Jake Mahaffy: Cassavetes on Cassavetes and your book on Shadows give
insight into Cassavetes' personal life and creative practice, both how
he related to people on a day-to-day basis and how he related to actors
and crew, working on a film production. We get a very real, human
portrait in both books. One aspect of Cassavetes' character that comes
across is unsettling. He was obviously very sensitive and perceptive,
and able to share people's fears and most subtle emotions in film. But
it seems he could just as readily use that knowledge to manipulate and
intimidate people, and not even for noble artistic purposes, but just
for it's own sake…
Ray Carney: Cassavetes was not a simple
person. At the point at which I began doing research I had heard so many
stories – the “I rode with Billy the Kid” tales – of how exciting it
was to work with him or be around him. I had hosted scores of events at
film festivals and listened to the press release version of his life
disseminated by his family and close friends. No one ever said anything
bad about him – particularly Gena Rowlands, who is extremely protective
of his memory for all the obvious reasons. I had this rose-colored
vision. Then I began lifting the carpet, talking to dozens of people I
hadn't met before this. There was a lot of stuff underneath. Things I
didn't want to know. Things I wished I hadn't discovered.
There
was a lot that was wonderful about Cassavetes that no one ever denied,
and that I still believe to be true. There is no question that he is one
of the great twentieth-century artists – in any medium. He was a
visionary and a dreamer, a passionate, nonstop talker who was exciting
to listen to. He was a born charmer, with the charisma of a Svengali.
People loved to be around him. They basked in his energy. He inspired
them and could talk people into doing seemingly anything. It took those
qualities to make the movies. He had to throw a lot of magic dust around
to keep people working long hours without pay. He had to play with
their souls to motivate them.
But as I dug deeper, I was forced
to recognize that you can't have the positive without the negative, the
virtues without the corresponding vices. Cassavetes was a
super-salesman, a Pied Piper, a guru – but he was also most of the other
things that come with the territory. He was a con-man. He would say or
do almost anything to further his ends. He'd lie to you, steal from you,
cheat you if necessary. He could be a terror if you got in his way. If
he liked you or needed you, he was a dream – kind, thoughtful, generous;
if you crossed him, he was your worst nightmare.
To put it
comically, you might say that he had a short man's complex or a Greek
man's macho streak. The positive side is that he was a fierce competitor
and a perfectionist. When it came to making movies, nothing could make
him compromise his vision. The negative side was that he was incredibly
proud and temperamental. He would turn on you if you even politely
questioned his judgment or wanted to do something different from what he
did. It was good he wrote, directed, and produced his own work, because
no one was less of a team player. He couldn't deal with authority. He
had to be the boss, the center of attention, the star of the show – on
and off the set. If he didn't get his way he threw temper tantrums and
behaved childishly.
When I began, I had already sketched the
portrait I wanted to paint in my mind. Cassavetes would be a paragon of
sensitivity and perceptiveness, using his characters to analyze male
sexual and social dysfunctions. Then person after person told me, asking
me not to put their names in print as having said it, that he resembled
his characters in lots of ways. In short, he could be as difficult and
macho, as bullying and emotionally immature, and as much a bullsh*t
artist as Freddie and McCarthy in Faces. He could be as much a clown and
show-off, hidden behind a wall of “routines” as Gus in Husbands. In the
years before he made Shadows, he was as much a slacker and moocher off
his older brother as Bennie is off Hugh. At the point he made The
Killing of a Chinese Bookie and Love Streams, he had a lot in common
with Cosmo and Robert Harmon. He was as much of a lone wolf, as spookily
withdrawn and solitary. I had begun by thinking of films like Faces and
Love Streams as being based on Cassavetes' run-ins with shallow, vain,
screwed-up Hollywood executives and artist wannabes; but I had it shoved
in my face that his characters were not someone else; they were him and
his best friends.
