In the end, Cassavetes said that he agreed to do the film largely as a favor to Rowlands, who relished the idea of playing a larger-than-life role. The role deeply appealed to her. It tapped into a side of her that captured the way she sometimes thought of herself – the "sexy but tough woman who doesn't really need a man" personality type that described many of the actresses she had idolized over the years. Or one might say that Cassavetes was having fun with her love for Marlene Dietrich (whom Gloria resembles in many subtle ways).
Though she really wanted to do it, she doesn't go about this very easily, you know. After the picture was written and the deal was made, she said, "Maybe you ought to get someone else." [Laughs.] Which is always maddening. On every film that we've ever made, she has enormous trepidations before she goes out and acts, but it's not because she can't act, but because she doesn't know whether she's capable of speaking for a bunch of women who are childless, and she wants to represent them truthfully. She doesn't want to represent them as caricatures, she wants to represent the people she's playing with some authenticity as to what they are feeling, what they would feel in a certain circumstance and in a way that not many actresses do. She's an artist. And her holdbacks are her pain. I mean, she went through a tremendous amount of pain thinking she's not good enough to play these things. Once she starts going she forgets "I'm not good enough" and the scenes hold her in check and she just keeps on going as long as she can.
Gena is subtle, delicate. She's a miracle. She's straight. She believes in what she believes in. She's capable of anything. It's only because of Gena's enormous capacity to perform that we have a movie, because a lot of people would be a little bit too thin to work on it. Gena is a very interesting woman and for my money the best player that is around. She can just play. Give her anything and she'll always be creative. She doesn't try to make it different – she just is – because the way she thinks is different from the way most actors think. She goes in and she says, "Who do I like on this picture? What characters do I like, what characters am I so-so about?" I picked up her script once and I saw all these notes, all about what reaction she had to the various people both in the production and the story. It was very personal to her, and I felt very guilty that I'd snooped. Then I watched her work. She sets the initial premise and follows the script very completely. Very rarely will she improvise, though she does in her head and in her personal thoughts. Everybody else is going boom! boom! boom!, but Gena is very dedicated and pure. She doesn't care if it's cinematic, doesn't care where the camera is, doesn't care if she looks good – doesn't care about anything except that you believe her. She caught the rhythm of that woman living a life she'd never seen. When she's ready to kill, I'm amazed at how coldly she does it.
Cassavetes was always in awe of what Rowlands could do with a script – even a weak one.
