Quote Quoting Pop Trash (view post)
Faces and Love Streams were the first movies I thought of while watching the drunken party scenes and their clearly improvised bathtub argument. Bradley Cooper went to the Actors Studio in NYC. I'm sure he's studied Cassavetes' films.
Without making any value judgements about their respective methods, there's a fundamental difference between Cassavetes' approach to narrative construction and exposition and Cooper's, which is essentially classical. One never has the sense here that one has in Cassavetes films of simply being dropped into a scene and having to try to figure out what's happening, how the characters are related to one another, and how the scene relates to everything that's come before (e.g., the scene in Husbands of the three men berating a female singer). Whether Cooper went to the Actors Studio or some scenes were partially improvised is irrelevant to the final result.