"I can't believe that I made a movie that's on point," Zoe Cassavetes muses playfully about her recently released film Day Out of Days, which follows the hustle of a Hollywood actress approaching 40, played by Alexia Landeau. The indie drama, like its 45-year-old director, is understated and unpretentious, and, to her point, it tackles an oft-talked-about subject without hitting you in the face with intent. "I was living in Paris at the time, and I was like, 'I've got to write something funny.' Can you imagine that it started that way?!" she quips in amusement.
Day Out of Days is only Cassavetes's second feature film as a director, but even if you haven't seen her first, the 2008 Sundance hit Broken English, you probably recognize her name—if not from her modest acting career in the nineties, then from her robust Hollywood pedigree, as the daughter of actress Gena Rowlands and late legendary filmmaker John Cassavetes, and the sister of actor and director Nick Cassavetes.
In keeping with her no-airs élan, Cassavetes is refreshingly unguarded when it comes to speaking about her lineage—and jumped at the opportunity to hire her mother to star in her first film, though, at Nick's suggestion she refrains from calling Rowlands "mom" on set. "I come from a family where everybody's a filmmaker. We love to read each other's stuff, play the casting game, you know?" she says. "This town is full of a lot of people saying, 'Everything's amazing,' so it's nice to have someone say, 'Hm, could be better.'"
Cassavetes says she soaked up some her most valuable show biz advice from observing her mother and father over the years. "One of my favorite things my father ever told me was, 'Don't forget that it's called show business,'" she says, adopting a deep, husky affect. "I always liked that, and it made me want to know everything, as opposed to being in denial."
But Cassavetes is not the denial type—especially when it comes to the first chapter of her Hollywood career, as an actor, which she maintains was a bust. "I was not talented. No, seriously, I really wasn't. I had amazing acting teachers, I did the whole thing, and I just sucked!" she insists. When did she notice? "I know the exact moment," Cassavetes says, almost excitedly. "I went to meet an agent somebody hooked me up with, and he said, 'So, tell me why you want to be an actress.' I really had one of those 'aha' moments. I looked at him and said, 'Oh my god, I'm so sorry I wasted your time. I've just realized that I have no desire to be an actress whatsoever. Bye!'"
Chapter two consisted of a move to New York, where Cassavetes worked as a marketing executive for the then-rebranding Mercer hotel and a string of production assistant and director's assistant gigs. Cassavetes had also become a fast fixture in the fashion circuit, as a muse and friend to Marc Jacobs, alongside pal Sofia Coppola, with whom she had co-hosted the short-lived '90s pop-culture TV show "Hi-Octane."
"Time warp!" she erupts when I ask about how her relationship with the designer began. "I met Marc hanging out in New York when he was doing Perry Ellis. And Anna Sui, as well. At that time, fashion just felt fun, you know?" she says. "The pressure now is incredible. How do people do, like, 16 shows a year?"
Cassavetes's second epiphany came shortly before 2000, when she decided to direct her first short, "Men Make Women Crazy Theory," which also starred Landeau—but not without a shove from her sister Alexandra, also an actor/director."I kept saying to my sister, 'I've got to be a director.' Finally, she said, 'Will you just shut the fuck up, make a movie, and see if you want to be one?' And I was like, 'Oh, totally," she says. "I did, and it was exactly what I wanted to do."
The timing of "Day Out of Days," was, in micro-view, dictated by the fact that Landeau was four months pregnant while filming. "We were kind of fighting the clock—it was now, or we'd need to wait another year," she says. Regarding the eight-year gap between this film and her last major release, Cassavetes adds, "Making a movie is really taxing—physically, yeah, but emotionally, you're totally drained. I had another movie that I wanted to do, that I probably will do, that's much bigger and intimidating, so I sort of thought of this as the warm-up. But I'm constantly writing."
The ageism-in-Hollywood conversation is one that Cassavetes was conscious to tackle, in "Day Out of Days," from a personal perspective, rather than a soapbox. "I think there's a bit too much chatter about it," she says. "I'm happy this movie could sort of show what it would be like in that situation, as opposed to just complain about it." She also acknowledged that, though unpremeditated in this case, each movie written about a middle-aged actress provides one more lead role for a middle-aged actress.
Currently, Cassavetes is working on a web series whose details are still under lock and key "All I can say is it's about teenagers, which is a group I'm completely fascinated with," she says. "All the archetypes are the same, but the situations are like, woah." As for why the sharp shift from middle-aged women to hormonal adolescents, she says, "I always want to get out of my comfort zone so I can think of stories in a broader way," then quips, "And, I got hired."
Day Out of Days is now available on Digital HD and VOD.
Romy Oltuski is a writer and editor based in New York. Her work appears in The New York Times, Forbes, Harper’s Bazaar, InStyle, and The Cut.
