cassavetes (1999) conjures him as the spiritual father of 'do-it-yourself' youth-culture movements.
But, above all, Cassavetes was an inventor of forms - and prodigiously so. There is not a single aspect of cinematic style or narration - acting, verisimilitude, mise en scène, découpage, sound mix, music, space, light, rhythm, plot structure, editing, camera movement, energy, plasticity - which is not completely reinvented in and by his work; not a single filmic articulation which he did not entirely disarticulate and recombine in search of his own idiom and style.
Cassavetes' films open to us slowly, like flowers, gradually revealing their emotional and physical terrains. Each of his films is a distinct, strange planet with its own secret rules and hidden lines of force. "How the frame is composed, how a character is lighted, how the camera moves or doesn't move" is as much part of the adventure as any use of a person, a body, a face, a voice or a gesture in these movies. But we see (and experience) only half the Cassavetes picture if we downplay, as Ray Carney does, formal invention in the name of pure emotion and 'being'.
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All of Cassavetes' films transform human questions - all those "questions about love, identity, and definition", what it is to be and maintain a couple, a family, a community, an individual-in-society - into, at the same time, urgent questions of representation. Every phenomenon explored by his work is treated not as a 'given' but as a question, a thing still to exist, a dream to be conjured, a concept to be tested and tried. This is why Nicole Brenez describes the films as a 'figural laboratory' and why they are great films on all formal parameters, not mere photographic 'documents' of this or that searing psychodrama.
John Cassavetes
on writing A Woman Under the Influence:
A script is a series of words strung together. They kind of spell out the story in a mysterious way I deal with the characters as any writer would deal with a character. There are certain characters that you like, that you have feeling for, and other characters stand still. So you work until you have all the people in some kind of motion.
When I first start writing there's a sense of discovery. In some way it's not working, it's finding some romance in the lives of people. You get fascinated with their lives. If they stay with you then you want to do something – make it into a movie, put it on in some way. It was that which propelled us to keep on working at it. Making a film is a mystery. If I knew anything about men and women to begin with, I wouldn't make it, because it would bore me. I really feel that the script is written by what you can get out of it and how much it means to you, and if it means nothing to you, we start again and try to put ourselves up and communicate with you. The idea of taking a laborer and having him married to a wife who he can't capture, is really exciting. I don't know how you work on that. So I write – I'll do it any way [I can]. I'll hammer it out, I'll kick it out, I'll beat it to death, anyway you can get it. I don't think there are any rules. The only rules are that you do the best you can. And when you're not doing the best you can, then you don't like yourself. And that's very individual with everyone.
The preparations for the scripts I've written are really long, hard, boring, intense studies. I don't just enter into a film and say, "That's the film we're going to do." I think, "Why make it?" For a long time. I think, "Well, could the people be themselves, does this really happen to people, do they really dream this, do they think this?" [There were] weeks of wrestling to get the script right. I knew hard-hat workers like Nick, and Gena knew women like Mabel, and although I wrote everything myself, we would discuss lines and situations with Peter Falk, to get his opinion, to see if he thought they were really true, really honest.
Letting the actors interpret their parts
I do a full and total screenplay and then the actors come to me and tell me what they don't like. I listen to them. Then I try to get deeper into the characters and find out what they want to play. In what they want to play, somehow they're adding to the film. They're adding their own sense of reality, and perceptions I wouldn't know from my relatively limited point of view. It's a necessary part of the process for me. If for me a line is right, I won't let the actors change it, but will allow them latitude in interpretation.
I don't think audiences are satisfied any longer with just touching the surface of people's lives; I think they really want to get into a subject. Marriage, like any partnership, is a rather difficult thing. And it has been taken rather lightly [in the movies]. Family life is so different than what has been fed into us through the tube and through radio and through the casual, inadvertent greed that surrounds us. Films today show only a dream world and have lost touch with the way people really are. For me it's the first real family I've ever seen on screen. Idealized screen families generally don't interest me because they have nothing to say to me about my own life. Usually we put film in such simple terms while being endlessly involved in talking about our personal experience. We admit how complex it is. But it's as though we never look into a mirror and see what we are. So the films I make really are trying to mirror that emotion, so we can understand what our impulses are why we do things that get us into trouble, when to worry about it, when to let them go. And maybe we can find something in ourselves that is worthwhile.
I'm totally an intuitive person. I mean, I think about things that human beings would do, but I just am guessing – so I don't really have a preconceived vision of the way a performer should perform. Or, quote, the character, unquote. I don't believe in "the character." Once the actor's playing that part, that's the person. And it's up to that person to go in and do anything he can. If it takes the script this way and that, I let it do it. But that's because I really am more an actor than a director. And I appreciate that there might be some secrets in people. And that that might be more interesting than a "plot." All people are really private – as a writer and a director, you understand that that's the ground rule: people are private.
A Woman Under the Influence (1974)