Cassavetes film debuts

Director Zoe Cassavetes, at the Greek debut of her first film, 'Broken English'

IN A scene from Zoe Cassavetes' film Broken English, the heroine Nora goes to an online dating site and searches for available men. For the "age" section, she fills in 25-45. The computer replies: none available. This is the bleak dating reality that Nora (ever-brilliant Parker Posey) faces in the film shot on a shoestring budget of $1 million in just 20 days.

In Broken English, Nora is disappointed with love, drinks too much, pops pills, has panic attacks, complains to her best friend (Drea De Matteo), slumps at her hotel job and clashes with her high-society mother (Gena Rowlands).

The daughter of groundbreaking director John Cassavetes and actress Rowlands, told the audience at the film's September 25 Athens premiere at the Athens International Film Festival that the film was semi-autobiographical. "I think that it's very interesting to put things that are very painful out there from my own life because I think that people are very shy about things that embarrass them," she said.

Though the film bursts with humour, she explained it was not really intended as a comedy but as the story of a very lonely person and the relationship she had with her own self. The humour, she explained, derived from relating to the heroine.

In front of the audience, Cassavetes, who is in her mid-30s, cut a confident figure, employing humour and hand-gestures (like the knife-to-heart twist) and stating how thrilled she was to screen the film in the country of her father's origin. When asked about the burden of being compared with the film legend who died when she was 18, Cassavetes said, "I'm proud of my name," but admitted, "I'm ready to take the punch."

Speaking to the Athens News a couple of days later, Cassavetes noted that while it took four years to clinch Japanese and US funding, on the set: "It was really nice to have a distance from it, to really be able to see, not to be caught up in it so much, in my ego about it, and to let the story unfold."

Making films is clearly about family for the new director. She assembled a crew of friends and sat her cast down and said: "This is going to be fast. It's going to be hard. It's not going to be glamorous. You're not going to have a trailer." She added, "And everybody was really interested in making a movie that way."

Cassavetes may have joked about working with Rowlands for the Athens audience, but she noted, "My Mom doesn't really miss - ever."

Though Cassavetes says she "goes crazy" when the film is compared to Sex and the City (perhaps due to the New York location), she told things from a woman's perspective because, "I'm still not completely sure what men think about life." In lieu of rehearsals, Posey prepared for the film with an 11-hour champagne and chat session with the director on an LA lawn.

Though one of the "bad" men in the film is a hilariously arrogant Hollywood actor (Justin Theroux), Cassavetes clearly admires the craft. "I tried to be an actress when I was younger and I was really bad," joked the filmmaker, who grew up around actors. She added: "It looks like it's a very easy job, but it's actually a very difficult job to turn yourself over, and [to] stop and start."

As time ran out on the set, which was plagued by rain and "everything going wrong that could go wrong," improvisation increased. Cassavetes noted that the constraints ultimately helped. As for the film's happy ending, Cassavetes said she put it in to comply with her friends' wishes to "not be so depressing". Broken English will be released locally soon.

ATHENS NEWS , 28/09/2007, page: A33
Article code: C13254A331