Cassavetes On Cassavetes
By Ray Carney*

This is the autobiography John Cassavetes never lived to write. s––Ray Carney

For more than thirty years—from the late 1950s through the late 1980s—John Cassavetes, one of the fathers of American independent filmmaking, steered a courageous course freelancing on the fringes of the Hollywood studio system. During his lifetime, with the exception of A Woman Under the Influence and Faces, his work was largely ignored by reviewers (when it wasn’t simply ridiculed). However, in the years since his death, he has been rediscovered by a new generation of viewers and artists. He has become a cult figure with many young followers. In fact, he and his films are bigger today than at any point in his lifetime.

In Cassavetes on Cassavetes (Faber and Faber, 2001), John Cassavetes tells the story of his life as he lived it, day by day, year by year, in his own words. He begins with his family and childhood experiences and talks about being a high school student, college dropout and drama school student. He describes the years he spent pounding the pavement in New York as a young, unemployed actor unable to get a job—or even an agent. Then he takes the reader behind the scenes to sit in on the planning, rehearsing, shooting and editing of each of his films—from Shadows (1960), Faces (1968) and Husbands (1970) to Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), A Woman Under the Influence (1974), The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), Opening Night (1977), Gloria (1980) and Love Streams (1984). He describes the battle to get them made and the even greater struggle to get them into movie theaters. He talks about the reaction of audiences and reviewers to his work and responds to criticisms of it. This is Cassavetes at his most candid and outspoken—uncompromising, humane and passionate about life and art.

The tale is a personal one: of dreams, struggles, triumphs, setbacks and frustrations; of high-stakes financial gambles, crazy artistic risk-taking and midnight visions of glory. But it is also the story of an artistic movement that extended beyond Cassavetes and defined an era in film history. Between the lines, as it were, these pages chronicle the history of one of the most important artistic movements of the past fifty years—the birth and development of American independent filmmaking—and the response to it by critics and reviewers.

Cassavetes pioneered a new conception of what film can be and do—a vision of it as a personal exploration of the meaning of his life and the lives of the people around him. He made his movies the way poets write or painters paint. It was not about telling a hyped-up dramatic story to take people away from their lives, but a way of asking deep, probing questions about the world in which he lived and of asking viewers to explore the meaning of their experiences. Cassavetes on Cassavetes traces the cultural trajectory of that idea and the wildly opposed responses it elicited: the incredible energy and excitement it engendered among certain artists, critics and viewers; and the fierce resistance it met with from uncomprehending studio heads, producers, distributors, reviewers and audiences fighting to hold onto their notion of the movies as "story-telling" or "entertainment." It’s not too much to say that Cassavetes was engaged in a struggle for the soul of American film and that the battle is not over; it continues today.

Ray Carney, the world’s leading authority on Cassavetes’ life and work, plumbs the depths of Cassavetes’ soul, presenting both a spiritual portrait of the artist and a soul-searching meditation on Cassavetes’ more than half-doomed attempt to create works of art in a commercial medium like film. Carney, who spent eleven years assembling and editing the text, says his goal was to "get beyond the press release version" of Cassavetes’ life. "I wanted to tell the real story of the predicament of the American film artist … to show what it really is like to be an artist in a business-oriented culture like the one we live in. You read the film magazines and watch the TV talk-shows, and they make being an ‘indie’ sound exotic and glamorous and exciting, but the truth is that anyone who attempts to make films that are more than entertainment in America is almost certainly doomed to be neglected or reviled by newspaper and magazine reviewers, who are almost all under the sway of Hollywood entertainment values. Every generation fools itself and thinks that it is wiser than its predecessors, but the next Cassavetes, the young artist trying to do interesting things today, is in exactly the same situation Cassavetes was. Cassavetes still has a lot to teach us." Indeed, as this excerpt from Cassavetes on Cassavetes illustrates. In the words of John Cassavetes himself:

I love my films! They are everything that is in my children, they’re everything that is in my family, they’re everything that is in me, they’re everything that is in my wife, everything that is in my friends. Yes, I love the movies. And they’re honest movies. Whether they’re good or bad is another story. But at least they’re movies that tell what I know. And if I don’t know anything, then you’re in trouble! Then you might not like the movies! But they’re expressions. Now, I can’t compare them with the slickness of a political movie, because I hate political movies; and I can’t compare them with the pretensions of an art movie, because I hate art movies. These are just straight on, straightforward movies about things we don’t know about. But they’re questions that I think people ask themselves all the time.

