John Cassavetes placeholder

    1984     Love Streams
    1980     Gloria
    1977     Opening Night
    1976     The Killing of a Chinese Bookie
    1974     A Woman Under the Influence
    1971     Minnie & Moskowitz
    1970     Husbands
    1968     Faces
    1963     A Child is Waiting
    1959     Shadows

Favorite films

1. Minnie & Moskowitz
2. Opening Night
3. A Woman Under the Influence
4. Love Streams
5. Faces
6. Gloria
7. Husbands
8. Shadows
9. The Killing of a Chinese Bookie
10. A Child is Waiting

JOHN ON JOHN

The language barrier means nothing to me. Language is just a bunch of symbols. People’s emotions are fundamentally the same everywhere.

Truth is the moment for you. Truth is the moment. Don’t let that moment go by.

I don’t deal with the life of others but with my own life. That’s all I know.

TRUTH, HONESTY AND EMOTION

We need to stop intellectualizing so much and rely on what you feel. If you feel something, it’s true. The only truth you can really know is something emotional that you feel. When we lose our instincts for truth, we have nothing.

There’s a difference between being violent and having violent emotions. There’s a difference between anger and the act of shooting somebody in the face. I’ve never known anyone in my life that ever shot anyone in the face. And I’ve seen it on the screen too many times. There’s no morality there, no feeling of anything for anyone.

I’d rather deal with the longings of the mind, the heart. Life is men and women. Life isn’t, say, politics. …I’m never going to make any other pictures except about men and women. Motion pictures, whether art or not, should reflect in human terms the needs of their audience. If relating to one another only ends in cheap momentary revelations, communication of the spirit, of the heart, will be distrusted and unwanted too. There isn’t anyone making any films that relate to anyone as far as I’m concerned — the human part of anyone.

We’ve got to realize that money is useless beyond whatever it takes to feed, clothe and house yourself. As a matter of fact, the more you have beyond that — whatever it takes to free you from those basic concerns — the more difficult it is to find out what really matters and to get it for yourself.

INDIVIDUALITY

Be in touch with yourself. That’s the main thing — to be in touch with yourself — to find the courage to deal with your own personality, to find something in your life that will let you recognize what you read on a page, and then put it into a form. And as you go along in your life you realize more and more how much you want to develop yourself. The main thing to do is to stay individual. To be an actor you have to be a person, and once you are a person, then you want to express some part of what is in you. You have to find something in the part that you can identify with in your own life. It’s a discovery — like we’re scientists.

The main thing of being an actor or an actress is you have to fight the put-downs in yourself. You have to keep your mind’s eye view of what you think you are.

…I hate leaders. We should all lead ourselves. The leaders tell us these are the facts and the facts are horseshit. They’re not facts. Whose facts? Whose truths? You have to use your own truth.

ARTISTIC COMMITMENT

I’ve never seen a successful person in this business, artistically successful, that gives way on important issues. And that consider themselves beyond the picture that you’re doing. Though you don’t say it, because it’s too corny to say, you’ve got to be ready to die for the movie.

I discovered… I could no longer compromise. I wasn’t about to make another film where we didn’t say something real.

If I can, I will make films with non-professionals, people who can afford to dream of a much bigger reward, people who crave to take part in something creative and who don’t know exactly what it is. What I want from a crew is as much love for the film, the story, the actors and as much daring and invention that they are capable of.

IMPROVISATION AND SPONTANEITY

I think you have to define what improvisation does — not what it is. Improvisation to me means that there is a characteristic spontaneity in the work which makes it appear not to have been planned. I write a very tight script, and from there on in I allow the actors to interpret it the way they wish. But once they choose their way, then I’m extremely disciplined — and they must be extremely disciplined about their own interpretations. There’s a difference between ad-libbing and improvising, and there’s a difference between not knowing what to do and just saying something. I believe in improvising on the basis of the written word and not on undisciplined creativity. When you have an important scene, you want it written; but there are still times when you want things just to happen.

