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THEY
SAID
Gena Rowlands on the Cassavetes Era: "It was a
romantic time. You could hardly send us home from work,
then we'd get home and, even though we were exhausted, we'd
still be talking all night, trying not to talk about it,
trying to be balanced with the rest of our life. But we
had such extraordinary happiness in each day," she
adds smiling, "which isn't to say they were
peaceable days." And on the difficulties in founding
money: "The first time I mortgaged my house, I was
scared," she admits. "But then I'd think, `Oh,
damn, go for it.' There wasn't room for us within the
system. Once we decided to make this break and to
concentrate everything on it, it was hard financially . .
. but hard in a good way, not a terrible way." And
on the influence of their movies: "Influential is
such a hoity-toity word," she says graciously.
"But I think there's kind of a longing, a yearning,
for emotion in young people. They've been through a long
period when emotions were not dealt with in film. And
John's films really are about love . . . how you find it,
how in God's name you keep it, how you deal with it no
matter when you lose it - whether by divorce or betrayal,
indifference or death. He goes so deeply into how people
can love and hate each other at the same time."
''You can never be sure,'' New York Times critic Vincent
Canby wrote of Cassavetes, ''whether what you're seeing
is artful or artless.'
Gena on shooting Gloria: "John and I were just back
from Italy, and we'd eaten every single pasta in sight. I
can't tell you what a genius Ungaro was the day we tried
that dress on."
"One of our writers was saying to me the other day,
he didn't think anyone's name came up more often than
John Cassavetes with filmmakers from all over the world,"
says Mr. Jameson, editor of Film Comment
"Well, there's no denying I found him physically
attractive, but I suspect the real attraction was his
passion for everything, not necessarily for movies. We
were theater students when we met, and I always thought
of our future in terms of a theatrical couple, like Lunt
and Fontanne. - Gena on John
Roger Ebert on John Cassavetes: "John Cassavetes is
one of the few modern directors whose shots, scenes,
dialogue and characters all instantly identify their
creator; watch even a few seconds of a Cassavetes film,
and you know whose it is, as certainly as with Hitchcock
or Fellini. They are films with a great dread of silence;
the characters talk, fight, joke, sing, confess, accuse.
They need love desperately, and are bad at giving it and
worse at receiving it, but God how they try." And
again: "One of the things we can ask of an artist is
that he leave some record of how it was for him, how he
saw things, how he coped. Movies are such a collaborative
medium that we rarely get the sense of one person, but
Cassavetes at least got it down to two: himself and
Rowlands. The key to his work is to realize that it is
always Rowlands, not the male lead, who is playing the
Cassavetes role.
Gena on the blurring line between art & life: "We
were so obsessed," the actress remembers. "Our
children got accustomed to coming out to get ready for
school and falling over cables and bumping into cameras
and a houseful of people." To shield the kids from
the coarse tone of their films, the couple tried to avoid
discussing work around the dinner table. "We said, 'We're
going to let it just drop so that we don't bring these
children up to be total neurotics,'" Rowlands laughs.
"We'd go to bed. And then about 3 o'clock, I'd say,
'Are you awake?' He'd say, 'Yeah.' I'd say, 'What do you
think about the scene where...' And then we would go off
again, talking and talking."
Ben Gazzara on John: "I once saw him with his eyes
bleeding, he was so tired," Gazzara marvels. "Bleeding.
From exhaustion. Broken capillaries. From no sleep."
"He was a fighter about everything," says
Elaine Kagan (secretary). "Including death."
Saymour Cassel on his collaboration with John: "You
could give me millions of dollars, and I'd say, 'Keep it,
because what we did with those films is worth more to me
than any amount of money."
Michael Ventura (writer and director of a Cassavetes
documentary called I'm Almost Not Crazy: John Cassavetes:
The Man and His Work) on Love Streams dailies: "When
the lights came up, John looked at me with that
unrelenting look he had. That look. It was fierce, and it
was funny - as though a tough joke had been told, and the
joke was on him. It was full of pain, yet full of
eagerness. It was the look of a man doing what he was
born to do, a man who would settle for nothing less. It
was all those things, and it was something more: It was
humble. For all his arrogance, his pride, his rages, John
Cassavetes was a sweet and humble man, a man who would
spend hours - and on a shooting day! - listening to the
opinions and stories of grips, script girls, bit players,
and the people who dished out the food, because human
beings interested John. He was humble before our struggle
to live and to make some sense of our lives. This shines
in every film he made."
Al Ruban on John: "John
was so in love with life that he was almost intoxicated.
[... ] But he had bad habits, he was always on the phone
and always with a cigarette and, even though I have never
seen him drunk, when he was talking with someone he did
it with a glass in hand. [...] And he loved to talk, debate, argue. He was always on the opposite side. His
true drug was conversation"
"John made you feel important, and he treated
everyone the same, including Gena," says Seymour
Cassel.
"John wrote the parts and told you very little after
that," Rowlands says. "He'd say, `It's your
part, you own this person. Don't ask me how to play it
because you know this person better than anybody else.'
Gena on John and marriage: "I met my husband when we
were students, and we were married thirty years. And we
were so busy doing the things that we were trying to do,
that we didn't think about what made it work, or not work."
And again: "I think now that I look back on it, I
think that we were both so very obsessed about wanting
the same thing. And then we just had a natural, um, it
was just a magnetic happening between us at the beginning.
So I think that is it. And we weren't separated a great
deal. You know how the business thing is pretty hard on
marriages. So..."
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