What I was discovering violated everything I
wanted to believe about great artists. I had always thought of them as
somehow better than the rest of us – wiser, kinder, more aware, more
sensitive. The artist functioned somewhere above the crummy, confused,
disorganized world the rest of us live in.
Does that sound stupid
or naive? Well, that's what I sincerely believed. I needed Cassavetes
to be a wonderful human being. I didn't want him to be petty and
fallible. I fought the truth tooth and nail. I didn't want to believe
it. It was a real crisis for me. I lost sleep worrying about it. I spent
hours talking it over with friends, trying to understand how it could
be true. I almost aborted the project at several points because of it.
JM: So you found out he wasn't perfect. But no one is!
RC:
It's a larger issue. I discovered a lot of stuff that seemed really
very immature, very adolescent, very sad in a way. Though no one talks
about it in public on the record, in private his friends and children
tell endless stories of unprovoked rages, insane jealousies, petty
vendettas, passionate loves, paranoid fantasies, tearful fits of
despair. It actually validated the view of Cassavetes that critics like
Kael, Kauffmann, and Simon had. In their reviews they implied he was
boorish and offensive, and I found out that he was!
Throughout
his life, Cassavetes was known for his wild-man behavior. He was
delightfully nutty, and impetuous and impulsive to a fault. He seemed
capable of doing or saying anything to anyone, utterly fearless and
heedless of consequences. Sometimes the nuttiness manifested itself as a
stunt or a prank – like the time he chained himself to radiator at CBS
to attempt to force them to give him a walk-on in You Are There or got
mad at a receptionist and faked an appendicitis in her office (refusing
to give up the ruse, even when the paramedics showed up) or deliberately
made a scene in public just to see how people would react. This was the
actor who, after all, if he found himself with a spare hour or two on
his hands, would ride uptown in the bus loudly crying the whole way, and
then downtown loudly laughing, just to see how people responded. Or (in
anticipation of Seymour Moskowitz) approached women on the street he
had never seen before, insisting he knew them from high school or
college, trying to pick them up. Half of his friends thought he was
nuts; the other half adulated him, since even simply going into a bar
with him became a kind of street theater – Cassavetes would do something
completely demented, a crowd would gather, and craziness would ensue.
And Cassavetes ate it up. He was a born clown who loved to the center of
attention (in fact demanded to be). He was a Svengali with women. A
guru with men. And took full advantage of the power that accrued.
He
turned life into fun and games. Of course the game was often not funny
for those who were its victims. The years he was trying to make it as an
actor are full of examples. There was the time a casting director
rejected him for a part because “no one would believe you as a
murderer,” and Cassavetes returned to his office a few hours later with a
gun and threatened his life: “You don't believe I can be a murderer?
You don't think I can kill you? I'll show you.” The young actor wasn't
smiling and the agent was so terrified he broke into tears. Or the time
Cassavetes got mad at a producer and tore up his office – overturning
the desk, pushing the bookshelves over, tearing up the rug, toppling
everything onto the floor. It wasn't a joke. There was hundreds of
dollars worth of damage, and Cassavetes didn't stop until the police
came to arrest him. Wild, insane rages were common. Cassavetes thought
nothing of swearing, yelling, even throwing a punch when someone dared
to disagree with him. There were lots of brawls like the one in that
ends Shadows – in bars and on the street; and later on, lots of yelling
matches, with Rowlands, at home and in public. None of that was a
laughing matter.
It's no surprise that the films he went on to
make in the following decade are so intense emotionally. They are
continuous with the emotionality of his life. Cassavetes the person was
unable to fit into society's categories and polite roles, just as his
characters are unable too. He was too alive, too emotional, too fluid to
be contained by a category, to behave properly or correctly in society,
just as they are. His own personal behavior, in fact, was beyond
anything you see Mabel, Myrtle, Sarah, or Lelia do – at their most
extreme. His films, in effect, pose the same questions his life did. How
do we understand this sort of extremity? Is it crazy or inspired? Is it
evidence of creativity or just maddening self-centeredness? Does it
point a way out of the ruts and routines of life or is it just a sign of
a rug-merchant, a con-man, a hustler devoted to getting his own way? Do
these theatrical expansions of selfhood enhance, enlarge, and enrich
personal identity or open the flood gates to chaos? They are the
questions figures like Lelia, Moskowitz, Mabel, Myrtle, and many of
Cassavetes' other characters pose.
