John Cassavetes

A Mortgaged House as a Screenplay

John Cassavetes mortgaged his house in 1957 to finish a film nobody had asked him for. It was called Shadows and grew out of an improvisation workshop in New York. There was no written script, but there was a physical urgency to capture something studio cinema completely ignored.

Cassavetes worked as a television actor to pay for his own film stock. He earned money from series such as Johnny Staccato and burned it on camera rentals and 16-millimeter film cans. Because his cinema sought not technical perfection but the truth of the accident.

And the accident tended to be expensive.

In 1959 he premiered the first version of Shadows, and European critics responded enthusiastically. But he wasn't satisfied with the result. He reshot much of the footage months later because he felt the narrative had become too commercial and predictable.

The System Against the Individual

Hollywood tried to tame him during the first half of the 1960s. He shot Too Late Blues in 1961 and A Child Is Waiting in 1963 for major studios. The final cuts were taken out of his hands in the editing room. That was when he decided that he would never again let a producer touch his material.

He surrounded himself with a group of friends who functioned as a creative commune. Gena Rowlands, Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara were his loyal soldiers. In 1968, they released Faces after months of editing the film in the garage of his own house.

The film cost about 275,000 dollars.

He received three Oscar nominations despite being a completely fringe production. His method relied on long rehearsal days in which actors pushed themselves to the limit of emotional exhaustion. This turned the camera from an object into an uncomfortable witness to human intimacy.

The Gaze of Gena Rowlands

You can't understand his work without the face of his wife. In 1974 they shot A Woman Under the Influence with money from their own family savings. The distribution was a disaster at first because exhibitors didn't know what to do with a two-and-a-half-hour drama about a mental breakdown.

But the film grossed more than 13 million dollars during its run in American theaters.

Cassavetes preferred film grain and blur if that meant preserving an honest performance. He hated the artificial lighting that erased the natural shadows on faces. That is why his shoots were chaotic and dragged on for months without a fixed production schedule.

In 1976, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie premiered and critics tore it apart for its lack of a clear crime structure. Audiences expected a gangster film and got a psychological study of defeat. He responded by re-editing the film two years later and cutting nearly thirty minutes of footage.

The Final Stretch in Los Angeles

His final years were marked by cirrhosis and a lack of outside funding for his personal projects. In 1984, he directed Love Streams, in which he played an alcoholic writer opposite Rowlands. He won the Golden Bear in Berlin, but by then his health had already deteriorated greatly.

John Cassavetes died on February 3, 1989 in Los Angeles.

He left behind a archive of unfinished scripts and a personal debt that Gena Rowlands managed for years. His last film as a director was Big Trouble in 1986, a studio-commissioned project that he himself asked to be removed from his official filmography because of the studio's constant interference during the shoot.