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Cassavetes’ only professional encounters with Steven Spielberg date from around this same period. For three days, an eighteen-year-old Spielberg worked as a PA on Faces, fetching coffee and cigarettes for members of the cast and crew, before he got tired of it and quit. Two years later, Spielberg was on a Hollywood soundstage watching Cassavetes act in a television show when the filmmaker, who couldn’t possibly have remembered him from before, surprised him buy coming up at a break and asking what Spielberg thought of the scene they were shooting. When Spielberg told him he himself wanted to be a director someday, Cassavetes proceeded to ask him how he would direct him in the scene he was playing and then took his advice in the next take. It was typical Cassavetes. No one was beneath his dignity to talk to and, just possibly, learn from—not even the twenty-year-old kid standing off to the side of a shoot.

—Cassavetes on Cassavetes