JM: So his personality is in his characters.
RC:
Yes. But what I have just said makes it sound too theoretical. Let me
not mince words. Cassavetes may have been a brilliant filmmaker but he
was not always a great human being. As my friend Tom Noonan, who also
knew him, said to me once: “You know, all those people who worship him
as some kind of hero wouldn't have been able to stand being with him for
an hour.” He was too annoying. He needled Gena mercilessly. He pushed
people's buttons to see how they would react. He flew into rages if you
dared to cross him or disagree with him. He wasn't reasonable. He was
not a saint. He was closer to being a nut case. A wild man. Possessed
and out of control emotionally. A con-man who would use you if he could
benefit from it in some way. A child who threw temper tantrums, yelled,
screamed, and cried when he got upset. That's what threw me for so long.
How could a great artist be so screwed up, so immature, so
self-centered and willful?
But in the end it taught me important
things. First, that the dancer is different from the dance. Look at
Bach, Beethoven, Picasso, D.H. Lawrence, Robert Frost. None of them was
an ideal human being. They were all cantankerous, difficult people.
Critics find that so surprising that they write books about them
“exposing” their moral flaws, as if it were the exception rather than
the rule. The mistake is that artists function by different rules from
what critics expect.
Second, he wasn't a clear-headed theorist of
his own work. He forged his work in his heart, out of his emotions. Not
from his head and his ideas. He used to say he discovered what his
films were about when viewers told him, and that wasn't false modesty.
They didn't come from theories and ideas, but from impressions, memories
of things he saw and lived through.
What I ultimately understood
that art could come not from clarity but confusion; that work could be
quarried from the imperfections of an artist's emotional life. I
ultimately realized that his fallible, flawed humanity was not at odds
with the greatness of his work, but the source of it. Cassavetes'
personality was a mess of unresolved moods and feelings. He could be a
romantic and a hard-driving businessman; a visionary and a rug-merchant;
an idealist and a ball-buster; generous and self-centered; sensitive
and tough – and he created characters with the same complexity. He put
his emotional confusions and contradictions into them. At other times it
seemed as if he parceled out different sides of his personality into
different figures. If Jeannie represented one part of him, Chettie,
Freddie, and Richard represented other moods and feelings. Cassavetes'
greatness as an artist was precisely that he wasn't afraid to put
everything that was in him in his movies. That's what it means to say
that his life is in his films, not as biographically but emotionally.
Maybe
that's a better starting point for thinking about most art – not as
coming from otherworldly clarity but this-worldly turbulence. Look at
Picasso's paintings. Listen to Beethoven's symphonies. The first thing
they teach us is that the greatness of the works is not their heavenly
clarity, but their all-too-earthly conflict. And the second thing they
teach us is that the greatest art is personal. It's not about someone
else. It's about them, their lives, their frustrations, their
loneliness. That's where critics invariably go wrong. Art at its very
greatest isn't a game of playing with genres or conventions. It isn't
all those arch, ironic things the critics read out of it. It's a life or
death struggle to express what you really are – in all of its mess and
turmoil. It's reality. It's close to home.
What I learned about
Cassavetes ultimately violated everything our culture tells us about
movie stars and directors. Watch Tom Cruise on Oprah, listen to a
Barbara Walters interview with Meryl Streep, or Charlie Rose or James
Lipton sucking-up to Spielberg. The goal is to convince us that they are
just sincere, hard-working regular people like us – raising families,
falling in and out of love, buying groceries down the street, trundling
the kids off to day care. They're no different from you and me. Just
folks. They are the same charming, well-meaning schmos we think we are.
