John Cassaveti, born in New York on December 9, 1929, is a descendant of Greek immigrants. He lived in Greece with his family not long after his birth, returned to the United States at the age of 7, and then grew up in New York, graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1950, and worked in theaters and tv series and movies after graduation.
He starred in 79 films and directed 18 films in his lifetime, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in The Dirty Dozen (1967). More familiar is his participation in Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby.
In the film, he plays Ruth Marie's husband, Guy, a spooky man who has made a devil's contract with his old couple's neighbors for his acting career. The characters considered were Robert Redford and Jack Nicolson, and John Casaverty, who was finally executed, almost fell out with Polanski because John Kasaviti was always reluctant to follow Polanski's instructions to speak and act, and even criticized Polanski's directing technique, making Polanski indignant and ridiculed John Casaverti: "What kind of director is he?!" Just made a few movies, and anyone can take a camera and make a movie like He Did Shadow!"
Polanski's detrimental remarks show that John Casavetti's belief in "Improvisation" performance is not easily acceptable to other directors, even masters, and on the other hand, it shows that the "father of independent cinema" John Cassavetti is not so highly regarded in the field of mainstream cinema, but the achievements of his works are often posthumously awarded after the film is released and even after the painting is lost.
In fact, directors who disagreed with Polanski were Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, the former of whom had watched his films to generate a desire to create, saying, "If there is a film that captures life, I think that is everything Casaveti has made"; the latter was a production assistant for John Cassaveti's "Faces" (1968). And until his fame, he still described Casaveti as a "genius".
Although John Cassavete is revered over the years, and even one of the annual "American Independent Spirit Awards" john cassavetes awards is named after him, his creative path began with thorns.
Johann Casaveti's debut film Shadows (1958) is a black-and-white film about a pair of African-American blacks who encounter ideals and emotional setbacks in American life, and have been unable to find investment in the United States in the early days, and as a result, they have to use European funds to complete it with 16 meters of film, which has become the benchmark for American independent films.
Even though morris Engel, Lionel Rogosin, and Shirley Clarks, pioneers of American independent cinema, have emerged in the 1950s, john Casaveti's work has a narrative tradition of both storytelling and counter-mainstream cinema, a combination of professional and non-professional actors, and a directorial approach to improvising actors and modifying scripts anytime, and an extreme approach to visual actor expressions in large close-ups. But it had an impact on Hollywood and even world movies at that time. This kind of directing method has a great contradiction with the operation mode of mainstream Hollywood industry.
Due to Shadow's reputation in Europe, John Casavetti received U.S. funding to shoot Too Late Blues (1961) and A Child Is Waiting. (1963), but because of conflicts with producers and distributors, he was included in Hollywood's "director's blacklist", which made John Casaverti understand that the rules of his film game could not be integrated into the mainstream Hollywood system, so he decided to pay for the TV series, and borrowed fifty thousand US dollars on his own loan, and coaxed relatives and friends to participate in his new work "Faces" to save production costs.
In the intermittent process, he completed the best actor at the Venice Film Festival and received three Oscar nominations, including best original screenplay and best supporting actor and actress.
For the first time in the United States, John Casavetti gained widespread recognition at the creative level, and made it clear to the majority of filmmakers to raise their own funds and staff, to support the production work that generally requires the support of the entire studio with their own personal ability, and to be responsible for the distribution and request for the theater to screen their works as a director after the film was completed.
This series of operation models is not only feasible, but even guarantees that creators can be free from the interference of investors at the level of commercial considerations during the creation period, and create freely, forming a contemporary so-called "independent film" spirit.
John Casaveti's later works, such as Husbands (1970), A Woman Under the Influence (1974), and Love Streams (1984), all show his polishing of "improvisation" and its ultimate practical level.
The actors boldly experimented with different immediate reactions in the camera's way of trying to capture their reactions, so that they showed a subtle psychological reaction in the situation of each particular character, full of spiritual emotional performance, and even did not mind the intermittent or repetitive dialogue performance, and the characters were often moody.
In the case of John Cassavetti, even sometimes involved, certain calm low-pitched and high-pitched to hysterical states are expressed without embarrassment, and even penetrate into all kinds of imaginable but indescribable details of human nature.
Focusing on the internal structure of the American nuclear family, the various aspects of gender, values and the mental state of urban people are discussed in depth, which is sophisticated and rich, inspiring and alarming, and innovative and eclectic.
Of course, it is impossible to mention his actor's wife, Gena Rowlands, who, in addition to being nominated for the Oscar for Best Actress and Best Director with her husband, respectively, "A Woman Under the Influence" (1974), starring in "Gloria" (1980), made Gloria, a gangster boss lover who was hot and cold, and gloria, a character who bravely protected orphans, become John Lenti. Casaveti's most commercially successful work.
It is also after "The Killing of Chinese Bookie" (1976) once again with the crime genre film posture as a "Casaveti" style variation, in addition to gangsters, crime, violence and other commercial elements, the protagonist's mental journey makes the film as a commercial genre film but always people-oriented, depicting the plight of life, and the humble hope and warmth in the desperate situation, but also makes the film fortunately not fall into the vulgar.
"Opening Night" (1977) is a stage play play by Gena Rowlands on behalf of her husband John Casaveti to show the actor's process of self-discovery and even self-redemption through "improvisation", and it also contains the director's creative view and the concept of life of the master's self-taoist speech, the well-known stage actor played by Genaland Rows in the play is because the intuitive script does not represent its true self, So he decided not to follow the script, and finally performed a so-stunning drama under the "improvisation", so good that even Woody Allen took a fancy to Second Woman, adapted into the movie Another Woman (1988), the heroine of "Rosemary's Baby" Mia Farrow.
John Casawitty's films are always new, and when you think that Desperate Housewives has exhausted the pathological mental threats that modern American women face, then "Drunken Woman" will only be more pressing and real;
When you think that Madmen is a complete observation of how lonely and vain men are through the coolness of married men, then "Husband" must make you travel closer to the collapse of the roller coaster game for middle-aged men from the absurd to the desolate;
If you've decided that "The Last Metro" or "Mrs Henderson Presents" are the most emotional classic portrayals of a stage-based romance film, then "Premiere Night" will allow you to enjoy more than enough sobriety and self-realization, and see a scene in the play: Joan Blondell, the stage playwright, asks Gena Rowlands, who plays the stage actor and is rehearsing:" You are playing a person who is no longer young and loves too late, it is so simple, don't you understand? How old are you? Gena Rowlands did not answer. The screenwriter asked, "What do you think this script owes?" Gena Rowlands replied, "Hopefully." ”
This is the finishing touch to the state of life that John Cassavetti has stated throughout his creative field. From the desperate, ideal life that has been eroded by life, look for the humble but most astonishing human aura.