When I think of Cassavetes, anything that comes up is inextricable from my own life journey. He’s just so IN there with me, the choices I made, the goals I had, my values. He’s also behind my favorite marriage proposal, which might sound silly but … it’s Cassavetes. It’s not silly at all. That’s the one proposal I said yes to. Now, we did not end up getting married, but it’s still a pretty funny story. I discovered Cassavetes young, which I think is good. I discovered him before I was a film critic, long before, which I also think is good. I came to him as an actor, looking for community, hungry for connection. He was (and still is) inspiring. I took this picture, when I was living right behind the Music Box Theatre, and spent all my free time there.
It was years before I could finally see the long-unseeable Love Streams (his final film) … and, coincidence? I think not … my first “gig” for Criterion, back in 2014, was to write and narrate a video-essay about Gena Rowlands’ career. It all made sense.
Of course I’ve written so much about Cassavetes over the years but I’ll highlight just two I’m really proud of:
For my newsletter, I resurrected an old piece about Minnie and Moskowitz, a film that gets me every time.
And most recently, I wrote a piece I’d been wanting to write for years. Decades, really. I wrote about my VIVID first year in Chicago – which I’ve covered in other contexts (“tsk tsk”) – and how I saw Opening Night for the first time, and also discovered Tennessee Williams’ Two-Character Play. Within months of each other. To this day, those two works of art seem almost the same to me. I was different after I encountered both, and never really got back to my before self: John Cassavetes, Tennessee Williams, and Intelligent Insanity.
“I guess every picture we’ve ever done has been, in a way, to try to find some kind of philosophy for the characters in the film. And so, that’s why I have a need for the characters to really analyze love, discuss it, kill it, destroy it, hurt each other, do all the stuff in that war, in that word-polemic and film-polemic of what life is. And the rest of the stuff doesn’t really interest me. It may interest other people, but I have a one-track mind. That’s all I’m interested in – love. And the lack of it. When it stops. And the pain that’s caused by loss of things that are taken away from us that we really need. ”
— John Cassavetes
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