Interview with Nick Cassavetes

As children, we’re all encouraged to follow in our father’s footsteps. Imagine being the child of a man who directed influential classics like Faces and A Woman Under the Influence, and became the father of American Independent filmmaking. Yet the 47-year-old son of John Cassavetes has no intention to fill his father’s bottomless shoes. After a brief acting career in straight-to-video erotic thrillers with titles like Assault of the Killer Bimbos, Nick Cassavetes has found success for the past decade, directing films such as She’s So Lovely, John Q, and 2004’s smash hit The Notebook. Filmmaking is still a family affair for Cassavetes, who enjoys the “shorthand” found when working with kin, and has cast his mother Gena Rowlands in three of his films.

His latest directorial effort Alpha Dog, opening next year on January 12th, has sparked controversy because of its real-life subject matter. The film tells the true story of Jesse James Hollywood, a teenage drug dealer who was wanted by the FBI for kidnapping and murdering the brother of a client he blackmailed. With his feet resting on a coffee table, and his face carrying a boyish grin, Cassavetes recently talked with The Chronicle about his career, his father’s influence, and his personal connection to the plot of his latest film.

The Chronicle: How have your parents influenced or inspired you in your filmmaking pursuits?
Nick Cassavetes: My dad was dead for a number of years before I made my first movie. We never really talked film theory. My experience with my dad was more along the lines of how to be a man, how to be yourself, how to free yourself from what society tells you to do, how to release yourself as an artist. In no way shape or form can I compare myself with him because a guy like him comes along every hundred years. You must be satisfied to think the way you think and explore things in the manner that you think. In that position I’m much more like mom than dad. We’re probably more reflective; our thought-processes probably occur in a quieter way than John’s. John’s thoughts exploded out of his body. He was a wildly entertaining guy. I’m very, very lucky to have him as a father.

Why were you drawn to telling the true story of Jesse James Hollywood?
It happened in my neighborhood. I live in Los Angeles, it was all over the local news, and my daughter went to school with the victim. She was a couple years younger than he was but it was a story that was really around me.

People are criticizing you and the film for unfairly judging Mr. Hollywood before his actual trial.
They’re entitled to their opinion. I’m friends with Jesse’s dad Jack Hollywood, and he’d agree with me if I told him. I think they could hire twelve jurors who haven’t seen the movie. It’s a movie where we were painstaking in all legality of [using fictional names]. We were going to delay the film’s release date until after the trial, and we changed all the names and the locations.

How did Justin Timberlake become involved in the project?
I met him for The Notebook. I liked him a lot, I’m such a knucklehead; I knew he was a singer, but I didn’t really know who he was. So when I hired him, everyone seemed to have really strong reactions one way or the other and I didn’t understand it. I thought he was a talented kid, he could speak well about how he thought, and how he connected with the character, and those are the criteria I use in the hiring process.

Did The Notebook’s massive success give you the freedom to do whatever you wanted?
No. Each project is different. I’m sure that I would be free to direct many similar projects to The Notebook, ‘weepers’ as I like to call them. I probably could do a couple of those, because that film proved that it worked a little bit. [But instead], I’ll do other people’s material, I’ll do my material, you know – I’ll do love stories, independent films, thrillers. There’s only one criterion for me: If I’m gonna spend two years making a movie, I gotta be interested in it. You’ll never catch me making a movie that I’m not interested in. I don’t think you ever get carte blanch unless you’re trying to do something that you’ve already done.

Your father once said that only exploitation films seem to get today’s youth right. Was it your intention to make Alpha Dog an exploitation-style film, in order for it to connect with today’s youth?
It’s so hard to get a true story right. You’ve got the events, we know what happened, but to try to fill in the gaps of what they’re talking about, and how they feel… I wanted their language and partying to be kind of an assault on the senses. I felt confident that it was true. I wanted their lack of toughness to be really apparent, but with all the trappings and affectations of being tough. What is an exploitation film? It’s just things that you haven’t seen before in movies. If they were familiar to you, it’s because other people have done them before in different ways. And that’s probably why it resonated that way.

With this film, are you deliberately carrying on the Cassavetes tradition of polarizing audiences?
I deliberately wanted to make people mad with this movie. Most people won’t respond to this [film] because it’s unlike anything they’ve seen before. There’s a movie sensibility that the film doesn’t conform to.
When [my father] did [his] films, most people hated them. There were some reviewers that thought they were awesome, but most everyone else was like, ‘Fuck him!’ His movies are like a piece of food that has a really intense taste. So some people won’t like it, but the ones who like it really like it. He really was on to something. Nobody else is doing that kind of thing, but they all try. Independent film is like, ‘let’s rip off John or Bergman or Fellini or whoever.’ They haven’t gotten it yet. But someone will someday.