The costumer cooked spaghetti.
A painter became a gaffer.
And everybody got upset with everybody.
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The costume designer cooked the spaghetti forA Woman Under the Influencesbig breakfast scene.
At one point, the script supervisor found herself operating a camera.
A recent college grad hired to help paint the set wound up overseeing the entire lighting operation.
Synergy became key to the naturalism that makes the domestic drama so wrenching.
Cassevetes used non-union professionals aware the gig wouldnt do much for their savings accounts.
I loved going to the set every day, and the crew bonded.
John and Gena valued that we were there and that we were not getting paid a lot.
With no forewarning, she snaps into action as soon as the troop shows up.
Carole Smith, for example, has two official credits on the film, production secretary and wardrobe supervisor.
Peter kept changing the way he was playing it, Breit says of the scene.
There were lots of takes, there was lots of spaghetti, there were a lot of camera angles.
I dont think we were doing two cameras at that point just one camera.
I remember it being frenetic.
He hadtrained under Gordon Willis, the cinematography great best known for theGodfathertrilogy.
As Breit tells it, Deschanels traditional practices didnt always mesh with Cassavetes roving experimentation.
John and Caleb were not on the same wavelength, he recalls.
John was used to being the person who held the camera.
He had a different way of doing things.
Thats when Cassevetes promoted a 22-year-old Breit to gaffer, the person who manages the lighting.
(Deschanels rep did not respond to Vultures requests for comment.)
Were showing a hard moment in a persons life, a terribly hard moment.
When things got tense, there were no trailers or commissary to escape to.
And yet Kagan describes Cassavetes and Rowlands as very in sync.
She cried, she got upset with him, Kagan says.
Everybody got upset with everybody.
All of the characters emotions swapped over to the emotions of the actors.
If she wanted someplace to go by herself, shed go upstairs.
But the magic of their romance melted into the project.
Carole Smith and I were constantly calling to get short ends to shoot the next day.
The intensity was exciting, besides being exhausting.
He believed in the arts in a way few others that I worked for did, Jaffe says.
He was like an Orson Welles bang out.
He had such an enormous ego, but his charm was overwhelming, so you didnt notice the ego.
In 1975, he and Rowlands earned Oscar nominations for their work.
(He lost to Francis Ford Coppola, and she lost to Ellen Burstyn.)
He loved her so much.
