John Cassavetes Directs Love Streams

In 1983, during the production of John Cassavetes’s Love Streams, journalist Michael Ventura was hired by Cannon Films executive Menahem Golan to make a promotional documentary about the company’s first Cassavetes picture. The result was the sixty-minute “I’m Almost Not Crazy . . .”—John Cassavetes: The Man and His Work, which affords the viewer a rare, intimate glimpse into the great filmmaker’s process. In this excerpt, Cassavetes directs a climactic scene set during a rainstorm, contends with the film’s menagerie of animal performers, and then talks about the importance on a movie set of never knowing what the next day will bring.