Top 100 Cassavetes Quotes
#1. Like, I'm a big fan of films from the '70s, like Cassavetes and things, where they just keep the dialogue really loose and just kind of roll, you know what I mean?
Jody Hill
#2. It was more freedom than I think most people get when they're starting out - or even when they're not starting out. He [John Cassavetes] did his thing and I did whatever I thought.
Gena Rowlands
#3. I was honestly a cartoon kid. I loved cartoons. That was more my dream than anything else. But now, it's the films of people like John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands. Those are the kinds of characters I want to play, and that's the kind of filmmaking I'm fascinated by.
Tatiana Maslany
#4. It was a very hard play [Woman Under the Influence] to do every night. And John Cassavetes said, "Don't worry. Don't even think about it, you're right. I hadn't thought of that." He said, "Just forget it."
Gena Rowlands
#5. John Cassavetes was a year ahead of me but we met there. What you do when you are at a school for drama, you do a play as opposed to a final. Anyone who wanted to come could just come. So he came, and I can't remember the name of the play, of course, it was a long time ago.
Gena Rowlands
#6. It's sweet to hear, but anyone who says that they want to be the next John Cassavetes is crazy. He had it so tough. No one would want to walk a step in his shoes. Believe me - I wouldn't.
Alexandra Cassavetes
#7. I'm not good at comparing and contrasting. I take what's in front of me for what it is, although I guess there's something about Paul's realistic writing that is like Cassavetes.
John Cassavetes
#8. My all-time favorites that I always go back to are films by the director John Cassavetes. The movies he made, the work he left behind, have been a big influence for my work.
Nina Hoss
#9. You look at people like Gena Rowlands, but she had [John] Cassavetes to write these amazing roles for her.
Winona Ryder
#11. I'd rather do 'She's So Lovely' that John Cassavetes wrote versus doing 'Batman.'
Robin Wright
#12. He[John Cassavetes] was just being an actor. A very successful actor, especially in live TV. He did many wonderful performances.
Gena Rowlands
#13. So many people mistakenly think that the rest of his [John Cassavetes] pictures and the ones we did were improvised, which isn't true. He wrote all the rest of them.
Gena Rowlands
#14. [John Cassavetes] came backstage afterwards and introduced himself and we talked a bit, and then went for a little coffee at the Russian Tea Room next door. It just ... started.
Gena Rowlands
#15. I was a big fan of John Cassavetes, his wife, Gena Rowlands, and that era of filmmaking which was about realism and which represented the antithesis of the dreamy escapism you found in musicals.
Carmen Ejogo
#16. John Cassavetes wrote A Woman Under the Influence as a play. He said, "Hey, I wrote you a play." And I said, "Great, let's read it." I read it and I said, "John, I couldn't do this every night and twice on Wednesday and Saturday".
Gena Rowlands
#17. I like so many different directors: Scorsese, Coppola, Cassavetes, Jarmusch, Gus van Sant, Woody Allen and the greats like Fellini, Bergman, Tarkovsky and among current filmmakers von Trier, Ang Lee, Wong Kar-wai.
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
#18. I've had people ask me to come and work for them. I went to Vienna and did three scenes in a movie for a guy that I met at a retrospective of Cassavetes films. It's a great way to travel, to meet people, to see different countries and cultures.
Seymour Cassel
#19. Of course I would change anything if John Cassavetes said so - it's his script. But he was very easy about that.
Gena Rowlands
#20. John [Cassavetes] loved actors. He gave them a lot of freedom. So if something came up that a certain actor just felt at the moment and said - that kind of improvisation he would accept. He gave very little direction.
Gena Rowlands
#21. In general, I hate films that are overtly either very masculine or very feminine, you know? The same way that I don't like a war movie about soldiers smashing people's heads. But a chick flick I like would be Cassavetes' movies. 'A Woman Under the Influence,' 'Husbands.'
Gael Garcia Bernal
#22. I never understood a word John Cassavetes said. And I think he did that deliberately.
Peter Falk
#23. I go back to many films that I really love. Some Bresson, some Godard of the early times, the Cassavetes of those years I love. And the early Wim Wenders. But my own films I don't watch, unless I need them.
Agnes Varda
#24. You can defeat fear through humor, through pain, through honesty, bravery, intuition, and through love in the truest sense.
John Cassavetes
#25. Talking to other people who make low-budget movies, everyone kind of has the same struggle.
Zoe Cassavetes
#27. We don't take the time to be vulnerable with each other
John Cassavetes
#28. I love when I'm writing and I'm cringing because I know I'm doing something right.
Zoe Cassavetes
#30. An artist can accomplish anything provided he doesn't accept facts or defeat for more than a few minutes.
