Nov 23 -
“He had an insatiable curiosity and compassion for just regular people, very often working-class people or artists or women. In Faces, there were older women who expressed their desires and frustrations and that was just not seen at the time. It was considered embarrassing for an older woman to have anything to say about anything emotional.”
So difficult was the business of distribution that one night Cassavetes went to a late-night newsstand and bought all the out-of-town papers, from St Louis and Toronto and Chicago, to see which cinemas were playing the sort of films they liked; he would then ring them and ask if they would take his movies. Sometimes it even worked.
“John was totally fearless, almost unnaturally so. I never saw him depressed, I saw him angry, which they say is the other side of depression, but he was very sure and not particularly influenced by anything anybody said. Our pictures made people feel very uncomfortable much of the time. The characters were very emotionally exposed and people weren’t used to it. Everything was not spelled out. The old tradition was that you prepared the audience but with our films you had to just sit there and hold on to your seats. Some people like that and some don’t.”
