There wouldn’t have been a John Cazale special without an interview with Meryl Streep.
“She apparently doesn’t talk about her private life very much,” says the director Richard Shepard, who worked on the HBO profile for three years.
“For me, she’s the lynchpin in this, both emotionally and in terms of getting everyone else to say yes.”
Streep and Cazale met while performing in “Measure for Measure” at the Public Theater in 1976 and were together until his death two years later.
“It’s a weird situation,” Shepard explains. “They had this brief romantic love — like out of a movie — and he passes away, and then she has this 30-year relationship with her husband. So it’s a little strange for her to talk about it.”
But Shepard persisted.
“I did an interview with Sidney Lumet, an interview with Cazale’s brother Steve, and then I spent a year and a half trying to get an interview with Meryl Streep.”
Finally, Cazale’s brother went to an art opening knowing that Streep was going. “He went to corner her and say, ‘Will you please do this for me?'” Shepard says. It worked.
Once he got Streep, he landed every other name who had worked with Cazale: Francis Ford Coppola, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Richard Dreyfuss, Gene Hackman. (Only “Deer Hunter” director Michael Cimino, who rarely grants interviews, declined to participate.)
“For me it’s all summed up by Pacino saying, ‘No matter what she does as an actor, when I think of Meryl, I think of the way she was with John when he was dying.’ To me that’s the heart of his story.”
Streep refers to Cazale’s illness without going into detail.
“I think at a certain point Meryl warmed up to the idea that at least our hearts are in the right place.”