June 2004: by John Gallagher

Gena Rowlands, the 1996 National Board of Review Career Achievement Award winner, is one of our most revered actresses. Her brilliant and always memorable work has influenced an entire generation of filmmakers. She and her late husband John Cassavetes practically invented American independent film with their ground-breaking collaboration on Faces (1968), Minnie And Moskowitz (1971), A Woman Under The Influence (1974), Opening Night (1978), Gloria (1980), and Love Streams (1984). Their son Nick continued the tradition with Unhook The Stars (1996), starring Ms. Rowlands. A few days after the NBR Awards, Sylvia Caminer and I spoke with Ms. Rowlands in her suite at the Wyndham Hotel in New York.

JOHN GALLAGHER: We loved your work in Unhook The Stars, especially with the little boy, Jake Lloyd.

GENA ROWLANDS: Nick has a great touch with children. He has two little girls himself and I noticed with them he has endless patience and love, and thinks they're very original and creative, which they are of course.

SYLVIA CAMINER: As a child himself he grew up in a film environment.

GR: My poor children grew up in a house where you were always shooting a movie. They'd come out and fall over the cable and the camera and there'd be forty people in our house all the time. I do believe they thought that's how everybody else lived too. They all seemed very comfortable with the process, not that all of them are doing it but they seemed to feel it was a normal way of life.

JG: Like all independent filmmakers, we're so inspired by the films that you did together. We're glad it's coming out more and more that the films you guys did were not improvised.

GR: You can't convince anyone of that, because the first picture John directed, Shadows (1959), was. Every newspaper in the world printed it from that point on. We liked it to look improvisational, we liked it to look like what we thought was real. John had a very great capacity and talent for writing dialogue as it's spoken, the way people speak instead of that kind of "movie speak" that used to be fashionable when we first started. So that gave it a sense of improvisation. I've been confronted with this question so many times that I try and think why people think this, even though for the next ten pictures you kept saying there was a script. I came to realize that it was the style. It was the language and also very early we used those little body mikes. They were quite cumbersome then, y'know, it was always where to put the battery and you lost a certain degree of quality but what you lost in that little roughness in quality you were able to make up in spontaneity and movement.

JG: We've seen pictures of A Woman Under The Influence when you're standing on the couch and doing "Swan Lake" and John's there actually filming you himself.

GR: He couldn't keep his hands off the camera. We always used two cameras which I liked very much especially if you're working in deeply emotional waters, because then the closeup exactly matches and you don't have to do an over-the-shoulder. But also you'd turn around and there'd John be with a camera!

SC: We're also huge fans of Minnie And Moskowitz . It's such a crime it's unavailable. We're going to start a letter writing campaign to Universal to release it on video.

GR: They won't release it, short of threatening their lives with a .44 or something. I'm sorry they don't release it.

(Note: Minnie And Moskowitz was eventually released on DVD by Anchor Bay Entertainment, with audio commentary by Gena Rowlands and Seymour Cassel).

JG: Like a lot of the films it's really about love, the whole issue of love, not having enough love or too much.

GR: I think it's the first time too that it's just been absolutely said out loud how much we have been influenced by movies. What we expect a face to look like. When I'd look at Seymour (Cassel) and say that was the wrong face. I was supposed to be looking at Humphrey Bogart or Charles Boyer. So much behavior and so many expectations were built by the movies.

SC: We read somewhere that Universal originally wanted Jack Nicholson to play Moskowitz ...

GR: ... which defeats the whole purpose. Well I remember John wrote a picture he did called Too Late Blues (1961) for Monty (Clift) and me and they wouldn't let us do it. They got Bobby Darin and Stella Stevens, who were very good but it was just their way of thinking.

SC: I'm sure you had thorough rehearsals.

GR: Sure.

JG: People think, oh, a Cassavetes film, they just turn on the camera and start improvising.

GR: Yes and a lot of people think improvisation is just walking on and saying anything you want to. Many times we would stop if we couldn't get a scene, couldn't make it work, we'd stop and talk about it, improvise a little bit, just the way anybody works.

SC: How about the scene in Love Streams where you're trying to make your daughter and your husband laugh?

