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Ben Burr Film 472 FinalMarch 13, 2008Cassavetes and the French New WaveJohn Cassavetes directed his first film,
Shadows,
in 1957 and 1959. In betweenthese years, the first films of what would later become known as the French New Wavewere also shot. The French New Wave would take off and become an international forceto be reckoned with. Cassavetes would have so much trouble on
Shadows
that theoriginal version would be eventually lost and not found until 2004. While Cassavetes andthe French New Wave started out on the same path, Cassavetes wouldn’t stay on track for long. After making two films with studios (
Too Late Blues
(1961) and
 A Child is Waiting 
(1963)), he wouldn’t make another film until 1968’s fiercely independent
 Faces.
Work for the lesser known filmmakers of the French New Wave would also wane in the yearsafter the five years of the movement. The two entities had so much in common but it isn’ttotally clear how the Cassavetes felt about the new wave directors but it is known that hecalled
 Breathless
(Godard, 1959) “sordid” and “negative.
i
” It is said that Godard reallyliked Cassavetes and he is rumored to have once said that he (Godard) didn’t haveenough talent to make even the worst Cassavetes film. It isn’t really fair to compare JohnCassavetes to an entire film movement, but the similarities and differences between themstand out so much that it would at least be interesting, if not fair.John Cassavetes and the French New Wave had many inherent similarities that itwould be easy to say that Cassavetes stole ideas, to a certain degree, from the French
 
 New Wave. But Cassavetes directed his first film (
Shadows
) in 1957 (and later wouldreshoot in 1959), a year before
 Le beau serge
(Chabrol, 1958) would hit theaters andusher in the new wave. The biggest common thread between Cassavetes and the French New Wave was the auteur theory. Francois Truffaut essentially put the auteur theorydown on paper in the late 1950s and he believed that a filmmaker should be the complete“author” of the film and be in total control of its style and feel. One way of doing this is by the director also writing the script. Cassavetes always wrote his own scripts and hetalked of the importance of it in a 1971 interview in Playboy. “The thing I feel directorshave to realize today is that they must become like the Beatles: They must write their own material.”
ii
Later in the interview he would even go on to criticize adaptations of novels and plays into films. This was a very important idea to the movement and toCassavetes because it allowed the filmmakers to have nearly absolute control over whatwas being seen frame-by-frame. The themes of Cassavetes and the new wave wereheavily existential. The only difference between his films and that of the movement werethat the French films centered on youth and their problems while his films revolvedaround middle-aged characters and the problems with marriages, relationships andchildren. Both feature middle-class characters, but with Cassavetes centering more ontheir daily lives rather than telling a complex story, through it started getting intostorytelling with
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie
(1976). With this he tends to be in syncwith Bergman’s later films starting around
Through A Glass Darkly
(1961) and endingwith
Cries and Whispers
(1972).There were many other similarities also, mainly pertaining to production.Cassavetes favored a handheld 16mm camera because it allowed him a freedom to get
 
close to the actors and would thus capture intimate emotions from the performance.French directors, especially with the earliest productions of the new wave also used16mm, mainly because it was the cheapest thing going at the time. Cassavetes employs acinema-verite style in most of his films, most notably in
 Faces
. He uses either naturallighting (on the rare occasion it is available) or, since most of his films are set indoor,very sparse lighting. Budgets for Cassavetes and the new wavers were very small, bothsides having to come up with a lot of the money independently. Cassavetes got most of his budgets from friends or his acting jobs, namely the larger films like
 Rosemary’s Baby
(Polanski 1968) and
The Dirty Dozen
(Aldrich, 1967), the latter for which he wasnominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. And as with the French New Wave directors, his budgets would get bigger. He went from a budget of $40,000 on
Shadows
in 1959 to $1.5 million on
 A Woman Under the Influence
in 1974, which was hisonly real box office success. Cassavetes also despised the studios after a myriad of  problems with them, especially with the Judy Garland vehicle,
 A Child is Waiting.
 Cassavetes used a unique cast in all of his films. Most of the actors he used werehis friends from school and the low-level actors he met while he worked on televisionshows. The actor that he would use most in his film would be his wife, Gena Rowlands.But unlike Godard and Anna Karina or Roger Vadim and Brigitte Bardot, Cassavetes andRowlands would be together from 1954 until his death from cirrhosis of the liver in 1989at the age of 59. Their time together earned the duo 5 Academy Award nominations, 2 for Rowlands (
 A Woman under the Influence
and
Gloria
) and 3 for Cassavetes (acting in
 Rosemary’s Baby
, script for 
 Faces
and director for 
 A Woman under the Influence
). Other recurring actors included Peter Falk, Seymour Cassel and Ben Gazzara. In
Minnie &
of 00

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