I met my first Cassavetes moment six years ago in a script writing class. It was the long and exhausting scene that comes at the end of A Woman Under the Influence and we watched it alongside another brilliant domestic moment, the scene in Network where William Holden tells his wife he’s in love with Faye Dunaway. Later, I saw Shadows and Faces and Opening Night. Then I wrote about The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, and now his films are stuck under my skin and almost every tiny thing links back to a Cassavetes moment. This has ruined countless conversations. Everything will be going along swimmingly, stories, jokes, shared wonder at lovely things, and then a word or an image will remind me of Gena or Seymour, wild laughter and endless glasses of scotch. After that, I’ll gush uncontrollably while the other person’s attention wanes and they begin to wish they were somewhere else.
The other day Cadillac said, in reference to some kind of rot, ‘well botulism is the same everywhere,’ and immediately I was in the dressing room of The Crazy Horse West and Cosmo Vitelli was telling a sinking joke, ‘they got botulism and died!’ and laughing as though the rest of the room were laughing with him. I’m always urging people to see Cassavetes’ movies, and then worrying they won’t like them and wondering if we’ll still be friends afterwards. It’s a problem, because I think I might be becoming the very kind of person that annoys me the most. The person Jonathan Lethem describes in the first part of his essay, ‘Two or Three Things I Dunno About Cassavetes’, the one who says, ‘Well quit saying you love me because if you don’t love that movie you don’t love me because I am that movie, that movie is me.’ Oh, help!
There are lots of reasons why I love Cassavetes so much. I love his openness and the way his films ask questions and then answer them with more questions. I love his images, the way he lets the frame become an abstract blur of hair and limbs when the characters come too close to the camera and how he lets the camera be curious, swooping after the characters as their bodies try to somehow express some terrifying primal feeling. I love that he is so articulate about the inarticulable, that he gathers up all the things we feel but can’t put into words, and makes the film — the lighting, the composition, the camera movement —convey them. Those myths you hear about him being an amateur director and a kind of idiot savant are bullshit. I can’t think of another director whose images reflect so precisely the sensation of the character’s world. There’s not a chance you can pull that off by accident. Nor can I think of one who had such acuity about blindness — the way we so often fail to listen, fail to know what other people are feeling, fail to understand what it is they want. Cassavetes loved Nicholas Ray, and I can see a shared commitment to communication in their films. Just as Ray used the frame as a visual mirror of inner conflict, Cassavetes’ camera enacts the messy emotional binds his people are in so that we can feel how they feel and experience, just a little, what it is to be them. Look at the lens flare in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. It marks the frame so frequently and with such deliberate placement — how many times does the flare obscure Cosmo’s face? — that it has to be telling us something, leading us to some realisation about this doomed man, this creator whose only art is a series of distinctly un-titillating strip shows.
And what about the way his camera bestows such dignity on his characters, even in the most undignified situations. I’m thinking of Florence in Faces as she urges Chet to kiss her and Margarita in Love Streams, dancing slinkily with her daughter’s lover, two women whose youth has long past but whose desire and longing for love has not. These scenes could so easily be played for the grotesque, for laughs, they’re scenes that in front of another camera could be unbearably mean. Watch how respectfully the camera follows Mabel as she careens around the living room at the end of A Woman Under the Influence. Cassavetes refuses to say, this woman is crazy, she’s nuts! He doesn’t judge Nick either, when he gives his children beer and hypes Mabel up instead of calming her down. They’re all just people, and sometimes they act foolish and lose their shit and upset everybody, but isn’t that what living is all about?
I could keep going. I could describe Meade Roberts stunning performance as Mr Sophistication, the extraordinary dialogue in Love Streams, the beauty of Shadows. But I’ll stop. I’m taking Cadillac to see his first Cassavetes film on Wednesday. I hope he likes it.

















