Is ‘A Woman Under the Influence’ the most important indie movie of all time?
More than being one of the greatest works from a toweringly influential figure in cinema history, A Woman Under the Influence might well be the single most important film of John Cassavetes‘ career.
Not only for its artistic and creative merits, which saw the powerful drama earn him an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Director’ alongside wife and star Gena Rowlands’ ‘Best Actress’ turn, but for the way it completely rewrote the rules of independent cinema when Cassavetes took it upon himself to tell the story he wanted to tell without having to navigate Hollywood’s political minefields.
He already had six features under his belt at the time to complement a steadily successful acting career, all of which were distributed by either established companies or major studios. However, A Woman Under the Influence marked an evolution for the filmmaker in more ways than one.
One of the first double-pronged talents to leverage one career to sustain the other, Cassavetes used the money he earned from acting to fund smaller, intimate passion projects he created from the ground up. Taking things one step further, A Woman Under the Influence was the first picture produced by his own Faces International Films and distributed by Faces Distribution, the entity he’d founded and named after his 1968 classic.
It wasn’t easy, though, with Cassavetes mortgaging his home and borrowing money from family and friends to help foot the bill, with second-billed cast member Peter Falk so taken by the script he put up $500,000 of his own money. The crew were plucked not from Hollywood but the American Film Institute, and the lack of resources saw him shoot scenes not on purpose-built sets, but actual homes.
Rowlands did her own hair and makeup, and Cassavetes took it upon himself to secure a theatrical release by personally calling cinema owners and asking them politely to screen A Woman Under the Influence. That was the first time an independent feature had been rolled out without using the established system that had been in place for decades, where it ended up earning $6 million at the box office against a million-dollar budget.
Self-created, self-made, self-distributed, and sustainably successful, A Woman Under the Influence shifted the paradigm of independent cinema forever. What Cassavetes did to realise his passion project was virtually unheard of at the time, but it’s long since reached a point where dedicated auteurs funnelling their own money into their projects and shooting without a locked-in release and distribution model in place is a regular occurrence.
The only reason it existed as a feature was because Rowlands wanted to star in a play reflecting the difficulties faced by modern women, but she didn’t want to perform it multiple times a week. Instead, Cassavetes turned it into a screenplay that nobody wanted to buy, only to get the last laugh when A Woman Under the Influence delivered a resonant, powerful, and evocative story of struggle.
It’s an incomparable film regardless of how it was put together, but the lengths Cassavetes went to coupled with the reverberations caused by its unique construction states a solid case for A Woman Under the Influence being the most important indie flick ever. At the very least, it’s the most transformative in terms of how it impacted the complexion of smaller-scale cinema for generations to follow.