That's why we are supposed to like them. To say the obvious: that's
poppycock – even if we're talking only about Hollywood hacks. It's not
even true of us ordinary people. We're all much weirder than that.
And
it was even less true of someone like Cassavetes. He was not the man on
the street. He was possessed by demons – of self-imposed alienation,
loneliness, self-destructiveness, ambition, frustration, anger – but
that's not a bad thing. It was the demons that gave him the power to
create such powerfully demon-driven protagonists, living their own lives
in states of emotional extremity. Look at the movies, for gosh sake.
Look at the fact that he made them, and kept making them – against all
odds, while almost every critic in America jeered. He didn't care. He
had a vision, a dream. He spent his life trying to build rockets to fly
to the moon in his garage. That should tell you something about how
crazy he was! And that's what's wrong with all those postmortem
celebrity interviews that tell us what a swell guy he was. OK. He was a
great guy at times; but he was a lot more than that or he wouldn't have
been what he was and done what he did. He was a maniac. He was nuts. He
was a tough, hard person. He was absolutely impossible to deal with when
he wanted you to do something for him. He didn't give a sh*t what the
critics said about him or his work. He was not Tom Cruise or Tom Hanks.
He was not all those things his admirers want to turn him into: warm,
fuzzy, cuddly, and loveable. He would have chewed up and spit out Oprah
and Rose and Lipton. Heck, he did with interviewers in his own day. I
have tapes of his appearances on talk shows of his own day. He was not
the charming, smiling guest they bargained for – and the hosts did not
invite him back.
Cassavetes gave me copies of some of his
shooting scripts before he died, and the shooting script of Faces makes
the autobiographical side of the film almost painfully clear. He wrote
it at a time of deep frustration and dissatisfaction with his life, and
it is laced with incredibly personal passages – perhaps too personal,
since they were almost all cut from the release print – in which
Cassavetes puts his own feelings in the mouths of his characters,
particularly Richard Forst. But what is most telling is how unresolved
and contradictory the expressions are. Forst expresses frustration deep
with his marriage, but also talks about the wonder of love and romance.
Much of his speech is laced with disillusionment and cynicism, but he
also expresses hope and idealism in other passages. He talks about
loving to be around people; then switches to talking about the need to
get drunk to kill the pain of empty, meaningless social interaction.
It's almost more than I can bear to know about Cassavetes' emotional
turmoil at the point he wrote the movie. But it reveals a lot about the
messy, confused rag-and-bone shop of the heart his work came from.
JM:
For Cassavetes, a film was a tool, a means to an end, not a
self-contained statement. It was a practical way of recording moments
and expressions, which were the real medium for him. He shied away from
using the word “idea” and preferred the word “emotion” to express the
content of his work. He thought ideas were the intellectualizing, the
formulation of experience, whereas emotions were an immediate,
instinctive and direct experience. Ideas as explanations are a step
removed from actual experience, and somewhere in-between a truth is
lost….
RC: Cassavetes was not an intellectual. He wasn't
interested in theory or criticism. In fact, he really wasn't much of a
reader at all. Believe it or not, I don't think he ever read
Stanislavski. Remember the line in A Woman Under the Influence: “Let the
girls read”? – well, he left the reading to Rowlands! He was a
people-watcher and learned more from an hour of watching faces and
listening to voices in a restaurant than a library of books could have
taught him. He did not function analytically. He operated out of his
guts, his instincts about people, his feelings about life.
In
fact, he probably wasn't aware that his characters represented parts of
himself or embodied his emotional confusions. All he probably thought he
was doing as he dictated his scripts was slipping into their skins and
trying to bring them to life, putting everything he felt and knew into
them. His obsessions, doubts, and uncertainties became theirs.
