The family business

When you grow up with the last name Cassavetes -- Zoe Rowlands Cassavetes , 37, is the youngest child of the late indie pioneer John Cassavetes and his wife and muse, actress Gena Rowlands -- the question is not so much whether you'll take up filmmaking, but when.

Siblings Nick, 48, and Alexandra, 41, made their directorial debuts years ago. "Everyone asks, 'Why did you wait so long to make a movie?' " says Cassavetes, who was in Boston last month to promote her first feature, "Broken English, " which opens Friday for a week long engagement at the Brattle Theatre, in Cambridge.

"Well, it took me four years to get my movie done, but also, I'm not old! I have something to say now that maybe, if I'd made the movie four years ago, when I started to try, would have been a different movie, with a different feeling."

In person, Cassavetes is distinctly non-Hollywood, although she was born and raised there. Her hair is an uncoifed tumble of blond streaks, and her sandaled feet find their way into a semi-lotus position. She shares her father's penetrating gaze and her mother's relaxed candor.

"Broken English" stars Parker Posey as a 30-something New Yorker, Nora Wilder , who is stymied in her job -- guest relations manager at a boutique hotel -- and an utter disaster on the romance front. It's not until Nora meets Julien (soulful Melvil Poupaud ), an open-hearted young Parisian willing to weather her emotional crises, that she's able to relinquish some of her closely guarded pain.

Cassavetes herself put in some time as a marketing exec for Soho's trendy Mercer Hotel. She didn't meet "her" Frenchman -- musician/composer Sebastien Chenut of the Paris-based duo Scratch Massive , who ended up designing the film's soundtrack -- until after she'd written the screenplay for "Broken English." Now they're engaged.

"Next time the girl's going to win the lottery!" Cassavetes jokes. "I mean, if it's really going to go that way . . ."

Getting the film produced was hardly a snap, notwithstanding her impeccable pedigree and a top-drawer cast -- including Rowlands playing Nora's mother. Having already gone the maxed-out-credit-card route for her well-received 2000 short, "Men Make Women Crazy Theory" ("I'm still paying for it"), Cassavetes had no choice but to go begging. She managed to secure some Japanese seed money but, as the agreed-upon start date approached, she still lacked substantial backing. "We decided we were going to shoot, no matter what. We were just kind of soldiers marching off the cliff. . . . Aaaahhhh!

"I was really stressed out in those days, really tense." She shudders. "But I couldn't show that -- you can't let 'em see you sweat. It's like this kind of Zen. I would lock the door and be hysterically crying -- 'I'm a loserrrr!' Then you get up and fight."

Cable company HDNet stepped in at the last minute. Cassavetes carried off t he film -- shot in 20 days (15 in New York, 5 in Paris) -- for a modest $1 million. Still, the challenges just kept mounting.

"We kind of had this shoot where everything that could go wrong went wrong," she recounts. "It rained almost every day. A friend of ours lent us his hotel to shoot in, and it was, like, the Israeli Day parade, and all the rock bands were stationed in front of the hotel . . . But after a while it becomes totally comical. At first you're just uptight, and then you're, you know, 'Whatever.' "

A certain laissez-faire looseness also extended to slight variations in the screenplay. Like her father -- whose carefully scripted work seems so naturalistic it's often mistaken for improvisation -- Cassavetes was willing to give her actors a certain leeway.

"Parker would definitely add little moments," she recalls. "But you want people to do that. You write something, and it's kind of yours, and then you have to let it go: You can't control everything. It may turn into something else, but also it's brilliant and amazing and not what you expected."

Cassavetes early learned she far prefers being behind the camera to being in front of it. Although she first appeared onscreen at 1 -- in 1971's "Minnie & Moskowitz" -- she was never that drawn to the spotlight. Instead, she remembers "hiding under small pieces of furniture" to observe the distinctly non-amateur home movies being shot in her living room, and listening at the door as her father dictated scripts. "I'm a big eavesdropper," she admits with a laugh. "Hence the writing: I like listening to other people."

A few bit parts undertaken in her early 20s were enough to quash any acting aspirations. "It felt like something that I should do, more than I wanted to do. It just seemed like the thing you do after you get out of school." At the time, she says, "I didn't think, like, 'I'm going to be a director! ' " On the other hand, she muses, "It never didn't occur to me to be a director."

She sidled into the field by assisting on various shoots and co-hosting, with her friend Sofia Coppola, "High Octane," an experimental digital video show that aired on Comedy Central in 1994. Then came some music videos and a slew of commercial projects . Before long, she had acquired the requisite skills.

Her own discomfort in front of the camera, Cassavetes believes, ultimately made her a more empathetic director. "I love actors! " she says. "I want them to feel safe -- I know it's scary."

Casting Posey as sad, neurotic Nora might seem counter-intuitive, but, having spotted what seemed to her an untapped dramatic potential on Posey's part in Rebecca Miller's 2002 film "Personal Velocity," Cassavetes was set in her choice: She sensed that Posey, who usually plays brash, could just as easily tap into vulnerable. "There was never a question in my mind -- and she was really happy to have a chance to do that."

Posey, reached by phone in New York, concurs: "Anyone who's funny has all that stuff happening underneath, or they couldn't be funny in the first place." She loved the script at first sight -- when it came to lonely, panic-prone Nora, "I didn't find it difficult to feel for her at all" -- and waited three years for Cassavetes to line up the money. The minute it came through, Cassavetes flew out to Los Angeles, where Posey was guest-starring on "Boston Legal." As the actress recalls, "We just bonded -- we sat outside for eight hours at the Chateau Marmont and just talked and talked and talked about our lives, and Nora's life -- it's very relatable."

On set, Cassavetes "was very particular, very original and honest -- very much in the vein of what her mom and dad were all about," says Posey. "She's very talented. I kind of knew right away. She's supposed to be a director. There's no doubt that she's the real deal."

Sandy MacDonald can be reached at sandy@sandymacdonald.com.