Gena and I are freaks. We are. We’re absolutely freakishly obsessed with wanting to convey something that is very hard for us to express in our life. To dig deeply into the way things are, through people, is what I like and what the people who work with me like also. To find out the delicate balance between living and dying. I mean, I think that’s the only subject there is.

Directors have to realize that they must become like The Beatles: they must write their own material. It’s really incredible that directors would allow someone else to write their scripts for them. I can understand that happening when a guy starts out, I suppose, but to make a career out of directing other people’s work is just all wrong. A director should create his own films.

People are crazy, you know? They really are. Because they think that it’s good enough to make a movie that you don’t like as long as it makes money. It’s much more interesting to find out whether you’re going to live or die. Whether you’re going to have a good time or not. Whether the children will be content with their life – not content, but content with their life, you know? Not feel they have to be like everybody else. If you find something you like to do, you think that’s a beautiful thing. I like to act in films. I like to shoot ‘em. I like to direct ‘em. I like to be around them. I like the feel of it, and it’s something I respect. A lot. It doesn’t make any difference whether it’s a crappy film or a good film. Anybody who can make a film, I already love – but I feel sorry for them if they didn’t put any thoughts in it. Because then they missed the boat.

What people like is different from what they want. You have to give them what they want, not what they like. They see insincerity and they hate it – but they don’t say what they really feel. Why do people throw away all their mentality, all of what they really feel, in lieu of a promise – fake – made by the society – of how everybody’s supposed to live? There’s something about seeing an audience when they really do get it. I mean, they may not like it, but they get it. I don’t want to make a movie like a meal that evaporates quickly. But it’s always difficult to find a language when people don’t want to hear what you’re saying. That’s what’s called a tough audience. But, once you crack them, you’ve won them.

As an artist I feel that we must try different things – but above all we must dare to fail. You can fail in films because you don’t have talent, or you have too much humility, or you lack ferociousness. I’m a gangster! If I want something, I’ll grab it. I think I probably have the philosophy of a poor man. You know, like maybe I’d steal the pennies off a dead man’s eyes. The people who get things done are not the ones who stand back and ask permission, but who plunge in. The only thing young filmmakers can do is get some money and make films – any way they can do it.

In my later life I’ve become more successful with other people because I don’t give a damn about personal ambition. At my age, that’s fruitless. I don’t want recognition. Recognition is a pain in the ass. But having a good time is not fruitless. Or having a bad time is not fruitless. Making something indelible is what I want. Something concrete. There are no rules. Just get together with good, decent, artistic people and value them – because they’re the only ones who will help you.

I’m lost by life. I don’t know anything about life. If I make a movie, I don’t even understand why I’m making the movie. I just know that there’s something there. Later on, we all get to know what it’s about through the opinions of others. If you make a film, it might as well be important as be nonsense. You can’t go for ten cents and expect to come up with a million. You have to go for everything. Whether you fail or don’t fail, you have to go for what will make us better when we’re finished. I like to work with friends and for friends on something that might help somebody. Something with humor, sadness; simple things.

The artist is really a magical figure whom we would all like to be like and don’t have the courage to be, because we don’t have the strength to be obsessive. Film is an art, a beautiful art. It’s a madness that overcomes all of us. We’re in love with it. Money is really not that important to us. We can work thirty-six, forty-eight hours straight and feel elated at the end of that time. I think film is magic! With the tools we have at hand, we really try to convert people’s lives! The idea of making a film is to package a lifetime of emotion and ideas into a two-hour capsule form, two hours where some images flash across the screen and in that two hours the hope is that the audience will forget everything and that celluloid will change lives. Now that’s insane, that’s a preposterously presumptuous assumption, and yet that’s the hope.