John loved to talk, that's what I read. He also talked with his movies, that why I think that watching his movies is a way to a have conversation with him (remember that he was always the female character of his films). He spent hours talking with his actors, his crew or just someone who passed by. He was never cheap, you could disagree with him but you could never accuse him of superficiality. If after "reading" his movies you are still interested in what he had to say, you can have a brief example in this page. Than try to get hold of the interviews he did in his life and the book they wrote about him (see Sources and Critics Section) - surely not a man in the choir.

"[...] because no one else had done me a special service that I feel obligated to"
--John Cassavetes referred to his wife in his testament

Introduction - John Cassavetes in His Own Words

I hate quotations
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

"They said"

HE SAID

"There's a difference between ad-libbing and improvising. And there's a difference between not knowing what to do and just saying something. Or making choices as an actor. As a writer also, as a person who's making a film, as a cameraman, everything is a choice. And it seems to me I don't really have to direct anyone or write down that somebody's getting drunk; all I have to do is say that there's a bottle there and put a bottle there and then they're going to get drunk. I don't want to tell them how they're going to get drunk. I don't want to tell them how they're going to get drunk, or what they would do, and I don't want to restrict them in being able to carry out a beat, to fulfill an action. You can't say somebody's drunk, or in love."

"It doesn't matter if the words are written, because improvisation has been going on in films by everybody. There's nobody that doesn't improvise to some degree. So it just depends on what degree you need."

"As the director of Husbands, I went under the assumption that sooner or later Peter Falk would know what he was doing, and sooner or later Ben Gazzara would know what he was doing, and we'd wait it out until we did know what we were doing. Then, that would be close to what the characters would want to express, for whatever reasons. I was shocked by Peter's choices. I mean, it really surprised me that he would go off in a certain direction. What happens is, everything is strength. How much strength do you have? Before you get to improvise on any kind of level, we would have to know that no matter what we did, we would be O.K. We had to know the material that
well. We could improvise the rehearsal and come out great. We all have the instinct that if we got in front of the camera that that kind of delicate improvisation without any theatricality would lose some of its ease. All of a sudden there would be cameras, cables, guys around, people saying, 'We can't move this thing over there,' and suddenly the actors would receive very little importance. And you start to fight to preserve what you have and you start pushing, and all of a sudden, it's gone. What had been terribly concentrated in rehearsals would dissipate. So I found that by writing scenes that we might never use, and writing them again and again and again, that everything that we had written and improvised was, therefore, in our minds, used and usable. We had investigated, then studied it. We knew what we were capable of saying to each other and doing with each other, so we got to the point where we could just give any kind of improvisations."

"I don't shoot any angles going back and forth. Almost everything is shot from the same place, from the same perspective, so that...it's very important to me that the cameraman has feeling, and can move with the figures as he feels it, rather than me saying, 'Oh, we missed that.'"

"I wouldn't tell Vic Kemper where to put the camera. Just get together with him and say, 'Feel what you feel.' All the long lens shots were Vic's, and there was one stationary shot in the whole scene. He's the only cameraman I know who hand-holds with an Elemack dolly. He just walks around with it, pushes the cameraman, and has a terrific focus-puller that he has worked with for a long time. They talk to each other, back and forth. He sets up his moves. You could watch the camera moving, and you knew that it was going to be very good because he just has great feeling. So I would never worry about him."

"I'm not a cameraman. But you generally light. Just take a lot of time to fill in. I mean, people see what's going to happen, really, basically. If this is the room, we're shooting this way, the camera's here. So you encompass all of it. I mean, you couldn't possibly work with the lights that are surrounding somebody and say, 'Now, improvise, oh Jeez, you're in the shadow.' You couldn't possibly do that, so the lighting would have to be much more general. But the soft lighting seems to work very well for improvisation, because it's a general light anyway."

"You con people and you lie to them. You try to keep a little part of yourself when somebody says to you: 'You figure it's the greatest picture ever made?' You try to keep a little part of yourself alive. It's the same thing if you are a cameraman behind the camera with a director who is uptight. They know the guy's uptight. What can they do about it? Can they say, 'Look, you're uptight. Relax?' They are going to have to live with it afterwards. They will go out and have a drink, go home, argue with their wives and be unhappy. There doesn't seem to be any solution within that traditional framework whereby people could say, 'I am going into the movie distribution business for money,' while we approach it behind the scenes as an art. We can't."