Venice Magazine September 2001              photography Jesse Hill

GENA ROWLANDS TALKS TO GARY OLDMAN
ABOUT LIFE WITH JOHN CASSAVETES
FROM THE BEGINNING: PART I


[Editor’s Note: On the eve of a two-month film series entitled “Gena and John: A Cassavetes Retrospective”, Venice Magazine had the honor of interviewing Gena Rowlands, whose three decades of work with her husband, writer/director/actor John Cassavetes, has given us some of the most heart-wrenching moments ever to be captured on film. Self-described Cassavetes junkie Gary Oldman spoke with Gena in the living room of Faces and Love Streams.]


Gary Oldman: There’s a lyric in a David Bowie song and I always think of John Cassavetes when I hear it---“You think this is easy, realism?”
Gena Rowlands: There’s the misconception that John’s films are improvised, which is untrue, apart from Shadows. That was the first one, and then it sticks. Actually, they weren’t improvised after that. Every once in a while there’d be a scene or something that wasn’t working the way we wanted. So we’d stop and rewrite and do something like that. They were very carefully scripted. Even more so after he got older; he seemed to enjoy the form more and more.

GO: When we were talking before we started, I have [a project] I am trying to get off the ground---trying to find some idiot to write me a check. I had to put a considerable sum of my own money in my first film (Nil by Mouth). I’m still somewhat hurt from it financially, but it is what I wanted to do and no one could tell me otherwise. But now I’m considering digital.
GR: I don’t know much about digital, except from what people have been telling me.

GO: The misconception about it is that it’s quicker, but you still have to shoot days.
GR: What’s the great advantage of it? Is it economic?

GO: It comes in cassettes, and you will never have someone come up and say, “You’re shooting too many cassettes,” because they are $30 or whatever they are. On [Nil by Mouth], I got the thing about “You’re hemorrhaging film,” because I shot 550,000 feet. That was quite expensive. But there are advantages [to digital].
GR: Does it compare to film?

GO: It’s getting better and better. I don’t think it would ever, for me, replace celluloid, but do you think John would have embraced the digital age?
GR: I don’t think so---he truly loved film; I mean film itself. He would edit in the garage. And long after people were using more skilled technology for their editing he would use a Moviola. He just loved it. But we always recognized the terrible difficulties of financing your own film. As you say, you’re still hurting from it. But it’s the only way people will leave you alone.

GO: We’ve both had many conversations that start, “God, if I just had the money, I would do this myself.” And you don’t have to talk to those [other] people.
GR: There are so many ways to distribute now. But it’s very, very costly. It was easy for us because we both had a profession before John got into writing and directing. So, when we ran out of money, we’d stop---I’d go make a movie and he’d go make a movie. And we’d bring in quite a bit of money. But mostly people starting out don’t have that.

GO: I’m doing something in September. You know, “I’ve got to go and earn some money.” But I do have the ability to do that.
GR: It’s a great advantage. John did some wild ones! People would say, “What is John doing?” I would say, “We’re making a picture, we’re getting it out of the way.”

GO: Of course that was the oxygen he breathed.
GR: It was funny, it’s so quiet here today---this house has always been packed, full of people. We were shooting here; there were cameras here. There were never less than 40 or 50 people in here. People cooking in the kitchen. And I look at it once in a while, it does look like a set. We’ve shot so many things. And we had all those posters in John’s office. When he died I just thought, “I’m not going to put them all away. That’s our life.” I hung as many as I could on the wall.

GO: Some of the things I recognize, where you say, “Oh my God, that hasn’t changed. It’s still there [things in the house]. Were there two stars in the marriage, if you know what I mean?
GR: I don’t think there were any. John loathed anything to do with stardom, or people thinking they were stars. Because they are put into technical dashed-off kind of movies. In order to keep their minds off of it, their agents and manager divert their attention to the money and the billing and grosses on the weekends. And they are really not actors at some point because they have hung so much baggage on the end. So even when they want to be free and just act, people won’t leave them alone. There were certainly no stars in our family. The people we worked with just felt like a repertory group that we liked.