GR: Now that was an improvisation, and that's our last movie so there was improvisation all the way to the end.

JG: Did you know what you were going to be working with?

GR: The script just had a little thing that said Sarah calls her husband home from work and her daughter home from school, to make them laugh, and that they don't enjoy themselves. I said, "John, what is this scene?" He said, "I don't want to ruin it for you." I said, "But in what way? I mean, how do I make them laugh?" He said, "Believe me, you are gonna love it so much, I don't want to ruin it for you." So I thought, OK, I trusted him forever. We're getting closer and closer to shooting the scene and I said, "Are you gonna give me the pages the day before or something?" He said, "Don't even talk about it." I thought I'm gonna kill him is what I'm gonna do cause I was really getting nervous. So the day we were to shoot it I still had absolutely no idea. He said, "Stay in your dressing room, we're gonna get all set up, you're gonna be so glad that we did this, you're gonna remember what a good time it was forever." We came out in the back, we had this big beautiful home, and there's Seymour and Risa (Blewitt) sitting at this great big picnic table full of those teeth that clatter and eyes that fall out. I said "What's this?"   He said,"I want you to use those things to make them laugh and then at the end, when you're finished go and dive off the diving board into the swimming pool." I said "OK, but I'm not sure how these things work." He said, "That's alright, just do it." I said, "Which ones shall I use?", he said, "Use all of them. Action!" So I just started wildly using them and of course he told them not to laugh at all. I am killing myself and they are sitting looking stone-faced and then I realized why he told me to jump off the diving board. That was improvisation. I don't think you could write those lines and do that any other way.

JG: On Love Streams did they keep the animals at your house overnight?

GR: Little improvisational things do happen. I knew they were going to bring miniature animals. I'd never seen anthing miniature before. I think I thought they'd look like Shetland ponies or something. I didn't think they'd be a tenth as big as a Shetland pony and again John said, "I don't want you to see them until they come out of the taxi because when they come out of the taxi it's gonna be like one of those little cars in the circus." He said, "You're gonna go crazy when you see these little animals and I want it on film." That didn't seem very hard. He said, "Then take them into the backyard." They drove up to the house and these little magical things start coming out, ducks and geese and these little horses and I was just, I couldn't believe it, it was as if you slipped into a fairy tale or something and then there's John playing my brother in the front door. I said, "OK, OK I want to take them in back" and then to his amazement I took them up to the front door and into the house. I didn't realize he meant to take them around the house to the back. This way it just seemed the shortest way to get to the backyard, through the front door. I totally forgot that even little horsey-poos are quite a lot for an interior of a house. We had them upstairs one time. They liked to go upstairs. You would think it would be hard for them but they liked to go upstairs.

SC: And then in the rain, the animals tracking mud into the house.

GR: Oh it was just a mess. The house had to be, just everything torn up when we were done.

JG: Opening Night is a picture that only now people are getting to know and appreciate.

GR: I think maybe it's a movie that artists appreciate more cause we're all so involved in what crosses over into your personal life and what crosses back into your work, and how you try to keep a certain amount of sanity. I thought the working relationships were very real in the film. I loved Maurice, the character John plays, he just was jealous that was all, he had the smaller part, I had the big part! And the backstage workers, all of it. It's very dear to my heart.

SC: Any special memories about making Gloria?

GR: Oh I loved Gloria . I remember it was about 120 in the shade, I had five-inch heels, I had a child slung over my shoulder and I was running a great deal of the time but it was fun. It was fun to feel so powerful and so mighty and then on the other hand to always be thinking, I mean, here was a woman who just didn't like children, especially this child, and then she came to love him. You wonder is that just built in? It's a mystery, and a serious thing that you didn't get into in this kind of movie but still it's in your mind and it's interesting to think when did it turn from "I want to punch that little bastard" to knowing how much you cared about him. Yes I liked the film very much. I don't think I've ever seen New York shot better. It just was loads of fun.

JG: What kind of research did you do for A Woman Under The Influence?

