Interview: Woody Allen Part One

By George 'El Guapo' Roush on August 6, 2008

Whether or not you agree or disagree with his personal life, you have to admit that Woody Allen is one of Hollywood’s most talented writers. His latest film, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, is perhaps his best movie in years. In part one of this press conference interview, Woody talks about everything. From the actors in his newest movie to marketing taglines to filming in Barcelona and how directing a movie isn’t rocket science. His interview was both candid and really, really funny.

 

I’m curious for you to talk about the inspiration you get from women.  Can you talk about women and what they bring out in you in terms of making films?

 

Allen: The interesting thing is, and I’ve said this before, when I first started I could never write for women.  When I wrote my first couple of films and did them, and when I used to write my cabaret act, and I would write sketches for television, I could never write for women.  I always wrote the male point of view.  This went on and on for quite a while.  People even commented about it at the time.  Then I got into ‘Play it Again, Sam’ with Diane Keaton on stage.  Keaton and I started dating, we started living together, and became very close.  Through some kind of Socratic osmosis or something I started writing for women.  I started writing for Diane, and I found I could write for women.  Then I sort of only wrote for women.  I wrote more and more for women, and I wrote for them all the time.  I like women, I enjoy their company.  The person I edit with is a woman, my editing assistants are all women, and my press people are all women.  My producer is a woman.  I just enjoy their company very much.  I get a big kick out of them.  For some reason I find them interesting to write about too, men occasionally, but really my heart is in it more when I’m writing for women.  I don’t know why but I remember when that transformation took place from an inability to write a credible woman.  I couldn’t’ write anything but a one-dimensional woman.  Then I was writing for women all the time.  Over the years I’ve written many women’s roles that turned out to be some of my most interesting roles.  A bonus is that there are so many wonderful actresses out there, it’s much easier to get a woman for a role, than it is a man.  If you write a role there are always a couple of women you can get for it, where as with a guy, if you don’t get the one or two guys you want its not so easy.  There is a scarcity of guys, really, on that level.  There are so many gifted women out there that are just waiting for an opportunity to work.

 

Like Scarlett Johansson?

 

Allen: Yeah, Scarlett was an accident.  I had Kate Winslet for ‘Match Point’ to the last week in pre-production, when she said she couldn’t do the picture, because she had worked continually and had spent no time with her child.  She asked would I forgive her, and of course I understood that completely, and I didn’t know Scarlett from a hole in the wall.  I thought she was too young to play the part.  She was only 19 years old at the time.  I was in a hole, I had to get somebody fairly quickly, and I knew that Scarlett was a great actress and a beauty.  I didn’t know if she was really what I had written.  I hired her and became totally captivated by her.  I thought she could simply do anything.  She was not only beautiful but also bright, amusing, charming, and gifted.  I’m very happy to work with her.  Whenever there is a part that fits anything she could do I would always call her and hope that she would be available for it, as I did with Keaton for years.  I did that with Mia [Farrow].  I did many roles with her, thought she was a wonderful actress, and she never let me down.  I think that the same with be true with Scarlett.

 

As a writer what are the challenges for you to write about three different culturally distinctive characters, in terms of creating the characters?  What was a particular challenge for you?

 

Allen: It was not, I had the idea about two women going away on a summer thing some place.  Someone called from Barcelona and said ‘Would you like to make a picture here?  We’ll finance it.’  That’s always the hardest part of making any picture, is getting the financing.  Writing it, directing it, or anything else is easier than getting the financing for it, so I said sure, I would do it.  I had no idea for anything for it, and then about a week or two later I got a call from Penelope Cruz.  I didn’t know her, she wanted to meet, and she was in New York.  I had only seen her in ‘Volver’ and nothing else ever.  I thought she was great in it, and she said that she knew I was doing a film in Barcelona, and she would like to participate.  I started out with Barcelona, with Penelope, and in the back of mind I was going to go to Scarlett.  Then I heard Javier [Bardem] was interested, so gradually it took shape.  I was writing for these people.  I was deliberately writing for these people.  I didn’t know Rebecca Hall at all.  Juliet Taylor, my casting director, discovered her.  She said that she was great, I should read her, and look at some film on her.  I did and she was right.  I put the thing together for the people almost, as I did it, and did the best I could.  I relied on whatever knowledge I had, I’ve been to Barcelona several times in my life, but I didn’t have a vast knowledge of it.  When I got over there the art director took me to all these places.  You get help from people.  Everybody on the crew cooperates and says ‘They would never speak that way.’ Or ‘They would never go to this restaurant if they are 25 or 30 years old. They would go to this one.’  So gradually you do it and it looks like you know Barcelona or you know London, when in fact you are faking.  Everybody helps you a great deal.  That is exactly how it emerged.

 

You have been exploring relationships in all of your films.  Have you found any answers?