GO: When you first met John, or first started working with him, did you get it right away---where he was coming from?
GR: No, this didn’t happen right away. I was at the Academy of Dramatic Arts; he had just graduated the year before. He came and saw a play and we fell in love. But I thought he was going to be actor and I was going to be an actress. In fact, I never thought of movies; I thought just of the stage. If someone could have asked me what my idealized position would be, I would have said for us to be an acting couple. And it was like that for quite a few years. Then, when I was doing “Middle of the Night”, my first big break on stage with Edward G. Robinson, which was pretty exciting---it ran 18 months, and John and some guy started improvising and doing stories and then I don’t know how they ever actually got into shooting film. One friend, who was the cameraman, worked on the [Gene Shepard show]…

GO: It was a radio show?
GR: Yes. They got talking about this story and John said, “God, if I had the money, I wish people could just throw in some money and I could make a movie.” There was a great actress---I was doing “Charlie Rose”---and I came out and she said, “You know, we didn’t have a lot of money, but my father heard John talking about that first movie with Gene Shepard that night. He wrote him a check out right there.” It was so funny. I didn’t know anybody that remembered that. John just got into films and became obsessed with it and just drew the rest of us into it. It was his concept.

GO: It’s a little like he kidnapped thespians. Because the idea for that time, what he wanted to achieve, it was like he just wanted to smash all conventions. When you stand on a set and basically say to people, “For the first time, let’s just throw the rule book out of the window. I’m not going to worry about this or that. We’ll use source lighting; if we haven’t got enough lighting, we are going to do this.” There were a lot of people who looked at you like you were crazy.
GR: Oh yes. It’s not a creative environment for everybody. A lot of people are very uncomfortable with it. We just happened to love it. You get used to the freedom and it’s very hard to go back to anything else. The idea of looking for a mark on a floor? Which used to be very common when I first started acting because they needed to light precisely. You kind of find yourself taking a sneaky little look at the floor because you know you had to get to that point. You can’t really act and keep your mind on where that mark is, you just can’t do it. The freedom was just dizzying and it was certainly his idea.

GO: When I have a good experience as an actor, it recharges you and you just say, “Oh, now I remember why I wanted to do this in the first place.” Those experiences are few and far in between, sadly. People do have an idea that it is collaborative, and it rarely is. I mean, I believe in one voice, one vision. I’m sure John knew what he wanted and what he didn’t want, but within that framework it must have been an incredible experience.
GR: I think what made it so exciting for the actor was that [John] was the writer and the director, it was his vision, but one he gave you the part, from that point on, he wouldn’t even answer a question about it. He would not speak of it. If you said, “You know, John, I don’t know if [the character] would say this.” He would say, “You have the part; it’s yours. You own it. You know more about it than anybody else in the world. Now you just do what’s right.” That concept was very foreign. Peter Falk nearly went crazy, he didn’t understand a thing. Also John wouldn’t let you talk to any actor about your character, which is very different from the way people were acting. John didn’t want any interchange of ideas that way, so that you felt very left on your own. And many people really liked it. You’d do your part; they’d do their part. Half the time the people are not doing what you think they are going to do. It was very exciting.

GO: When actors chat at rehearsal or over a cup of coffee and they discuss their role or the interchange of ideas about [it], [for instance, in Woman Under the Influence], there are things that Mabel wouldn’t know about Nick unless he told you as an actor over a coffee. So if you don’t have that…
GR: It creates a certain dynamic. I remember when [one actress] said, “I’m afraid to go to the bathroom. I might miss something.” I could see how confusing it would be. But she was quite used to it by the end. If you had shot for 30 years in one way…

GO: This might seem like a strange question, but did you ever feel that working with John as much as you did, did it ever narrow your options? Did other directors see you as his actress?
GR: I’m sure they did. But I didn’t know what direction we were going in the early beginning. Many people who thought they knew what you would like to do more than you did, would say, “You’ve got to do this picture.” And I would say, “You know, I guess I’m the luckiest actress who ever lived, I’ve had maybe eight or nine great parts…and the man who wrote them and directed them loved me. And I can work with this group of extremely close friends every year after year after year. And you mean someone wants me to do something else?”