GR: I'm a person who just shreds a script. I just read it and read it and read it until it can't stand it anymore and it just breaks into confetti. And then I think about it. Walk around talking to myself a great deal. One work technique that John used that I don't think I've seen anybody else do, he never allowed you to talk about your character with anyone else, with the other actors, which is just the opposite of what most people do and what most people did when we were coming up, they discussed the motivation and the thing until they became very intimate, that was their aim to become very intimate and comfortable with each other. John was just the opposite. He said, "You own your character, I don't know as much about the character as you do by now. It's yours. It's Peter's, it's Ben's, it's up to you to do your preparation." We were very very heavy on preparation, individual preparation, but nobody on the set ever said anything to the other, we didn't know what the other person was going to do until we met together on camera. It was very exciting because in your mind you kind of start thinking someone's going to do something just because that's how you would have done it or maybe how you expected it and it won't be that way at all, so it's just like you're meeting real people. I don't know what you're going to do in a minute, you don't know what I'm going to do. We have some sort of expectations and they might not be correct at all.

SC: How else did you and John Cassavetes prepare?

GR: John liked to get a big long table, put everybody at it and then read, and then take a break and then come back in and then read it again. Then maybe the next day read it again. Just reading. I liked that too because there's no pressure on you for a performance, and you do get some idea where the actors might be going. We were larger on preparation than rehearsal but many things had to be rehearsed a great deal, especially with kids. And you have to give the cinematographer a break sometimes. They're really the heroes of our pictures because they didn't know what to expect. I don't know how focus pullers even spoke to us.

JG: And yet if the camera goes out of focus for a minute, who cares? You don=t even notice.

GR: Because your life does that, your life goes out of focus for a minute.

JG: Working with a small crew really helps the actors too.

GR: It certainly does. One time we were shooting someplace and there was a lamp that looked just like a boom. We didn't even see it until we got into the dailies. We never had enough money to go back and re-shoot on these pictures, you understand, so everybody picked up on it and said John Cassavetes is so careless that he even lets booms show in his films!

SC: Another film we admire is An Early Frost with Ben Gazzara.

GR: It was so moving.

SC: That was the first film to deal with AIDS.

GR: It was the first mention of AIDS in any medium in America, so when people knock television, which I do myself a great deal, they have confronted certain social issues first and very greatly. It was very bold. It meant a lot to all of us.

JG: You've done a lot of quality TV.

GR: Well, you know, offer me a good part and I'll go out on the street corner!

BOGDANOVICH ON CASSAVETES : Peter Bogdanovich's relationships with veteran filmmakers like Orson Welles, Howard Hawks and John Ford are well known. Before he became the celebrated director of The Last Picture Show (1971), Paper Moon (1973), Saint Jack (1979), Mask (1985), Noises Off (1992) and The Cat's Meow (2003), Bogdanovich had established his historian credentials with books on Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock, Welles, Lang, and Dwan.

Bogdanovich's association with John Cassavetes is not as well known. These two maverick filmmakers became close friends in the '70s; in fact, Bogdanovich almost cast Cassavetes in the title role of Saint Jack but settled on Ben Gazzara, whom he met on the set of Cassavetes' Opening Night . Bogdanovich (a winner of the NBR William K. Everson Film History Award) shared his memories of Cassavetes with me:

JOHN GALLAGHER: In your interview with director Robert Aldrich in Who the Devil Made It (Alfred Knopf, 1997) you point out that Aldrich helped get John Cassavetes back into mainstream Hollywood as an actor by casting him in The Dirty Dozen (1967).

PETER BOGDANOVICH: John told me that. It wasn't Aldrich, cause Aldrich didn't brag on himself. John told me he owed it to Aldrich because nobody would hire him because of the fracas between Cassavetes and (Stanley) Kramer (on A Child Is Waiting , 1963). That was a big thing for John, doing The Dirty Dozen .

JG: He was nominated for a Supporting Actor Oscar.

PB: He's brilliant in that movie.

JG: The Ray Carney book The Films of John Cassavetes (Cambridge University Press, 1994) says Cassavetes asked you to direct a scene in Love Streams (1984) between him and Dianne Abbott. What's the story behind that?

