John Cassavetes’s fifth feature film, “Husbands,” from 1970 (which I discuss in this clip), was edited from two hundred and eighty hours of footage. He wrote a script, rewrote it based on extensive consultations with his co-stars, Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara, kept on rewriting it while improvising with them, often at night and often on-camera (he wanted them to feel as existentially pressured during these rehearsals as during the shoot), and then, after shooting many takes of a scene, would often, after watching rushes with his actors, rewrite again and reshoot the same scene, differently, the next day.
The astonishingly protracted production—as wild and free as it was methodical and meticulous—is described in detail in Ray Carney’s indispensable book “Cassavetes on Cassavetes.” A hallmark of the best modern directors is that they don’t just invent results, they invent means: they rethink and personalize the entire process of filmmaking. Cassavetes is one of these directors; his films are among the most emotionally powerful and aesthetically original works of his era. His incantatory way with text—language carved as stones and flung as objects, actors hurtling against each other with explosive force—conjures, in the fullness of their energy, a Beckettian void, a divine, derisive laugh from every twist of agony; and his art emerges not from a preconceived schema but from the experience of their creation; or, as he says (and Carney cites): “The time devoted to making a film is just an extension of the life of everyone involved.” The same can, and should, be true of the watching of a film; it’s hard to escape the sense, after watching “Husbands,” that one has gotten to know not just the characters, but Cassavetes, Falk, and Gazzara themselves, with an uneasy, indelible intimacy.
