Image by Sophia Quach
Zoe Cassavetes
Issue #33
A talented daughter makes her own mark with English Lessons.
By Joseph McCabe
Published: September 1st, 2007 | 12:00am
Zoe Cassavetes had an education most film students can only dream of. As the youngest child of actor-director John Cassavetes and actress Gena Rowlands, she learned at a young age the value of pain and the fearlessness needed to depict it on-screen. It’s a lesson she puts to good use in her feature film directorial debut, Broken English, which stars Parker Posey as Nora, a thirtysomething hotel manager looking for love in New York City.
“I’m a big crier,” Cassavetes says. “So I really wanted to make a movie about emotion. And I don’t think that men are insensitive, but I think women are more socially allowed to show that kind of emotion in life. I didn’t even want to take advantage of that. It’s just how I feel about life. I like pain.”
Broken English finds a cast-against-type Posey revealing new sides of her familiar screen persona. “It was really important to the whole piece for her to be vulnerable,” Cassavetes says. “I said to her, ‘I don’t want any of this cute shit in the movie,’ and she laughed, because she understands, and she got it right away.”
Cassavetes says it was scary to write her first film. “It’s always your baby, and then you have to give it to somebody to do the part and become the role,” she says. “Then they bring so much to it, and you just guide. Directing’s just about finding the right person and kind of guiding them through the journey. So I was very happy that she said yes.”
Writing from experience, Cassavetes portrays Nora as someone who must ultimately learn to love herself before she can expect love from others. “When you try to force something it never really ends up working out the way you want it to,” she says. “I was like, ‘I am a joke. I am a joke.’ Then, when I started working on this movie and had something to really focus my time into, I could have the perspective, and I felt fine and great. Then I met somebody. So it’s almost when you kind of let go of all that stuff that it naturally comes to you.”
Cassavetes has spent a lot of time as a single New Yorker and knows audiences are bound to question the extent to which Broken English is autobiographical — especially since she cast Rowlands as Nora’s widowed, critical mother. But she claims to have exercised her creative license.
“It’s funny,” she laughs. “My mom isn’t like that at all. She’s so not pushy like that. It was fun for me — I guess because she’s my mother — to watch her be this different kind of mother. And Parker’s character actually agrees with her. She’s looking for answers from anyone.”
Cassavetes, who lost her father when she was 18, says that girls have issues with their fathers. “But when you lose somebody it’s a very sensitive thing that you carry around for the rest of your life,” she says. “So I didn’t want to play on ‘I’m totally fucked up because me dad’s dead,’ but I wanted it to be a point. It was one of those points that Nora used for herself, like, ‘If I care about someone else, am I gonna lose them in that huge capacity again?’”
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