Week 21/2025

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Filmmaker Magazine: Bless Their Little Hearts itself doesn’t end in a call-to-arms or moment of radicalization. If anything, it seems like it starts after that moment has already taken place; in the opening scene, guys are talking about robbing banks. You talk about Third Cinema — a lot of those films end in a kind of manifesto.

Billy Woodberry: I don’t know that [this film] is so political. Maybe it’s implicit. It’s about life outside of work – life without work. For this couple, one part is missing because [the husband] is not at his previous job, where he knew he’d bring a salary to her, and together they’d have consistent, regular contribution. He lost that. And the question is: What happens in the process, when a man loses his work? Which is what was happening to a lot of people at that time, in the different industrial places. We imagine he was a worker in a factory – maybe not a big works, but a supplier related to a big works. When we loses that, he needs to try to assess what is his place, what is his contribution – what is he doing in this family, in this couple, in this life? And he tries not to accept fully that that’s his condition. He tries to get any work so he can contribute.

His struggle to do that goes against the more general suggestion that people like him didn’t want to work. Maybe the politics is a kind of solidarity with the part of the working class that was experiencing that or dealing with that. It makes them present, it makes them the subject. Even our colleagues, they didn’t necessarily make movies about these people. Charles [Burnett] did, but not everybody. They made films about other social groups, other segments of the population.

Now when people talk about what’s happening with the working class, they come back with a kind of fiction about the “white working class,” as if the working class in the United States for a long time hasn’t been a multiethnic, multiracial class. [The film] offers evidence of what happens with that section of the working class after work. Because, a lot of times, people work together in dynamic industries – the auto industry, steel – but they don’t go home together. They don’t socialize together. The social segregation disguises how people live their lives after the job. The film offers, maybe, a way for them to see themselves – to see their class situation in another form.

Billy Woodberry in conversation with Steve Macfarlane and Madeline Coleman1

• 1Steve Macfarlane and Madeline Coleman, “‘People Can Choose to Create the Collective, Social Experience’: Billy Woodberry on Bless Their Little Hearts,” Filmmaker Magazine, 25 May 2017.

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“When I read the script, I knew I wanted a walk for her. I wanted something that, from the minute you saw me, you knew I could handle myself on the streets of New York. So I started thinking about when I lived in New York, how different I walked down the street when there was nobody but me. It was a walk that said, they'd better watch out.”

Gena Rowlands

“Gena is subtle, delicate. She's a miracle. She's straight. She believes in what she believes in. She's capable of anything. It's only because of Gena's enormous capacity to perform that we have a movie, because a lot of people would be a little bit too thin to work on it. Gena is a very interesting woman and for my money the best player that is around. She can just play. Give her anything and she'll always be creative. She doesn't try to make it different – she just is – because the way she thinks is different from the way most actors think. She goes in and she says, ‘Who do I like on this picture? What characters do I like, what characters am I so-so about?’ I picked up her script once and I saw all these notes, all about what reaction she had to the various people both in the production and the story. It was very personal to her, and I felt very guilty that I’d snooped. Then I watched her work. She sets the initial premise and follows the script very completely. Very rarely will she improvise, though she does in her head and in her personal thoughts. Everybody else is going boom! boom! boom!, but Gena is very dedicated and pure. She doesn’t care if it’s cinematic, doesn’t care where the camera is, doesn’t care if she looks good – doesn’t care about anything except that you believe her. She caught the rhythm of that woman living a life she’d never seen. When she’s ready to kill, I’m amazed at how coldly she does it.”

John Cassavetes1

• 1Ray Carney, Cassavetes on Cassavetes (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001).