GO: The one thing that I most miss is the camaraderie of doing theater. Because you would be in rehearsal doing what you most loved from 10 am until five at night. You’d basically be acting all day as opposed to being on a set and acting for maybe 30 seconds. You all congregate for the evening for this event, and invariably you go out to dinner…
GR: We’d all make lunch, and we’d all go back to shooting. And anyone who wanted to, would go to the dailies---John would let anyone watch dailies---someone sweeping the street outside. He loved to get the feeling they had; rather than in the more traditional setting with people who know a lot about movies already. What I found so hard about movies is that once you’ve done the acting part, that’s it. It was all a lot of fun up until then, and then it’s over and the director and editor disappear.

GO: Some of these people you never see again. [laughs]
GR: John would say, “We’re all in the picture.” Since we didn’t have the money to have publicity, we would do these wonderful posters. We would all take our cars and put them up at night, in New York or Los Angeles. It never ended, it was so much fun. It was wonderful.

GO: It’s a rare experience. You’ve done tons of work, you’ve got family and commitments, running after the children, but there was a real consistency. You were engaged; you [both] were busy. Did you talk a lot after the day’s work?
GR: We said we weren’t going to; we had the children. We would have to just be human beings and talk about daily things. We’d go to bed and, sure enough, a couple of hours and I say [whispers], “John, you know that scene when we were coming down the hall? Did I step decisively enough before I get to the hall to carry that scene right, before I get to the hall?” And he’d say [whispers], “Yeah, you did; it took you about ten takes, but you did it.” It was definitely an obsession.

GO: Was it hard sometimes though? There must have been days when you disliked him.
GR: It’s a very hard way to live financially; to bring up a family and keep everything going, as it is for everybody. Except that we didn’t have to be doing that---we thought of that too. We fought about a lot of things. The other day I was thinking, I can’t remember [for the life of me] what we fought about, but we did it a lot.

GO: I think I read somewhere---I mean there are so many quotes and over the years people take things out of context---that at some point he said he couldn’t think of a better woman than you that he would love to hate or argue with.
What was your own cinema education?
GR: It was just seeing yourself---you went from one thing to another. And if you saw things that were more real and less real, you saw things you didn’t like.

GO: I think it’s knowing what you don’t like that’s important.
GR: Yes. If you know what you don’t like, it’s hard to go wrong.

GO: Some people believe that in some way John was in an ivory tower, that he was a snob about movies, but he loved movies.
GR: Yes. He loved movies; he saw everything. Science fiction movies, everything. We’d watch everything. In fact, my mother would be appalled at some of the things we were watching, like The Blob. He was anything but a snob.

GO: [Cassavetes] movies challenge the viewer---
GR: As a person or a viewer?

GO: As a viewer. I get so much from watching them because they express and reflect my deepest feelings.
GR: We had an office above the Fox Wilshire Theatre when we showed Woman there. So we’re on the second floor, hanging out, seeing who’s going. Inevitably, several people, who come out and stand in front of the theater, would be very upset. But most of the time, they’d stand outside and have a cigarette, then turn around and go back in. we knew what we must be putting people through to get them to act like that. You know everyone takes his own life with him into the movies and you don’t know which experiences you are touching on. But, yes, we required a lot of the audience.

GO: How much of you both is in [the films]? Are they very autobiographic in spirit?
GR: I can’t imagine anyone who hasn’t seen two or three of our pictures who doesn’t know a great deal about us. You can’t hide on film.

