Cassavetes Quotes

We don't take the time to be vulnerable with each other

Most people don't know what they want or feel. And for everyone, myself included, It's very difficult to say what you mean when what you mean is painful. The most difficult thing in the world is to reveal yourself, to express what you have to... As an artist, I feel that we must try many things - but above all, we must dare to fail. You must have the courage to be bad - to be willing to risk everything to really express it all.

Film is, to me, just unimportant. But people are very important.

No matter how old you get, if you can keep the desire to be creative, you're keeping the man-child alive.

Films today show only a dream world and have lost touch with the way people really are... In this country, people die at 21. They die emotionally at 21, maybe younger... My responsibility as an artist is to help people get past 21... The films are a roadmap through emotional and intellectual terrain that provides a solution on how to save pain.

I’m very worried about the depiction of women on the screen. It’s gotten worse than ever and 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, with whom, and how many. There’s nothing to do with the dreams of women, or of woman as the dream, nothing to do with the quirky part of her, the wonder of her.

I’ve never seen an exploding helicopter. I’ve never seen anybody go and blow somebody’s head off. So why should I make films about them? But I have seen people destroy themselves in the smallest way, I’ve seen people withdraw, I’ve seen people hide behind political ideas, behind dope, behind the sexual revolution, behind fascism, behind hypocrisy, and I’ve myself done all these things. So I can understand them. What we are saying is so gentle. It’s gentleness. We have problems, terrible problems, but our problems are human problems.

These days, everybody is supposed to be so intelligent: ‘Isn’t it terrible about Nixon getting elected?’ ‘Did you hear about the earthquake in Peru?’ And you’re supposed to have all the answers. But when it gets down to the nitty-gritty, like, ‘What is bugging you, mister? Why can’t you make it with your wife? Why do you lie awake all night staring at the ceiling? Why, why, why do you refuse to recognize you have problems and deal with them?’ The answer is that people have forgotten how to relate or respond. In this day of mass communications and instant communications, there is no communication between people. Instead it’s long-winded stories or hostile bits, or laughter. But nobody’s really laughing. It’s more an hysterical, joyless kind of sound. Translation: ‘I am here and I don’t know why.

As an artist, I feel that we must try many things - but above all we must dare to fail.

My films are expressive of a culture that has had the possibility of attaining material fulfillment while at the same time finding itself unable to accomplish the simple business of conducting human lives. We have been sold a bill of goods as a substitute for life. What is needed is reassurance in human emotions; a re-evaluation of our emotional capacities.

John Cassavetes once gave me some advice that has proved invaluable... He said, 'We're good friends, but never, ever do an artistic favor for a friend. Loan friends money, be there for them in every other way, but don't do them any artistic favors, because you've got to have one area of your life where there's no room for compromise.

The most difficult thing in the world is to reveal yourself, to express what you have to. As an artist, I feel that we must try many things - but above all we must dare to fail. You must be willing to risk everything to really express it all.

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 the stuff in that war, in that word-polemic and film-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 – love. And the lack of it. When it stops. And the pain that’s caused by loss of things that are taken away from us that we really need.

I'm not really a director. I'm a man who believes in the validity of a person's inner desires. And I think those inner desires, whether they're ugly or beautiful, are pertinent to each of us and are probably the only things worth a damn. I want to put those inner dreams on the screen so we can all look and think and feel and marvel at them.

I thought leaving home would be a liberation. I thought university would be a dance party. I thought I would live in a room vined with fairy lights; hang arabesque tapestries up on the wall. I thought scattered beneath my bed would be a combination of Kafka, coffee grounds, and a lover’s old boxer shorts. I thought I would spend my evenings drinking cheap red wine and talking about the Middle East. I thought on weekends we might go to Cassavetes marathons at the independent cinema. I thought I would know all the good Korean places in town. I thought I would know a person who was into healing crystals and another person who could teach me how to sew. I thought I might get into yoga. I thought going for frozen yogurt was something you would just do. I thought there would be red cups at parties. And I thought I would be different. I thought it would be like coming home, circling back to my essential and inevitable self. I imagined myself more relaxed—less hung up on things. I thought I would find it easy to speak to strangers. I thought I would be funny, even, make people laugh with my warm, wry, and only slightly self-deprecating sense of humor. I thought I would develop the easy confidence of a head girl, the light patter of an artist. I imagined myself dancing in a smoky nightclub, spinning slackly while my arms floated like laundry loose on the breeze. I imagined others watching me, thinking, Wow, she is so free.

