Biographie

As of 2007, he is one of only eight filmmakers to be nominated for best directing, writing, and acting Oscars over the course of their lifetime. The other seven are Orson Welles, Woody Allen, Warren Beatty, George Clooney, Roberto Benigni, John Huston and Kenneth Branagh.

Friend/actor Peter Falk said: 'Every Cassavetes film is always about the same thing. Somebody said 'Man is God in ruins,' and John saw the ruins with a clarity that you and I could not tolerate.'.

Friend/actor Peter Falk said: "Cassavetes was the most fervent man I ever met, and he didn't have a copy-cat bone in his body."

Despite many claiming that his films are improvised, they are from completed scripts that came from improvised work by the actors. Another trademark of his films is that they're shot in documentary style.

Wrote a scathing "Letter to the Editor", published in the January 23, 1970, issue of Life Magazine, which strongly criticized the magazine for publishing a now notorious photo of Charles Manson on the cover of its December 19, 1969, issue. Cassavetes had costarred in the horror movie Rosemary's Baby" (1968), directed by Roman Polanski, whose pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, had been among the unfortunate victims of the grisly cult killings.

I'm sort of my own Mafia, you know, breaking my own knees.

There's a difference between ad-libbing and improvising. And there's a difference between not knowing what to do and just saying something. Or making choices as an actor. As a writer also, as a person who's making a film, as a cameraman, everything is a choice. And it seems to me I don't really have to direct anyone or write down that somebody's getting drunk; all I have to do is say that there's a bottle there and put a bottle there and then they're going to get drunk. I don't want to tell them how they're going to get drunk. I don't want to tell them how they're going to get drunk, or what they would do, and I don't want to restrict them in being able to carry out a beat, to fulfill an action. You can't say somebody's drunk, or in love.

Ricardo Montalban is to improvisational acting what Mount Rushmore is to animation.

As an artist, I feel that we must try many things - but above all we must dare to fail.

People have forgotten how to relate or respond; what I'm trying to do with my movies is build something audiences can respond to.