In
short, Cassavetes' insights came from life, not from theory – which is
of course the best place to get them. It's the opposite to how most
critics function, which is why a critic has to be very, very careful
about the conclusions he draws. The films didn't begin as ideas. Shadows
didn't begin as a study of “beat drifters” or “race relations.” It was
Cassavetes' effort to give voice to the mixed-up feelings he had as a
young man (particularly about his relation to his brother). Faces and
Husbands didn't originate as analyses of the “male ego” or studies of
the frustrations of “suburban life.” They were Cassavetes giving voice
to his own personal disillusionments about marriage, middle-age, and his
career. They were documentaries of everything he knew and felt at that
point in his life – not sorted out into a series of “points” or
“critiques” or “views.”
That's actually a fairly unusual way to
proceed. La Dolce Vita was released three years before Cassavetes wrote
Faces, and has some superficial similarities with it (as well as being
referred to in it). I sat through a screening the other night at Harvard
and the scenes practically had labels on them. This one was an attack
on the idle rich. That one was a critique of on the superficiality of
journalists. This other one commented on the vapidity of modern
architecture. The majority of films are organized this way. Look at
Nashville, Welcome to the Dollhouse, Magnolia, and American Beauty. They
have theses. They make points. The characters represent generalized
views and ideas – and the critics eat it up! They love abstract movies,
since they make their jobs easy. Films that originate in ideas can be
translated back into ideas with almost nothing lost in the translation.
These films are eminently discussible. You can write an essay about
them. Because ideas are abstract. They are simple. They say one thing.
They stand still.
Cassavetes' work resists that kind of
understanding. Every time we want to lasso a character or a scene with
an idea, it scoots away from us. The incredibly detailed behaviors,
facial expressions, and tones of voice that comprise his scenes defeat
generalizations. The characters in Faces and Husbands are too
changeable, too emotionally unresolved to be pigeonholed intellectually.
As Cassavetes says in Cassavetes on Cassavetes, they may be b*****ds
one minute but they can be terrific the next. In A Woman Under the
Influence just when we're about to decide that Nick Longhetti is a “male
chauvinist,” he says or does something kind and thoughtful. Just when
we want to turn Mabel into an “oppressed housewife,” she sleeps with
another man to show us she is not under the thumb of her husband and has
genuine emotional problems. The racial incident at the center of
Shadows invites an unwary critic to view the main drama of the film as
being about race, but the film's narrative and characterizations subvert
the attempt. The racial misunderstanding at the center of the film is
largely a device to create other, more interesting, more slippery
dramatic problems for them to deal with. The characters are given such
individualized emotional structures of feeling that it becomes
impossible to treat them generically as racial representatives. We can't
factor out their personalities. Character is at the heart of
Cassavetes' work, always displacing incident as the center of interest,
and the particularity of the characterizations in all of the films
prevents us from treating the characters' situations in a depersonalized
way, which is what ideological analysis always requires to some extent.
I'm
convinced that this aspect of Cassavetes' work is the reason that
during his lifetime reviewers wrote off his work as being confused or
disorganized. They wanted to be able to label characters and situations,
and when they couldn't, decided it was the films' fault. They wanted to
be able to stabilize their relationship to an experience by being able
to maintain a fixed point of view on it. In Shadows, they wanted to be
able to conclude that Lelia and Ben were victims of racial prejudice; in
Faces, that the figures were being morally judged; in Husbands, that
the three men were being satirized. When the movies defeated such easy
relationships to the experiences they presented, the critics wrote them
off as muddle-headed, self-indulgent actors' exercises.
Cassavetes
made things hard to understand. That's why a work of art exists.
Otherwise, you might as well write an essay about your subject. Real art
is never reducible to the sort of moral lessons and sociological
platitudes that Spike Lee or Oliver Stone give us or that reviewers and
academic critics want. Art speech is a way of experiencing and knowing
far, far more complex than the ways journalists, or history, sociology,
or film professors think and talk.
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