Begun when Cassavetes was already quite ill, Love Streams represents a fond farewell to the director’s art. An idiosyncratic interpretation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest with an eccentric Prospero figure (played by Cassavetes himself) at its center, Love Streams is a richly self-reflective work that revisits scenes, characters, and events from his previous films in a cinematic meditation on the meaning of a life lived in art. Gena Rowlands, Cassavetes’s wife and frequent collaborator, plays an estranged wife and mother who, according to the director, "takes every situation to extremes out of an intense need for truth." His role as a withdrawn author by contrast "does the same to escape the withering emptiness that is the truth of his life." Love Streams is one of the most accomplished films of the director’s career.