"I'm lost by life. I don't know anything about life. If I
make a movie, I don't even understand why I'm making the movie. I just know
that there's something there. Later on, we all get to know what it's about
through the opinions of others. If you make a film, it might as well be as
important as be nonsense. You can't go for ten cents and expect to come up with a
million. You have to go for everything. Whether you fail or don't fail, you
have to go for what will make us better when we're finished. I like to work
with friends and for friends on something that might help somebody. Something
with humour, sadness; simple things.
The artist really is a magical figure whom we would all like
to be like and don't have the courage to be, because we don't have the strength
to be obsessive. Film is an art, a beautiful art. It's a madness that overcomes
all of us. We're in love with it. Money is really not that important to us. We
can work thirty-six, forty-eight hours straight and feel elated at the end of
that time. I think film is magic! With the tools we have at hand, we really try
to convert people's lives! The idea of making a film is to package a lifetime
of emotion and ideas into a two-hour capsule form, two hours where some images
flash across the screen and in that two hours the hope is that the audience
will forget everything and that celluloid will change lives. Now that's insane,
that's a preposterously presumptuous assumption, and yet that's the hope."
From Cassavetes on Cassavetes, edited by Ray Carney.