 

Allen: I haven’t found any answers that you would want to hear.  [Laughs] At the end of this movie, it’s a very pessimistic movie, because even the cosmetics of the movie are up.  Barcelona is beautiful, there is light, the music is pretty, and the actors and actresses are beautiful.  In the end Javier and Penelope can’t live with each other, they can’t live without each other, and they are constantly dissatisfied.  They can’t make it together.  Scarlett is always suffering from chronic dissatisfaction.  She wants something but has no idea what it is and she will always want something.  She will never know what it is, and nothing will ever satisfy her, because it’s really in her.  That’s the problem.  Rebecca Hall is marrying this guy but she’ll have a fairly stable, acceptable life, with no big highs or lows, and it will be some version of what Patricia Clarkson has.  Maybe less dramatic than that, or more maybe, but she’ll always feel that there were missed things in life she didn’t have.  I have a pessimistic view of relationships.  My view has always been that you talk about it with your friends, you scheme, you plot, and you see psychoanalysts.  You see marriage counselors, get medicated, do everything they can, but in the end you have to luck out.  It’s complete and total luck.  You have all these exquisite needs, some woman has all her exquisite needs, and the odds of all those wires going together are very, very slim.  If one of those wires is not there then it gets annoying and she gets dissatisfied, you get dissatisfied.  So, to get it all clicking in is a very happy accident.  It does happen to people, because there are so many people in the world, which statistically a certain amount of them luck out.  They meet someone, fall in love, they are happy with that person, no real friction, but its luck.  This is my observation of it, this can be argued, but if you ask me I would say that’s what I’ve learned.  All the advice, planning, self help books, anything you do, dating services, you’ve got to get lucky.  If you do it’s great.  Some people do, but you can see by the divorce rate, the amount of relationships people go through, and the amount of people in unhappy relationships but stay together because of inertia, because of children, fear of loneliness… there are very few really wonderful ones.  You have to get lucky.  I hope I haven’t depressed you. 

 

When you were shooting you always had a trove of fans.  How complicated was it to shoot?

 

Allen: It was very easy to shoot in Barcelona.  There is a film community in Spain, some from Barcelona, and some came from Madrid.  There is a more active film community there, but it was a cinch.  Most of them did not speak English, but a few did.  I don’t speak Spanish.  They knew how to light; they knew how to do all the crew work beautifully.  You can see that the picture looks good.  The cameraman was a Spanish cameraman, and he did a beautiful job.  He was as good as any cameraman in the world, wonderful cameraman, and he didn’t speak English.  It didn’t matter.  I’ve made a number of pictures with a Chinese cameraman who didn’t speak any English in the past.  I worked for 10 years with Carlos DePalma who spoke a tiny bit of English but not much.  Those things are the easy things.  That stuff is easy, but what is hard is getting a good script.  When a project fails, 90 percent of the time, it’s that the script is no good.  The actors are generally quite good.  It’s rare that something doesn’t work because the actors have torpedoed you in some way.  It’s rare that you directed it so badly that it doesn’t work.  Directing is not rocket science.  But if you have a bad script, then no amount of being Fellini, or a great stylist or anything saves you.  In the end you have a flawed movie, a boring movie, or illogical story, or un-engaging story.  Once I had the script, and it was decent, the fact that nobody could speak English didn’t matter.  Penelope and Javier, I encouraged them to improvise all the time.  They are great actors and they improvised all over the place.  I had no idea what they were saying.  No idea.  I could tell from the body language that clearly it was the scene I wrote in some way.  It was not the words I wrote, but they were breaking up, or arguing over the emotional life, it was something.  I never knew what they were saying until I got back to New York City and I was putting the titles in the picture.  The person who did the titles was bilingual and told me what they were saying.  It was fine.  It was not always what I wrote by any means, often flamboyant flights of fancy that they took, but it was fine.  You can do it if you have a story to tell.  As long as it’s a decent story, then everybody has common sense about how to tell the story, then you can do it.  if the script is not good, then no amount of great acting, or flashy direction, great camera work, it will never bail you out.  This I know from many years of being on both ends of these things.

 

Rebecca Hall’s character seemed a little like the roles you have played in the past.  She is the voice of reason.  When you were writing the character of Vicky was that something that you were thinking of your voice?

 

Allen: It’s funny that you should ask me that, you are the third person that has asked me that question.  To me, it seems so outlandish.  Apparently it’s not though because you are the third person to ask me that question.  Years ago when a friend saw ‘Interiors’ she insisted to me that I was the Mary Beth Hurt character, on the flimsy evidence that she was wearing a tweed sport jacket that I liked to wear.  I was saying ‘No, it’s not true because her problem in the movie is that she can’t express herself artistically. She’s full of feeling and can’t get it out.’  I’ve always been able to write a little bit, or make jokes, I’ve never had that problem.  As the years went by people would say ‘John Cusack is you, or this one is you…’ so when I did ‘Match Point’ someone said that Jonathan Rhys Meyers was playing my role.  I’m thinking, how can someone possibly come to that?  In my wildest incarnation I couldn’t play that role, be that character, or think that way.  The same year, not for a second would I think of myself, in any relation to Vicky.  I would have thought myself, and I don’t mean this because he’s so charming and charismatic, in Javier’s role.  I could see a funny scene of me getting up in a restaurant and trying to pick up two attractive women, then not being successful at it, or getting in over my head.  I could see Javier’s atheistic, existential point of view, as one I’ve expressed many times.  No one has said ‘Javier was kind of talking for you at times.’  They think that the girl is speaking for me.  I see it as absolutely not so, but it’s interesting that it keeps coming up, so I can only think I have a blind spot.  It’s not like you’re the only crazy in the city.  I have a blind spot and I don’t see it, but apparently its there for other people to see.  Now it’s come up again and again.  I don’t see it in any way, but I can’t honestly say that my perspective on it is correct.  I’m starting to lose confidence.