GO: I’ve heard it said somewhere that woman was your favorite movie. But it’s an extraordinary creation. I imagine it wasn’t fun every day, but I think it’s one of the great female performances on film.
GR: Thank you.

GO: It must have been like going into a sort of tunnel or something. Do you know where it came from?
GR: I don’t know where anything comes from.

GO: right. Yeah. I mean that’s the good thing. It’s sort of bittersweet because you sometimes go to a place as a performer and tap into something---find something. But, to go back---if you knew how you got there…
GR: You’re certainly never the same person you were starting a picture. The one fear I have in my life is that some young people might not see them and might not know about them. However, they are great on television, and I am extraordinarily happy for that. But I would love to have them on the big screen where they were meant to be.



Venice Magazine October 2001 Photography Jesse Hill

GENA ROWLANDS TALKS TO GARY OLDMAN
ABOUT LIFE WITH JOHN CASSAVETES
FROM THE BEGINNING: PART II

[Editor’s Note: This month, dear readers, you have an opportunity to see on the big screen nine films directed by the late great John Cassavetes, (besides Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky and Charles Kiselyak’s documentary A Constant Forge), starring (in six of them) his favorite actress, who was also his wife and muse, the magnificent Gena Rowlands. Now in the second wildly successful month of a 12-week series, “Gena and John: A Cassavetes Retrospective” was put together by Cassavetes enthusiasts (Sportsman’s Films’ Gabriella Bregman and Mario Luza) at Laemmle Theatres and sponsored by IFP/West and Venice Magazine. To coincide with this program, Venice sought to present a two-part discussion with Gena about her life with John and the remarkable films they made together. Gena graciously agreed.
Self-described Cassavetes junkie Gary Oldman happily accepted the honor of speaking with Gena at her home in the Hollywood Hills where she and John made many of their films. On a warm, sunny afternoon in late August, Gena sat down with Gary in the living room of Faces and Love Streams, a pitcher of fresh, homemade lemonade on the table, surrounded by European film posters and family photo’s on the walls.
At the end of Part I (www.venicemag.com, in case you missed it, /*this interview is not on the web any longer as far as I know, G.B.), Gena says: “You’re certainly never the same person you were starting a picture. The one fear I have in my life is that some young people might not see them and might not know about them. However, they are great on television, and I am extraordinarily happy for that. But I would love to have them on the big screen where they were meant to be.”
Here, then, is Part II.]

GARY OLDMAN: I never realized what it was like---I saw Husbands one night at the Beverly [Theatre], and I’d only ever seen it on TV. You can’t even get the scale and the size of the thing. When you see these films as they were intended to be seen, the communal experience in the dark on a big screen…

     Were you exposed to foreign cinema?

     GENA ROWLANDS: No. I came from Wisconsin. But then we moved to Washington, D.C., and I saw for the first time a British movie. Then I began to see things, but not a lot. Of course, until I moved to New York, then we saw everything.

 

     GO: What movies? Were there favorite films of yours?

     GR: Bette Davis, I got to work with her. Ida Lupino, I got to work with her. Edward G. Robinson is one of my big favorites. You remember him? He was just so wonderful. I was thrilled to work with him. I liked a lot of people, like Bogart and Ingrid Bergman.

 

     GO: Was John a fan of [Roberto] Rosselini?

     GR: Yes, he liked him very much. In fact he lent us his apartment in Paris. John thought very highly of him.

 

     GO: Because he was another sort of pioneer---using non-actors and using the camera and using the street. No fancy angles, no pyrotechnics. While I’m a big believer that you can razzle and dazzle people with cranes, but if you’ve got a great character, story, and a great actor, for me the camera doesn’t have to move. You never even notice it.

     What was John’s relationship with technicians and cinematographers?

     GR: He was always replacing cinematographers, and I didn’t even know why. [laughs] I think we lost them---he replaced four of them on one picture. He just wanted a certain look---I’m not sure he even knew how to describe it even, but he would just keep going until he did.