John Cassavetes
#31. When you create, it comes from this deep part of you, and your job is you, and so when you don't get heard it can feel bad and frustrating and you have to somehow keep the confidence up.
Zoe Cassavetes
#32. My mother and father were never frightened of anything. They always felt that they should go through life happily and without fear, and they did that. And it was a great boon to my brother and myself.
John Cassavetes
#33. I feel too strongly about rearranging reality in a movie. It gives me peace.
Alexandra Cassavetes
#34. No matter how old you get, if you can keep the desire to be creative, you're keeping the man-child alive.
John Cassavetes
#35. 'Faces' became more than a film. It became a way of life, a film against the authorities and the powers that prevent people from expressing themselves the way they want to, something that can't be done in America, that can't be done without money.
John Cassavetes
#36. Ricardo Montalban is to improvisational acting what Mount Rushmore is to animation.
John Cassavetes
#40. The idea of love as a mysterious, undiscovered world has come to have no place in our innermost imagination.
John Cassavetes
#41. I went to this Episcopalian school, and one day I came home and asked my mom, 'What religion are we?' She looked at me and said, 'We're artists.'
Alexandra Cassavetes
#42. As an artist, I feel that we must try many things - but above all we must dare to fail.
John Cassavetes
#43. I just want to make something that is true to itself and that interests me; otherwise, how can I have the audacity to think it's going to interest anybody else?
Alexandra Cassavetes
#44. There is another movie I love that always sticks with me and influenced me called "Frankie" starring Diane Kruger as a model past her prime trying to make it work and going crazy from how she is treated.
Zoe Cassavetes
#45. You can fail in films because you don't have the talent, or you have too much humility, or you lack ferociousness. I'm a gangster. If I want something, I'll grab it.
John Cassavetes
#46. I'm not cynical, but I don't really want to have a boyfriend or husband again.
Alexandra Cassavetes
#48. Everyone who makes a film is at the major distributors' mercy.
John Cassavetes
#49. I'm pretty sure a lot of directors would be thrilled to cast age appropriate roles. I am.
Zoe Cassavetes
#52. People don't know what they are doing most of the time. They don't know what they want. It's only in 'the movies' that they know what their problems are and have game plans to deal with them.
John Cassavetes
#53. I won't make shorthand films, because I don't want to manipulate audiences into assuming quick, manufactured truths.
John Cassavetes
#54. People who are making films today are too concerned with mechanics - technical things instead of feeling.
John Cassavetes
#55. Actresses feel immense pressure to keep up. Nobody wants someone who doesn't know how to market themselves.
Zoe Cassavetes
#56. I wouldn't say that I was an actress. I tried to be an actress. I really didn't have the gift.
Zoe Cassavetes
#57. People have said that my films are very difficult to watch, that they're experiences you are put through rather than ones you enjoy, and it's true.
John Cassavetes
#58. The pressure for an actress to look good and be skeletally thin is insane and unrealistic and it's a subject I've been fascinated by.
Zoe Cassavetes
#59. Work very very hard. This business is no joke. Make sure you know what you want or you might be taking someone else's view instead of your own.
Zoe Cassavetes
#60. My daughter, when she was a week old, was diagnosed with congenital heart disease. For the past thirteen years, she's had four major heart surgeries. She's a candidate for - and must have - heart replacement surgery in order to have a long life.
Nick Cassavetes
#61. I sort of forgot about 'Z Channel' after it went off the air in 1989, but once Jason Resnick of Focus Features made the suggestion, I became obsessed all over again. I still am. I'll probably be this way until I'm 80, babbling about 'Z Channel.'
Alexandra Cassavetes
#62. I don't care about being on top, about being No. 1. I just make movies for a few suckers in the audience, anyway.
John Cassavetes
#63. I think vampires would want to find a way to stay attached to the living, the way human beings do, and that is through love, interrelations and meaning.
Alexandra Cassavetes
#64. If you are the writer/director especially, no one cares more about the project than you do. You know it in and out. You created it. So always listen to input but don't be afraid to veto and fight decisions that you know instinctively are wrong.
Zoe Cassavetes
#65. There is no reason why a serious film, one about life, can't be enjoyable, maybe even fun. Emotions can be very entertaining, you know. I try to use them generously in my films.
John Cassavetes
#66. I think vampires are different from human beings, but they're sentenced to eternity on this planet. They have the same confusion about love and permanence, integrity, and denial. These qualities really are the same in vampire characters as in humans. I think they're universal themes.
Alexandra Cassavetes
#67. It was fun to create characters who had truth to them but were also made up so as not to completely offend!
