The dilemma of our country is the dilemma of the common man. His house, with his television set, and his credit card standing, his sexual confusion and his nagging business obligations have taken up too much of his time for him to realize the importance of his human needs. Films reflect better than anything else the systems that we live under, the feelings of the people. All the feelings of the people, the bad and the good, and only with films do you really have a chance to see where you are.
There's too little trust between people. Our children disappear -- popping pills, sucking smoke and pushing needles -- in some far-off reaches of the country where clean air and soft water still can be found. Our children are dying for lack of guidance and, more importantly, ideals. They don't believe in hope, but only in the present. Our industry refers to this group as the 'youth market'! It continues prognosticating what will be successful and forcing down the tortured throats of its audience pop-art solutions for politics and freedom in preview houses where a cross-section of the classes go to have their emotions tested, their laughs counted and their intelligence translated into box-office potential.
The people who make films have gone crazy. There's a responsibility not to express the worst part of your panic. They need to express life. In my whole life I've never known anyone who's been murdered. There was a time when life was important. Not this weird stuff but the way people really live. As a boy I worried about going to a party and talking to people. I worried about how to get my cowlick down. Other things that worry people are how to stay married, how to make kids proud but no so proud they lose their identity. I hate to see this business about the world being tougher than it is. There's such a continual series of put-downs. We just dehumanize ourselves to such a great extent that nothing really counts, nothing really matters.
The cause of motion pictures should not be a dehumanizing one. Major companies are making pictures that are disgusting. They make anti-war movies but exploit it by making money on those anti-war pictures, by publicizing and selling them. People on screen are stripped naked and left there to die. The thinking is supposedly committed to a revolutionary spirit but lacks the depth of intentions necessary for such discussions. Audiences begin to accept this exploitation as part of their lives. They find themselves laughing at what isn't funny, angered by what they don't care about, and influenced and contaminated by hours of heartfelt, unmotivated propaganda.
Motion pictures, whether art or not, should reflect in human terms the needs of their audience. If relating to one another only ends in cheap momentary revelations, communication of the spirit, of the heart, will be distrusted and unwanted too. There isn't anyone making any films that relate to anyone as far as I'm concerned -- the human part of anyone. If your characters can communicate with other people, and not put them down by being heroes or anti-heroes, then you succeed. How simple it is for people to care on their own level, and how lovely it is and how much confidence it can give people to see that -- characters revealing themselves in the smallest form.
There is no real art in America other than business, and anyone who thinks that there is is crazy. People who are artistic and who are working for big companies are dead, are dead men. You can't work for a big company and have any respect for yourself unless you're out to make money. People plunge their careers and their lives headlong into making money -- and when they get it, they don't like it, they don't need it and they don't know what to do with it. Money is the last refuge of people who've been scared by life, whose only way to survive is to acquire as much money and power as they can -- to protect themselves. But from what? We've got to realize that money is useless beyond whatever it takes to feed, clothe and house yourself. As a matter of fact, the more you have beyond that -- whatever it takes to free you from those basic concerns -- the more difficult it is to find out what really matters and to get it for yourself.
Before the war, America was a country of great innocence and idealism. Since then, it's been completely undermined by its people's hunger for profits. And that hunger is not limited to any ethnic group. I see it in everyone: Italian-, English- and German-American, Irish Catholics and, yes, even Greeks. Everybody's been going for the money and saying the hell with society. I see people just throwing away their values, all the things that their ancestors and fathers always treasured. They've put money up as the goal of life, but money is no measure of the value of a man -- any man. I know a lot of millionaires who do nothing but sit alone in their houses and wish they could have a friend to drink with or a woman they could truly love. All they have is their money. But they're really not greedy for money; they're interested in the zeros -- in the game of making two dollars into $20 into $2,000,000 into $20,000,000; nothing is enough.
In retrospect the old Hollywood glamour wasn't that bad. There was nothing wrong with Lubitsch. It comes to mind that maybe there really wasn't an America -- that maybe it was only Frank Capra. In talking with my friends, with my peers, fellow workers, I find that nothing has changed with them. They are willing to work. They are willing to steep themselves in ideas of human interest, in things that make sense humanly. Audiences care about people that they admire, people who will fight the odds of conformity with innocent weapons, people who fall in love and are crushed, who fight the enemy and die, who sacrifice, who sweat, who burp and work hard to make life more satisfactory. This, believe it or not, is what many good actors, directors and writers would be willing to substitute reviews and financial rewards for. Give the audience the vaguest permission or cause to feel real emotions, and they will take the challenge.
-- John Cassavetes, uncited interview excerpt reprinted in Ray Carney's Cassavetes on Cassavetes, pp. 269-71.
