Who was the Great John Nicholas Cassavetes?
Film can be the doorway to the spirit. Here is a pioneer in Independent. film Using the camera to break out of the “Hollywood” box
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3-minute read
Q. Lewis, I am an actor interested in learning techniques for making great films. I love to watch the best independent film. I even follow the Independent Spirit Awards. Who is one of the great pioneers in Independent film-making?
A. One of the greats is John Nicholas Cassavetes?
Photo by Denise Jans on Unsplash
Every time you watch an off-beat film, something edgy, visionary, bizarre, or unconventional you are watching the influence of John Nicholas Cassavetes at work.
It may Tarantino, or David Lynch…Cassavetes is in there.
John Cassavetes (Born December 9, 1929 — February 3, 1989), was an American actor, film director, and screenwriter He acted in many mainstream Hollywood films, notably Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Dirty Dozen (1967), but he used the money he earned there to create an entirely new genre, The Independent Film.
Cassavetes wrote and directed over a dozen movies, which he financed in part with his Hollywood paychecks, and which pioneered the use of improvisation and a realistic Cinema Verite style. He studied acting with Don Richardson, using an acting technique based on muscle memory.
By 1956, Cassavetes had begun teaching an alternative to method acting in his own workshop in New York City. An improvisation exercise in his workshop inspired the idea for his writing and directorial debut, Shadows (1959; first version 1957). Cassavetes raised the funds for production from friends and family, as well as listeners to Jean Shepherd’s late-night radio talk show Night People. His stated purpose was to make a film about little people, different from Hollywood studio productions.
Cassavetes was unable to gain American distribution of Shadows, but it won the Critics Award at the Venice Film Festival. European distributors later released the movie in the United States as an import. Although the box office of Shadows in the United States was slight, it did gain attention from the Hollywood studios.
Cassavetes played bit parts in B-pictures and in television serials until gaining notice in 1955 as a vicious killer in The Night Holds Terror, and as a juvenile delinquent in the live TV drama. With the payment for his work on television, as well as a handful of film acting jobs, he was able to relocate to California and to make his subsequent films independent of any studio. He was nominated for an Academy Award, a number of times.
Faces (1968) was the second film to be both directed and independently financed by Cassavetes. Faces was nominated for three Academy Awards. Around this time, Cassavetes formed “Faces International” as a distribution company to handle all of his films.
His Final years
Cassavetes directed the film Gloria (1980), featuring his wife Gena Rowlands as a Mob moll who tries to protect an orphan boy whom the Mob wants to kill. Rowlands earned another Best Actress nomination for it.
After receiving the prognosis from his doctor that he had six months to live, Cassavetes made Love Streams (1984) which featured him as an aging playboy who suffers the overbearing affection of his recently divorced sister. The award-winning film is often considered Cassavetes’s “last film”, in that it brought together many aspects of his previous films and also in that he despised the film he made afterward, Big Trouble (1986), which he took over during filming from Andrew Bergman, who wrote the original screenplay. Cassavetes came to refer to the film as “the aptly titled “Big Trouble”, since the studio vetoed many of his decisions for the film and eventually edited most of the film in a way which Cassavetes disagreed with.
In January 1987, Cassavetes was facing health problems but having outlasted his doctor’s prognosis, he wrote the three-act play Woman of Mystery and brought it to the stage in May and June.
Afterthoughts
At the time of his death, Cassavetes had amassed a collection of more than forty unproduced screenplays, as well as a novel of Husbands.
Aside from presenting difficult characters whose inner desires were not easily understood, Cassavetes paid little attention to the “impressionistic cinematography, linear editing, and star-centered scene making” that are fashionable in Hollywood and art films. Instead, he chose to shoot mostly handheld with general lighting or documentary style, to accommodate the spontaneity of his actors.
Cassavetes was never interested in working with actors who were more concerned with their images than with the characters whom they were portraying, which is why he rarely had actors of note (other than Gena Rowlands, Peter Falk, and Ben Gazzara) in his films. As Cassavetes said, he strove “to put [actors] in a position where they may make asses of themselves without feeling they’re revealing things that will eventually be used against them.”
The manner in which Cassavetes employed improvisation is frequently misunderstood. With the exception of the original version of Shadows, his films were completely scripted. Confusion arises in part because Cassavetes allowed actors to bring their own interpretations of characters to their performances. Dialogue and action were scripted but delivery was not.
Cassavetes’s unorthodox characters reflected his similarly unconventional method in the making of his films. He employed mostly his friends as actors and set personnel, generally for little or no money guarantee and a share in the profits of the film. Both Shadows and Faces, two of his earliest films, were shot over a four-year period on week-ends and whenever funds became available.
Cassavetes said: “The hardest thing for a film-maker, or a person like me, is to find people…who really want to do something…They’ve got to work on a project that’s theirs.” This method differs greatly from the ‘director run’ sets of big-budget Hollywood productions
According to Marshall Fine, “Cassavetes, who provided the impetus of what would become the independent film movement in America…spent the majority of his career making his films ‘off the grid’ so to speak…unfettered by the commercial concerns of Hollywood.”
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Author: Lewis Harrison is the creator of the Life Strategies Playbook and Mentoring Course and The Spiritual, Not Religious Course.
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