"The actor and the process. Perhaps Gena Rowlands' most daring role."

"The entire John Cassavetes: Five Films set is a great collection/overview of the master of independent cinema, unparalleled badass, brilliant actor and filmmaker JC. Also, I have mad love for Gena Rowlands. How I wish they were my parents."

"Anything that revolves around John Cassavetes has my vote. Anything that revolves around Gena Rowlands has my vote. Anything that revolves around the theater and aging and legacy and panic has my vote. So much anxiety, so much chaos. It’s human and imperfect and porous."

"I have been under the influence of John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands and their extended family in film ever since I saw a retrospective of Cassavetes’s movies at MoMA soon after he died. I could have listed any number of his films: Faces with Seymour Cassel and Lynn Carlin, Opening Night with Rowlands and Ben Gazzara, or Husbands with Peter Falk . . . it doesn’t matter. Each film is made with a love, passion, and style unique to John, and inspiring to the rest of us."

"Not much to add about Cassavetes, except that Criterion has put together an incredible box set, John Cassavetes: Five Films. There are alternate cuts, interviews, and documentaries, as well as the incredible films. Woman and Opening Night show Gena Rowlands at her best. These films contain performances that will never be matched, but are also structural innovations. I wish I could make movies like this."

"Not much to add about Cassavetes, except that Criterion has put together an incredible box set, John Cassavetes: Five Films. There are alternate cuts, interviews, and documentaries, as well as the incredible films. Woman and Opening Night show Gena Rowlands at her best. These films contain performances that will never be matched, but are also structural innovations. I wish I could make movies like this."

"I took this title for one of my songs on my third album and dedicated it to my sister; she loves this one too. The last John Cassavetes film . . . I heard he was ill throughout a lot of the making of this and, in the final scene, he waves good-bye. It’s really touching. His real-life wife, Gena Rowlands, is one of my all-time favorite actresses."

"Gena Rowlands is a goddess. I almost don’t know what else to say beyond that. I love the scene when her character, an actress named Myrtle Gordon, shows up to the theater drunk beyond belief on opening night. The physicality of Rowlands’s performance is brilliant: the tension in her mouth, the heavy breathing, her limbs rigid one moment, limp the next. Watching her gain her composure is harrowing and hilarious at the same time."

"Put this one and A Woman Under the Influence side by side and you have ample proof of my theory that Gena Rowlands is the greatest American actor or actress ever. Period. No prosthetics, no extreme weight gain or loss, no accents or limps . . . and yet has any other actor ever created two more distinct, honest, or complete human beings on-screen? Rowlands somehow simply shifts her center of gravity and transforms from Woman’s selfless and fragile Mabel Longhetti into Opening Night’s cunning and self-obsessed Broadway star Myrtle Gordon. Ben Gazzara is her director, Manny Victor, and the scene where he shares an intimate midnight moment with his neglected wife (the great Zohra Lampert), only to be interrupted by his leading lady, is priceless."