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Cassavetes also structured Shadows to have most of the actors play lightly fictionalized versions of themselves, acting out the same issues and problems they faced in their off-screen lives: Hugh Hurd and Davey Jones, who play frustrated or aspiring singers in the film, really were frustrated, aspiring singers in their lives. (Hugh was still attempting to launch his singing career when Cassavetes made A Woman Under the Influence, where he sings an aria from Aida as his audition piece.) Tony Ray who plays a poseur and fraud as a character really was a bit of a poseur and method-actor manqué as the legacy of having had his famous father as a father. (As Faces and Husbands will demonstrate even more brilliantly, Cassavetes was never one to waste expressive badness and uses Tony’s method-inspired jaw-tightening and breathy delivery in the post-coital scene, the “I have an appointment” scene, and the apology scene to express the falsity of his relationship with his own and others’ experience.) Ben Carruthers really was of mixed-race background and as unresolved about his “real identity” in life as he is in the film, and is another illustration of how Cassavetes uses an actor’s bad acting to mean something—most obviously in the scene where he pretentiously interacts with Nancy in the booth in the bar. David Pokotilow was as unassertive, “intellectual,” and “artistic,” in the negative senses in which Cassavetes understood the concepts, in his off-screen life as the character he plays. (He ultimately devoted his life to being a violinist in a symphony orchestra if that will suffice as an indication of his temperament.) And Lelia Goldoni really was a bit of a flirt (at least in Cassavetes’ imagination of her; she herself vehemently denies the characterization), and Cassavetes uses flirtatiousness to get her into trouble in the film. No wonder Cassavetes had the actors play under their real names; and no wonder they agreed. Cassavetes would do something like this in all of his films not only to create the most authentic performances possible and in an attempt to get his actors to investigate aspects of their identities as acts of self-exploration and discovery; but, less idealistically, simply out of a nearly uncontrollable propensity to tease and play mind-games with them—sometimes lovingly and comically, but just as often meanly and tormentingly. (As anyone who knew the filmmaker personally could testify, it was impossible to separate the comical and exploratory aspects of Cassavetes’ relationship to experience from the testing, mocking, taunting, teasing side of it; they were the same thing.) In short, in all of his work he tailored his scripts—not factually but emotionally and behaviorally—to reflect the actual personalities, imaginative situations, and expressive quirks, particularities, and foibles of the actors he cast to perform them. Ben Gazzara was a lot like the characters he played in Husbands and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie; Peter Falk a lot like the characters he played in Husbands and A Woman Under the Influence; Seymour Cassel a lot like the characters he played in Faces and Minnie and Moskowitz; and Gena Rowlands a lot like the characters she played in Minnie and Moskowitz and Opening Night.