Zoe Cassavetes
#68. I think the reason vampire movies have been so popular over time is that they share so many parallels with human beings.
Alexandra Cassavetes
#69. I tell myself, 'If I can wake up each day and be excited about what I'm doing, then I must be happy.' But then again, maybe I'm in denial.
Alexandra Cassavetes
#70. As a writer, I wouldn't know how to not take things out of my life.
Zoe Cassavetes
#71. I have a one-track mind. That's all that I'm interested in - love. And the lack of it. When it stops.
John Cassavetes
#72. You know as a director what you want, but the film is smarter than you, the film says no, the film says there's something more here.
John Cassavetes
#73. To me there is a name for each person. I think it's marvelous to have a name. A woman is not a woman. It's either Gena or my mother or some other person.
John Cassavetes
#74. My Mom and Dad did it pretty good, so I know it can work. The foremost thing I would say about working with Robin and Sean is that they were devoted to this project and devoted to their characters. You can't ask for any more from talented actors like that.
Nick Cassavetes
#75. You just go in and try to do the best job you can everyday.
Nick Cassavetes
#76. I don't know about relationships. Maybe I'm supposed to travel and make films and meet people and have adventures instead.
Alexandra Cassavetes
#77. I'm a great believer in spontaneity because I think planning is the most destructive thing in the world.
John Cassavetes
#78. I didn't plan to be a director until I was 35. For years I wanted to do anything but!
Alexandra Cassavetes
#79. (Acting) is an extension of life. How you're capable of performing in your life, that's how you're capable of performing on screen.
John Cassavetes
#80. I've noticed that when people make vampire movies, they're always determining which of the rules they're going to stick to and which they'll abandon.
Alexandra Cassavetes
#81. I got to grow up in an incredibly artistic family.
Zoe Cassavetes
#83. I'm not complaining about my life; every moment of it has been fantastic, and I'm so lucky.
Zoe Cassavetes
#84. I will watch a ton of movies while I'm writing for inspiration. "Postcards from the Edge" was one. I love the mother-daughter relationship and all the hard humiliating stuff she has to go through. Or thinks she has to go through.
Zoe Cassavetes
#85. I think at its most mature, love is a very bourgeois state. There is something about luxuriating in the nest of love that people fall into naturally.
Alexandra Cassavetes
#86. There are so many people I know who could be the greatest film-maker but who will never get the chance to make a movie; it's all about what somebody is going to make back. There are not a lot of romantic ideas about making movies anymore.
Alexandra Cassavetes
#87. Well, I think that people are smart enough to understand the difference between a movie and real life.
Nick Cassavetes
#88. My taste in films doesn't lead financers to think they are going to make a zillion dollars.
Alexandra Cassavetes
#89. Love is a component of many different things - the baggage you bring, the moment, what you need in your life, seeing someone as a portal for understanding everything, and all the intensity that brings. It's not something to count on and act like it's a stable thing.
Alexandra Cassavetes
#90. Art films aren't necessarily photography. It's feeling. If we can capture a feeling of a people, of a way of life, then we made a good picture.
John Cassavetes
#91. Commercial movies have no feeling, no sensitivity. Most people tell me people won't understand films with feeling. But everyone can feel.
John Cassavetes
#92. I think I probably have the philosophy of a poor man. You know, like maybe I'd steal the pennies off a dead man's eyes.
John Cassavetes
#93. I would put my pictures up against anybody's in this world. Certainly in my own day I bow to no one. I don't think there's another director in the world who works harder to make better films than I do.
John Cassavetes
#94. I think I'm probably one of the worst directors around, but I do have an interest in my fellow man.
John Cassavetes
#95. It's a bloody shame that all the video stores have gone, I'll tell you. Everything's so mechanical now. It's all so if-you-liked-this-then-you'll-like-this. There's no picking something out, or finding some brilliant person to open up new worlds for you.
Alexandra Cassavetes
#96. In a way I'm lucky because when people suggest I won't be able to do something I have no choice but to show them they are wrong. If I say I'm doing it, I'm doing it. No matter how hard it is.
Zoe Cassavetes
#97. My parents allowed their two sons to be individuals. My family was a wild and wonderful place, with lots of friends and neighbors visiting and talking loud and eating loud and nobody telling the children to be quiet or putting them down.
John Cassavetes
#98. Film is, to me, just unimportant. But people are very important.
John Cassavetes
#99. People are fascinated with eternal life and physical power - the idea of having no vulnerability. We all feel small and powerless in the world at times, so the temptation to be a vampire is compelling.
Alexandra Cassavetes
#100. The celebrity culture demands a camera-ready-at-all-times look or else the photo is circulated in a demeaning headline.
Zoe Cassavetes