PB: I didn't know he mentioned that. Well, actually I directed two things for John -- I mean, they're minimal. On Opening Night John was running out of money and I let him use my house. I had a projection room in the house that I had on Copa de Oro (in Beverly Hills) at that time. He'd asked me to come down and be an extra in the theatre scene in Opening Night . He said Peter Falk was coming down, so I went down and I wore a tuxedo.

JG: It's the last shot of the film.

  PB: I didn't know what to do when I got there. John just said "Go over and congratulate Gena (Rowlands)," so I did, and that was that. "You were terrific", I say and she says to someone "Do you know Peter Bogdanovich?" It was very funny, I think, at the end of the picture. I knew John was financing it himself and he was running out of money. I said "Do you want me to shoot anything for you, shoot some second unit for you?" He said "Would you?" and I said "Sure." So he asked me to shoot a couple of shots and I went out, grabbed a few shots of Gena and Joan Blondell in a car pulling into a garage or something. That was it. It took an hour.

Then after Dorothy was killed, Dorothy Stratten, I didn't go out much. I was writing the book (The Killing of the Unicorn) and I just didn't go out. I was just ... John and I were pretty good friends and he intuited, I guess. I didn't even discuss it with him. I told him I didn't feel like directing.

He called me up one afternoon and he said, "I need you to come over here and direct the scene I'm doing with Dianne Abbott."

I said "What do you mean you need me to direct the scene?"

"I need you to come over and direct the scene, I really need you, can you come over?"

I said "John, you direct yourself all the time, you don't need me to direct the fucking scene."

He said "Yes I do, now are we friends or what, you're not gonna help me?"

I said "John, you don't need me to direct the scene! What am I gonna do, you know I don't do this stuff."

And he said,"Peter. I'm asking you as a favor. Are you gonna come over and help me with the goddam scene? Are you going to say no? What are you gonna say -- no to me?"

I said "Alright John, you don't need me but I'll come over if you want me to."

He said "I'm in the scene and I want you to watch the scene, I want you to direct it."

So I went over and everybody was there, his crew and everybody, shooting in his house. Al Ruban was the producer, the line producer, and he was there. I went in and rehearsed the scene a little bit with John and Dianne. I gave her a piece of business with her flower, y'know, it took a couple of hours. I don't remember saying much about directing them, I just said whatever, I don't remember doing much, a couple of over the shoulders and a shot of her pulling up which John didn't use and that was the end of it. He thanked me profusely and everybody made jokes cause y'know, John would take a while to direct scenes. The joke was, Al started kidding John -- "Jesus, I mean, let's keep Peter on here, we got the goddam scene done quickly. Peter does it fast, John!" It really wasn't hard to do. I directed Dianne marginally, I don't think I said much, John knew what to do. I just went through the motions but it got me out of the house.

I didn't realize what he was doing until later, why he'd done it, but it helped me to get the juices going a little bit. A couple of years later I ran the picture and he thanked me at the end of the picture and that's when I figured out what he'd done and I was very touched. I called him and I said "Jesus, John, you're thanking me at the end of the picture, what did I do, I came over."

He said, "No no no, you were great, it helped me a great deal, in fact I asked the Directors Guild if we could share credit but they wouldn't let me."

"Share credit? You mean directing?"

"Yeah!"

"John, you're crazy."

"No no, really, it was a big help!"

That was John. John was amazing. I spent a lot of time with him the last four years of his life. I went over to his house a lot. I went through some hell in the early '80s, which he knew, and then in '85 we had a lot of problems, with Mask and so on, I finally broke down, went into therapy, went bankrupt. It was a rough year, '85. They say that about tragedy, when you have that kind of sudden death, that kind of tragic death, that five years later is really tough. It had been predicted to me and it was correct. Then John's illness started to show and was diagnosed. He'd stopped drinking and smoking and he asked me if I would stand up for him on a picture he was going to do with Sean Penn.

JG: She's De-Lovely (eventually filmed by Nick Cassavetes and released in 1997 as She's So Lovely.

