After you play a part, you think of it as your own.

John Cassavetes was a year ahead of me but we met there. What you do when you are at a school for drama, you do a play as opposed to a final. Anyone who wanted to come could just come. So he came, and I can't remember the name of the play, of course, it was a long time ago.

So I went home and I told my mom that I wanted to quit and be an actress and she said, “Huh, that sounds fascinating. It’s wonderful!” And I told my father and he literally said, “I don’t care if you want to be an elephant trainer if it makes you happy.”

So many people mistakenly think that the rest of his [John Cassavetes] pictures and the ones we did were improvised, which isn't true. He wrote all the rest of them.

People in independent film have a passion they're not in it for the money.

It was a period when live TV was just starting and getting popular and they took it seriously too. Not so much like TV now. They did Hemingway and Faulkner - and they’re all wonderful artists and it just was very creative at that time.

I only watch my movies that I make once, so I can just see how it hangs together, but after that, I don't watch them again. A lot of people have disappeared from Earth that you've worked with, and they make me sort of sad once in a while, and there's really no necessity for me to watch them. I've made them, and it's on film and that's that.

John [Cassavetes] loved actors. He gave them a lot of freedom. So if something came up that a certain actor just felt at the moment and said - that kind of improvisation he would accept. He gave very little direction.

So after the Shadows he acted and directed. And it worked out very nicely. And he wrote, obviously.

It was more freedom than I think most people get when they're starting out - or even when they're not starting out. He [John Cassavetes] did his thing and I did whatever I thought.

all creative writers need a certain amount of time when they're creating something where nobody should criticize them at all - at all. Even if the criticism is valid or good, they should just shut up, and let that person create. Because at a certain point you have to make it your own - not the world's, but your own.

John Cassavetes was there at night while I was working. After they [with his friends] discussed as much live TV as they felt they needed to, they started improvising scenes just for the fun of it and one of those scenes everybody got very interested in and it turned into Shadows [1959]. That movie was entirely improvised.

Of course, much easier to do a film when you're doing an extremely emotional part than it is doing it onstage over and over especially.

Never in my life have I ever even thought about anything else [ being anything other than an actress].

It was a very hard play [Woman Under the Influence] to do every night. And John Cassavetes said, Don't worry. Don't even think about it, you're right. I hadn't thought of that. He said, Just forget it.

You just can't complain about being alive. It's self-indulgent to be unhappy. When asked how she has coped since husband's death.

When I went to my parents I was at the University of Wisconsin, and I just couldn't wait anymore to go be an actress.