I’m a great believer in spontaneity, because I think planning is the most destructive thing in the world. Because it kills the human spirit. So does too much discipline, because then you can’t get caught up in the moment, and if you can’t get caught up in the moment, life has no magic. Without the magic, we might as well all give up and admit we’re going to be dead in a few years. We need magic in our lives to take us away from those realities. The hope is that people stay crazy. It’s really no fun to work with sane people, people who have a set way of doing things.

ACTING

Lots of performances claim to be realistic, but you see hundreds of phony copies where everyone’s acting realism and that makes me angry.

I think that the performing arts are greatly under rated, especially acting. The interpretation of a writer’s thoughts is handled by the actor directly, by the director indirectly. You can’t say which is most important — the indirect or direct action of trying to fulfill an idea. I think one falls in love with the entire concept of communicating abstract ideas, of somehow finding a way of connecting surprisingly with an audience. That much is absolutely rewarding in every facet of our thing.

An actor can’t suddenly deny or reject a part of himself under the pretext of playing a particular character, even if that’s what he would like to do. You can’t ask someone to forget themselves and become another person. If you were asked to play Napoleon in a picture, for example, you can’t really have his emotions and thought, only yours. You could never actually be Napoleon, only yourself playing him. I’ve never wanted to play a role.

With people like Ben and Peter you don’t give directions. You give freedom and ideas.

I want to give the actors enough time to allow them to express what they are feeling in a scene — I don’t want them to have to keep down their energy or curtail their performances. The length of the scenes allows us to capture reactions and behaviors that might never take place if it didn’t go on and on. The pacing conforms to the time real emotions take to happen.

WOMEN AND MEN

What life, including marriage, is all about is women versus men. There is a constant and, I think, a lovely war going on. Men and women are basically different. Women are the protectors– men can’t have children and don’t have the instinct for motherhood — and men protect the protectors. Men are built for adventure. It makes for unhappiness in a marriage when women don’t understand the basic differences between them and that men do need adventure.

It’s true that the women in my films are continuously being double-crossed by men. They really are, and they recognize it. And my point of view in presenting it is, ‘All right. So what are you going to do about it? Are you going to put up a wall around you, or are you going to fight to protect some of your innocence?’ No matter what the current trends are, a woman must fight to keep her own responsiveness alive.

I’m concerned about the depiction of women on the screen. It has gotten worse than ever. It’s related to their being either high- or low-class concubines, and the only question is when or where they will go to bed and with whom or how many. There’s nothing to do with the dreams of women, or of women as the dream, nothing to do with the quirky part of her, the wonder of her. The idea of love as a mysterious, undiscovered world has come to have no place in our innermost imagination.

The real sexuality in women comes in her ability to retain her own desire to be loved. I think the greatest problem for a woman, in terms of sexuality, is her continuing appeal.

I don’t see women as talky, intelligent and political creatures, though some of them must be. I see them as soft friends, in trouble like the rest of us. I don’t put ‘fully competent’ women into my films because I don’t know any ‘fully competent’ anyone.

THE STATE OF CINEMA

I’m so tired of films being romantic by setting a mood with a camera. It’s what a filmmaker or a script tell you to do; it’s their idea of what an audience will feel is romantic. They become so conditioned that when the music comes on and it’s soft and romantic, it conditions people to be one way or the other.

I don’t think there’s anything morally wrong with seeing a nude body on the screen, but it offends me to watch people kiss without genuine love or passion. Sex on the screen bores me.

Stanley [Kubrick]’s a genius! While I’m a bum from Port Washington who grew up on the Long Island railroad. Metro built a great big moon for him, but when I want a moon, I go outside and shoot what’s up in the sky!

SOCIETY AND CONDITIONING

I am trying to show the inability of people to recognize that society is ridiculous. Hardly anyone obeys the mores, but they respect them. If they are exposed breaking the mores their lives can collapse…. A silly search for mores reduces the great, wonderful hero of the story into a cheap individual with no morals and ethics and no place to go.

AUDIENCES AND CRITICS

If American audiences can’t fit a film into what they expected, it’s hard for them to believe that there is something that they don’t know about.

I hate audiences. They’re full of shit, for Christ’s sake. They just sit there and judge a film.

Give the audience the vaguest permission or cause to feel real emotions, and they will take the challenge.

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment

Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>