David and Lisa was, to the surprise of nearly everybody, a hit. Like Cassavetes’s film, it premiered at Venice, and it won an award for Best First Work.

It had started with Brando. He was the influence. The force. The originator. What he had created, together with collaborators like Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan, was more visceral. It was threatening. Brando had become part of a triumvirate of actors, along with Montgomery Clift and James Dean. Clift had the beauty and the soul, the vulnerability. Dean was like a sonnet, compact and economical, able to do so much with the merest gesture or nuance. And if Dean was a sonnet, then Brando was an epic poem. He had the looks. He had the charisma. He had the talent. There’s that classic sequence from A Streetcar Named Desirewhere Brando completely loses it during the card game, until he’s at the bottom of the stairs, yelling, “Stella! Stella!” It’s an episode that builds gradually, which of course comes from Kazan’s original staging of the play and Brando’s memory of it as he had done it every night. But by the time Brando got this on film, he had become one with the elements. You experienced that sequence like you experienced a tornado or monsoon. It was that captivating. But evolution always makes people nervous. There was anger toward Brando. People said he mumbled. They said his features were too soft, too delicate. They said he liked to show off his chest. If people disparaged his approach it was because they didn’t see the technique that went into it. But he found whatever it was that opened the door to his expression, that allowed him to reveal himself and communicate it to audiences so that they identified with him. Brando made possible the Paul Newmans of the world, the Ben Gazzaras, the Anthony Franciosas, and the Peter Falks, people like John Cassavetes, who was his own special kind of phenomenon. These were the idols of an era just before mine, actors who had already moved beyond the studios and had been out in the world for a decade or more by the time I arrived there.

Physically, he’s changed again. The face more drawn, the skin more wan, and he’s gained weight in the oddest way. His face, arms, legs, and butt are skinny, but his stomach – his stomach has ballooned. He looks three months’ pregnant. His belly is huge and tight as a drum, as though his shirt has been buttoned with difficulty over a basketball. Cassavetes is a man of immense ego but little vanity. He either won’t or can’t get that stomach down, but he does nothing (like wear looser shirts) to hide it. He intends to play the belly as part of his Love Streams costume. The film’s Robert Harmon will be weighed down with Cassavetes’ belly, and on Robert Harmon it will be an emblem of the dead weight of his life. Cassavetes

months of this, he said, ‘Okay, enough.’ I said, ‘Enough what? What do you mean?’ He said, ‘I’ve heard enough.’ I said, ‘What do you mean, you’ve heard enough?’ He said, ‘For six to seven months now, I’ve been hearing you tell me how much you love Gena, and – enough!’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘Yeah, what! Enough.’ He thought I was talking about GENA! Loving Gena, being in love with Gena, and missing Gena. He never once mentioned it to Gena. And he never once mentioned it to me, and accepted it totally – that if I was in love with Gena, all right, I was in love with Gena.

the way as the performances enhance and even change the original idea. This is not “improvisation,” this is like jazz: composition-in-the-moment.

That’s it for today.

Dylan looked to Hamlet for inspiration when editing Renaldo and Clara. One of three quotes Dylan wrote on the wall of the studio where he edited this film, came from the opening scene: “For this relief, much thanks, for ’tis bitter cold and I am sick at heart”.44 Dylan’s underrated film, Masked and Anonymous contains yet another trove of Shakespeare references in a film whose plot is reminscent of many of Shakespeare’s works: a ruler dying, a brutal succession, betrayal, political, familial and dynastic intrigue. With a mixed genre style and generic character parts such as mistress, soldier, drunk; as well as metaphorical names such as Bobby Cupid, Tom Friend and Pagan Lace and a plot of civil and familial turmoil, it is no surprise that Larry Charles described the film as “Shakespeare meets Cassavetes”.45 We also have a character named Prospero, and in the film script, at least, a Hotspur and a Blunt, plus that familiar pair from King Lear, Edgar and Edmund. Edmund here is also a son who is not a ‘full’ son and perhaps for similar reasons, power-crazed and driven to dominate. Edmund assumes control in Dylan’s film, in contrast to the play. Although, what he has control over seems to be built on extremely shaky ground.