 

     GO: There are people that come in and have a certain training, or they’ve been on a lot of sets, and there’s sort of “industry wisdom”, an unwritten kind of thing, so that when you say, “But I don’t care if she goes into the dark.” You hear, “Yeah, but you’ve got these little key lights.” You say, “I don’t want that! It doesn’t matter if she comes into shadow.” And it looks into my eye, a lot of it is source light.

GR: John could move any place. One of the things that made people think that John’s pictures were improvised was that we had such freedom that we used body mikes. Now that was at the sacrifice of really good sound sometimes, but it makes the actions so free. And it was lit every place; you could go any place---the focus puller was the only one who was really in trouble all the time, of course, they always are. They can wreck the picture. Everyone uses those little body mikes a lot [now], but those were very new. I hated them too. I thought, ‘ What a pain they are.’ But he was strict about it.

 

     GO: We just want to be free, don’t we?

 

     GR: I guess so.

 

     GO: I mean, I’ve played a lot of roles where I’ve been in costume and make-up for weeks, and people think I love wearing wigs and make-up. I don’t. [laughs hysterically] It just so happens that it’s how it has bee. But just give me some space and a t-shirt and I’m much happier.

 

     GR: I’ve never worn a full wig. I wore a fall one time. It’s hot and it’s itchy.

 

     GO: Let’s face it---you can’t it or use it. Dead hair is dead hair, no matter how good they are.

     Going back to that question of how challenging John’s films were, I guess we all wish in some way we could do something that has some meaning. We aspire to it, but really to attain it? We are so much at the mercy of scripts and handed-out jobs. Were you both ever disappointed that there were too many demands on the audience?

 

     GR: I think John would have kept editing his films. You practically had to throw a net over his head to get him [to stop]. As far as the demands on the audience, I don’t think he ever though of it. [The viewers] weren’t tied down to the seat or anything; we were glad when they stayed.

 

     GO: Now everybody is so worried; they try to please everyone and it is just beige. That’s all it is.

 

     GR: It’s impossible. But you know, I was thinking of Woman, one of the things I liked about it so much is that when people see you on film you are very unprotected. You reveal a lot about yourself. And they will tell you things about themselves: they’ll come up and say, “I didn’t know this was going on in anybody else’s house. This was my mother. I didn’t know.” What an enormous honor it is for another person, who is a stranger, to sit down and share the most intimate part of their lives.

 

     GO: Did they change a lot---the films? Did you continue to have ideas, or once it was written, what was it? Did it stay scripted?

 

     GR: You felt very free. You could change things.

 

     GO: But were there other endings?

 

     GR: I think there were 40 endings for that. He had shot it in such a way that he cut it differently to see what he liked. He would often do a whole picture. Like Shadows, the first time he showed [it]. With John, when you saw a picture, it was not necessarily what you’d see. With Shadows, he said, “No. that’s not the picture I meant to make.” So he went back in and took another three months and re-edited it. He was never really satisfied with anything.

 

     GO: He’d still be editing, wouldn’t he? [laughs] I noted that he tinkered with Bookie quite a bit.

 

     GR: So many people have seen all the different versions of his pictures. I’m sure he did [re-edit] Bookie.

 

     GO: And did the genesis of the idea for the pictures come to you, would he say anything?

 

     GR: It was less collaborative. He would just get the idea for something, god knows where. I don’t have any idea where or when I read Woman, but I thought, how did he get this idea? How does he handle this marriage of Woman? This particular kind of woman? I couldn’t see where it had come from; I felt that way many times. Just the slightest idea and he was lost with it. He had just the right secretary; she’s a writer herself and she could take it down just as fast as he could talk. I though that was a wonderful thing for him, to have someone like that, who could keep up with him.

 

     GO: It’s like an idea has been there, like sleeping. Or it’s like the Beatles---John and Paul met and then there was George. They got rid of the drummer and they hired Ringo and it changed the music forever. That’s just a coincidence? I don’t think so, I think there’s a bigger thing.

