Director can relate to his ‘Keeper’

HOLLYWOOD — Real men do shed tears.

That’s the conclusion one gets from sitting down with Nick Cassavetes, the 6-foot-6, square-jawed, mustachioed, multitattooed film director who was so wild and belligerent as a kid that his mother — actress Gena Rowlands — gave him a suitcase for his 16th birthday so he could pack up and move out.

Now, a couple of lifetimes later, he has made the film “My Sister’s Keeper,” a movie that requires even more Kleenex than his last hit tear-jerker, 2004’s “The Notebook.”

“As a society, we are trained not to feel things. We respect things that are scientific and cerebral and smart, and this ain’t one,” Cassavetes said over water and tea at Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont. His friend, the film’s star, Cameron Diaz, sits across from him, all long legs and scarves and jeans and jewelry.

Throughout the afternoon, the 50-year-old Cassavetes can’t stop showering Diaz with loud, brash adulation, while she looks at him with the fondness one reserves for a beloved papa bear.

The film, based on the Jodi Picoult bestseller, tells the story of a family coping with the elder daughter’s debilitating cancer. As part of the mother’s unbending plan to do everything possible to save the girl, a younger daughter had been conceived to provide bone marrow and other genetic material for the dying teen.

As the story progresses, the younger girl (played by Abigail Breslin) sues her parents to stop making her undergo the many medical procedures — in effect, for control of her own body.

“I guarantee you that everyone who read this script saw it as a TV movie, a cushy, sappy tear-jerker,” said Diaz, who plays the mother. “But when you say Nick Cassavetes is directing, it changes everything.”

Cassavetes pushed Diaz not to play the mother as a sympathetic victim. “Nick was like, ‘You don’t cry in this movie till the end. You don’t cry,”’ Diaz said. When the actors did get teary, Cassavetes nearly always cut it out of the movie.

“My Sister’s Keeper” is undoubtedly the most personal story for Cassavetes, who reveals that his oldest daughter, now 23, suffers from a congenital heart defect.

He understands the mother character’s single-minded devotion to her child. Cassavetes’ daughter suffers from a heart defect and when she was little she had pneumonia.

“There was a chance she was going to die. They were sticking a tube down her nose and in her lungs every hour and were making her cough. It was very brutal and hard on her, and I could literally see the life sucked out of my daughter.”

Finally, Cassavetes threw the doctors out. “They were like, ‘You are killing your daughter. She needs these things. She could be dead by morning.’ I said, ‘I want (you) out of the room.’”

His daughter survived the night, and Cassavetes ultimately apologized to the doctors, but, he said, “I know what is best for my kid, and I am going to get it. Why? Because that is my job.”

“It’s always present with him,” Diaz said. “There were moments when we were in a scene and I’d look over, and Nick’s by the camera and he is crying. Tears are coming down his face.”

Three weeks before the end of shooting Diaz’s father died of a heart attack. After a few days off, she returned to work. “I was kind of in shock,” she said.

“Nick’s experience with his father’s death was something that he shared a lot with me.”

John Cassavetes — the irascible director who pioneered a kind of documentary-style realism in such films as “Women Under the Influence” — died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1989.

“It was horrible,” said his son, whose stoicism in the moment certainly informs “My Sister’s Keeper,” a film that doesn’t ennoble suffering.

“We put him in the ground on a Friday, and on Monday I had an audition. … Life goes on. That’s the beauty of it and absolute tragedy of it.”