PB: Yeah, and would I say that I would be there when he directed if they couldn't get insurance. I said yeah and we went and talked to Sean. Unfortunately Sean took another movie instead, Casualties Of War (1989) I think it was. She's De-Lovely fell apart and John was pretty unhappy about it. But for those last few years I would go over there at least once a week, hang out. I was on a special diet, he was on a special diet. He used to kid me cause I came over with melons, I was eating a lot of melon, I'd come over with my own melons, he'd say "Oh boy, Peter's here with the melons!" I loved John. I miss him a lot.

JG: You thanked him in the credits of your picture Texasville (1990).

PB: He was very helpful. Did I thank him on the credits?

JG: Yeah.

PB: Because he read the script and he was a big help to me on that. He had great ideas, and you know sometimes just encouragement is a lot. People don't realize if someone says "Go for it, do it", it's great. That's something . I had that from John. He died before we made Texasville but he'd been helping me with it. In fact in '89 the Rotterdam Film Festival wanted to give him some kind of award and they wanted to show Opening Night . They asked John to come over and he couldn't. He was too ill. He asked me to go over and be there for him so I did. He died while I was there. I was talking about him, making a speech after the movie and was informed afterward that he'd passed on. So I wasn't there for the funeral and the memorial cause I was in Holland.

JG: People couldn't see Opening Night for years...

PB: I know it.

JG: ... and he's been such an enormous influence on independent filmmakers, the father of indie filmmakers.

PB: People forget, but John Cassavetes was the first American director to do films in the way everybody's trying to do them now. He did it. Shadows (1960) was the first one. That was in fact the only one of his films that was improvised. Everybody thought that he improvised all his pictures but that's bullshit. He wrote it all. That was the only one that was improvised. I remember they asked Peter Falk was it true that John improvised all his pictures and Peter said ... ( Another Perfect Imitation )... "How can you improvise that dialogue? That dialogue is brilliant, I mean that was all written, you can't improvise that."

JG: Did you know Cassavetes in New York?

  PB: No. I've tried to remember when I actually first met him. I think it may have been in Don Siegel's office (Cassavetes starred in Siegel's Crime In The Streets   in 1956 and 1964's The Killers ). He might have come in and I might have shook hands with him. I remember he came to a screening of What's Up, Doc? (1972) here in New York, and I knew him by then but not very well. I remember Shirley MacLaine was there. She has a very raucous laugh and she was laughing, and John was there with Gena and he was laughing. He had a very noticeable laugh. There were about 300 people and even though the picture had been working, you're always nervous about it. I remember at one point in the picture, about halfway through, John just said, loud , "I can't believe he's doing this!" ... (laughter) ... It made me very happy. That was the best review I ever got. Then we became more and more friendly and I remember he invited Cybill (Shepherd) and me to an early running of A Woman Under The Influence (1974) and we were just completely blown away by it.

In the late '70s he asked me to direct Gloria (released in 1980). He wrote it and it was called One Winter Night or something, One Winter Day , it was an early title. We had a reading of the script. He asked me to be a part of it. He said "You gotta direct this, you know how to do this picture." I said "John, I don't want to do it, this is your picture, you direct it." He said "No, no, I want you to direct it." I read the script and I said "You have to direct it, I'm not gonna direct it. You should do it. Have somebody buy it and you direct it." He really wanted me to do it, I guess because of Paper Moon, which he liked. But he finally did it.

JG: You have the sensibility to portray that hard-boiled woman in the tradition of Joan Blondell or Ida Lupino.

PB: It was wonderful. I loved that movie. I didn't see it when it was made because Dorothy was killed around that time. I didn't see it for a number of years and then I finally saw it and it blew me away. It was one of John's best. But Cassavetes was the first independent filmmaker and he led the way with Shadows and then Faces in '68. That was really the beginning of the New Hollywood. So it's correct that he's the father of the New Hollywood. He is that. He's the first one who said "Let's do it differently." And he came just at the end of the studio system, just as it was falling apart and he was the voice of the American New Wave which became clear in the late '60s with Faces and (Bob) Rafelson's pictures (Five Easy Pieces) and mine (Targets, The Last Picture Show), that whole thing that happened around '68, '69, '70, '71. Then it was kind of over by '75 except for John.

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