 

     GR: I don’t know what it is, but it’s very mysterious.

 

     GO: Opening Night is one of my favorites because I love the theater and it deals with the theater and backstage. A lot of people have tried to capture what a rehearsal is like. I love that moment where you’re having that exchange with the writer and she says something like, “What isn’t happening? What isn’t this about for you?” And you say, “Hope. There’s no hope in it.”  It’s theme, isn’t it? There’s a thread that goes all through the pictures, and as dramatic and shaken up as you are when you watch them, you come out and you say, ‘If there’s hope for Nick and Mabel, then there’s hope for us.’

     Let me just ask you this, and I don’t mean this in any way [to be] rude. I think that John Cassavetes is probably the greatest unknown American director who ever lived.

 

     GR: Well-known in Europe.

 

     GO: I guess Rosselini is more famous for marrying Ingrid Bergman than he was as a director. Sadly, there are a lot of people out there who think, “Okay, wasn’t he in The Dirty Dozen?”

 

     GR: He was one of The Dirty Dozen.

 

     GO: He was terrific. And then they say, “Oh yeah, he was that guy in Rosemary’s Baby.” So he’s known obviously among journalists and critics, and he arguably fathered independent film. And now we have [a two-month retrospective of your films at the Laemmle Theatres], specifically your work with him, so the people seeing these films for the first time, what would you like them to come away with?

 

     GR: I would just like them to go in with an open mind, and when they left the theater to see that they had thought of things they had not thought of before---that they had gained something. That would be my hope. You don’t know how much holds up with people nowadays when you make pictures with people that many years ago.

 

     GO: I think we’re in a bit of a Dark Age, in that there has never been a less important time to be an artist. Now I’ve read that the studios are going to come together and allow people to download new releases onto their computer.

 

     GR: Does that mean they’ll be able to see the new film on the screen of their computer?

 

     GO: Yes. And obviously they have not found anyone who will fund converting all the cinema arts, but they will eventually. They’ll be bouncing movies off the satellite. As we’ve seen three-strip Technicolor become obsolete, certainly in my kids’ lifetimes, celluloid will just disappear. It’ll be in a museum, or little art houses where the weirdo has a projector. It’s sad. The real dark stage we’re in, films become more relevant strangely enough.

     We’re hungry for films about something. If you look at the 90s, late 80s, there was an extraordinarily barren period. To me, [John’s] time was the golden age. You think of Paddy Chayevsky, where are they? Where is the young Gena Rowlands, for that matter?

 

     GR: You have to have good parts. I think there are artists out there; it is just very hard to break through.

 

     GO: In my time, I came from a tradition that was theater, that was writing. Why do these movies hold up and stand the test of time? Because you had great directors who all came from the theater; you had writers who were writing for the theater. We’re losing them. That is very sad, and kind of scary.

 

     GR: It is. But everything goes in streaks. It can’t just continue.

 

     GO: Yes. That’s why I feel that films will come around.

 

     GR: You’re right. We have a hunger for pictures about people. I just always worry that people’s attention spans are so short---they know something is bothering them, but they don’t know if it’s good or bad. They get antsy.

 

     GO: God knows, they should go to the theater and feel something. We’ve seen it all now, but this is a trend at the moment: people want this kind of movie, or this kind of movie. I guess the mainstream always [dictates that]. Was there a specific audience for your movies?

 

     GR: Yes. But now there’s that heavy publicity thing--- “I work all day, I want to be entertained. I see enough in life, I want to be entertained.” So people come to believe it, that entertainment is just something very light. Whereas, I think it doesn’t have to be that. It can make you feel a lot better sometimes to see that other people are going through the same things you’re going through.

 

     GO: We don’t necessarily demand that from music or anything else. We don’t always just demand entertainment, yet, if that thing, “I’ve got a terrible life, I don’t want to see that in the movies coming back to me” persists…

 

     GR: It’s a powerful message backed up by a lot of marketing.