MortSahlFan — 4 years ago(September 18, 2021 06:31 PM)

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 bullshit 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 hi