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It was filmmaking at its most romantic ideal (indie directors still get gauzy-eyed when you mention the title), and Cassavetes would continue to make films in this fashion for the span of his career, often financing them himself. But despite his posthumous status as a legend, he was far from universally acclaimed. Some of his most famous films bombed with audiences, and provoked a bizarrely personal rage in people. After a screening of Husbands at the San Francisco Film Festival in 1970, he was booed off the stage with screams of "Fascist!" And he maintained a lifelong feud The New Yorker's Pauline Kael, who once said that she felt Cassavetes "wanted to crush every bone in my body." In his exhaustively researched biography, Accidental Genius, film critic Marshall Fine charts the director's filmography item by item: Faces in 1968, a trippy, choppy look at the
Like Cassavetes' films, Fine's book became manifest despite the roadblocks. Before his death from cirrhosis of the liver in 1989, the director, iconoclastic to the end, told Rowlands he didn't want a biography. When Fine tried in 1993 to enlist her help in writing one, Rowlands turned him down. Ten years later, he asked again. Rowlands repeated that she wouldn't give an interview, but told Fine that if anyone asked, he could tell them that the project had her blessing. "With anyone truly in the Cassavetes inner circle . . . the first question I received when I requested an interview to talk about John was, 'Do you have Gena's approval?'" Fine writes. "It was invaluable to be able to say, 'Yes, I do.'" — Will Doig Even after all his success, you write that Cassavetes never felt comfortable with the indie-film posterboy status that was ascribed to him after Shadows. Why?
He felt he was being celebrated for things that had happened accidentally. The way [Shadows] was shot, the sound — all of it was hailed by critics who said, "This is so natural! What a look that he's got!" But really, he just didn't know what he was doing. Did he eventually become a part of the Hollywood system that his Shadows-era self loathed? I don't think so. Except for Gloria, none of those movies from A Woman Under the Influence on were big commercial successes. Independent film has become a stepping-stone to a Hollywood career for a lot of people, but for him, Hollywood was a necessary evil. He would act in Hollywood films only because that's how he made the money to make his own movies. [Cassavetes starred in dozens of films of his own and of other directors, including The Dirty Dozen (1967), Rosemary's Baby (1968) and Capone (1975)]. Today, the concept of independent film is very popular, and the big studios all have "indie" divisions. How would Cassavetes have felt about that? Yes, you've got the studios with their art-house divisions, but they're not comfortable with movies that don't cost a lot, or that don't have big-ticket stars in them. They don't see the upside of making a movie that costs ten million dollars and brings in thirty million. They all want the home run, the hundred-million-dollar movie. And unfortunately, too many of these independent filmmakers get co-opted by these studios who say, "Look, you can make your own movie for us," even though the movie they want you to make is a comic book movie or a sequel or a remake. John was too fascinated by topics that weren't audience-friendly [for that system]. In fact, he would actively antagonize his audiences. You write that Husbands was originally a comedy, but when John saw it he felt it was too likeable. He re-edited it to make it more difficult, and it is. The sound is jarring, the scenes go on forever — audiences hated it. Yeah, I guess you have to figure out, is he just sticking to his guns? Is he being self-destructive? Staying true to his vision? Being arbitrarily contrarian? To me, he was being self-destructive. I find Husbands unnecessarily grating, as if that was his main objective. And yet, if you asked him, he would have said, "That [first version of Husbands] was not the movie I set out to make." He often found his movies in the editing process. He didn't want a movie about these guys getting over their crises and moving on. He wanted a movie about how this changed their lives and friendships forever in ways that an audience-friendly movie — a comedy — wouldn't do. That movie, like Faces, is essentially about a middle-class midlife crisis. John was forty when he made it. Is that what he was going through at the time? I don't know. I've talked to people who said it was inspired by the death of his brother, but that happened a good ten or fifteen years earlier. He seemed generally interested in the oppression of daily life and how people break free from that oppression. He personally seemed terrified by the concept of losing one's freedom, both in his films and in the way he lived his life. I think that's an accurate assessment. He was really interested in the human animal and how it reacts under stress, how it deals with the everyday things. Most movies are about extraordinary circumstances. He wanted to deal with the drama of ordinary life. In retrospect, people consider him part of that era's counterculture, but that's really not accurate. The counterculture of the late '60s and early '70s often hated his films, because the ones he made during that period sympathized with ordinary middle-class problems. Yes. At that point, everyone was teeing off on the middle class, those straight white suburban guys. It was very unfashionable to show their perspective. Faces was very daring in that respect too. It was the year after the Summer of Love, and here was a movie implying that marriage was a valuable thing. And [Husbands] was also saying, yeah, these guys are screwed up, but there's value to their lives. Pauline Kael, probably the most influential film critic of her time, also despised everything Cassavetes did. She seemed to have a personal vendetta against him. What was going on there? He was a polarizing figure. There were people who got it, and the people who didn't felt he was just being self-indulgent. He had this fascination with non-acting acting that, to them, looked amateurish. It's a question of taste. She just happened to have one of the bigger pulpits. I can think of more than a couple of Cassavetes scenes that involve a woman drunk in a room with two or three men. These scenes are always uncomfortable, because the woman is outnumbered, inebriated and appears vulnerable. He made these films right before the advent of the women's-liberation movement. Was John referencing female disempowerment? What did he think about women's lib? He had a real distrust of causes. He was more interested in simple human dynamics. He made A Woman Under the Influence because Gena wanted it. It's interesting, because I actually feel that in those scenes with Gena [in Faces], ultimately she's in control. I think those scenes are less about women's disempowerment than male insecurity — the jealousy and competition between men, the insecurity of the lesser man around this woman. When he made Husbands, he told a reporter, "This is a man's movie." Was A Woman Under the Influence his "woman's movie?" I think so. It hit a Hooksexup. There were a lot of women in that era who had been promised one thing that turned out to be something else, and here was this woman who was devastated by it. So I think it is a women's movie, but he never would have said that. How did women respond? It was huge. It came out about the same time as Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore and a couple years after Diary of a Mad Housewife. I remember when those movies came out. They really tapped into the zeitgeist. They were the first women's movies in the new Hollywood. Many of his films concern people who are angry or disillusioned by their lives and relationships not turning out as they felt they'd been promised. And yet this kind of philosophy seems antithetical to Cassavetes as a person, who was relentless and driven, never self-pitying. Yet I think it's a pretty universal theme. You go back to The Iceman Cometh. We live the illusion of what we want to believe, and when that illusion is stripped away, it's shattering. That's a theme that runs through all these films. Whatever illusions he lived under, at some point they were shattered for him, and I think he recognized that that's a common reality, and a common reaction. Although most of his films deal with relationships, he showed very little sex on screen. Why? He was uncomfortable with nudity. One of the stories I heard from Sam Shaw's kids when he did Killing of a Chinese Bookie was that he didn't want to put nudity in, and Sam, one of the producers, kept saying, "John, this is a movie about a strip club." This is at a time when nudity and graphic violence were coming to the fore. The ratings system had come into effect in 1968, and as a result there was more freedom because they could quantify [films] and put a rating on them, instead of working under the old production code. And yet he resisted that. It was just a personal thing. He felt that showing lots of sex was exploitive and unnecessary. It's strange to think of him as having any inhibitions at all, because his films are so raw. In a way it's admirable. His characters are naked without being nude. n°
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, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