 

I was going to ask if any of the hearts of these characters are something you connect with personally?  Also I want to go back to were there fans hanging around when trying to shoot in Barcelona?  How did you deal with that?

 

Allen: Yes, there were huge crowds hanging around.  It was no problem at all.  They were the most polite, sweet people.  They would hang around, they didn’t bother us, and before a take if I needed quite I would go like this to them.  They would all get very quiet.  They were totally cooperative and nice.  We had an enormous amount of cooperation from the city in every way.  If you look at the end of the picture you see all the credits of people that participated.  People were giving us things for nothing left and right.  They couldn’t have been sweeter.  I was able to make the picture and because of all the freebies I could make it for the small budget that I had.  I never had a lot of money.  I make my pictures for approximately 15 million dollars.  Some go to 16 and some will be 14, but that’s the ballpark.  We were able to make the picture for that, and the picture looks healthy, because we got so much cooperation and free things.  The town was great to us.  The museum would open up for us.  The crowds in the street, which were enormous, it was not like shooting in New York where you get a couple of drifters that watch, and they are jaded, and don’t care.  We really got hundreds and hundreds of people.  They could not have been sweeter or more cooperative.

 

‘Life Is The Ultimate Work Of Art’ is the poster tagline, how do you feel about it? How do you feel about the statue made in your honor in Oviedo? Also, an artistic choice you made in the film was a narrator who is off screen and never really identified.  It’s a great literary thing to do.  Do you see film as literature?

 

Allen: There are three questions there, so the first one was the copy line.  First I have to disavow the copy line.  Usually when the marketing people show you posters for your movie, usually your heart sinks, because you think you have made a beautiful film.  At least you have tried to make a beautiful film and they usually show you something that is aimed, in the most heavy handed way, at the lowest common denominator.  Now on this picture, they showed me the ad, and I thought it was beautiful.  I thought it was great.  I was so shocked that I was not going to have to send it back and say ‘Please try again.’  It was a beautiful ad, better than anything I had imagined.  I never feel a copy line is necessary, but marketing people always throw one in there.  I wasn’t even aware of the copy line.  It’s meaningless to me, it has no relation to the film, and no relation to anything.  It’s something to get the suckers in off the street.  I wish it wasn’t in there.  The poster is beautiful and it’s one of the nicest I’ve ever had.  That’s how I feel about copy lines.  They are always terrible.  They never mean anything, they never bring anybody in, and they satisfy the marketing people for some strange reason. 

My statue in Oviedo is one of the great mysteries of western civilization.  It’s a lovely town in Spain, I went there a couple of times, and it’s beautiful.  I went once years ago for something.  Without asking me, I never did anything there, I never saved anybody’s life, and they said ‘We are putting a statue up of you in town.’  I thought it was a joke.  Then in the town there is a statue of me.  It’s a good statue, completely undeserved, but a bronze statue of me.  It looks good.  I’ve got my sport jacket on, corduroy trousers.  First I thought it was one of those things where I leave town and they take it in, then when Brad Pitt comes to town they put his statue out.  Why a statue of me?  I’ve never done anything up there.  I have a photograph of it at home with two feet of snow piled on my head.  People keep stealing the glasses from it, and they are welded onto the statue.  Guys come with blowtorches at night and they take the glasses off.  I have been there where I’ve had half of my glasses off.  They fixed it up this time when I was going there.  It’s inexplicable.  I don’t know what the connection is, like picking someone off the street.  I just don’t understand, but they are nice people, and I’m happy to go there.  I don’t visit the statue much.  The third thing was the narrator.  I primarily feel I’m a writer who only directs so my stuff is not mangled on the screen.  I’m a writer.  I always feel the narrative voice.  I was a stand up comic who always spoke to the audience.  I write and very often in my films I either talk to the audience, have a character talk to the audience, have a narrator.  I just feel the presence of the author all the time.  I’m literary in that sense.  When I thought of the story I thought of it in that way, instinctively.  I thought I was writing something.  I wrote it and went out and got a narrator to do it, but I never conceived it in any other way.  I’m a writer and that’s what I do.  I direct because of that reason. 

 

Check back for Part two of this awesome interview with Woody Allen later in the week. I’ll also be posting up interviews with Javier Bardem, Scarlett Johansson and Penelope Cruz, so keep checking in with Latinoreview!!

 

E-mail: george@latinoreview.com

Source:Latinoreview

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  Comments

• Regarding Mr. Allen's Confidence Fri Oct 03 at 16:26 EST

  Thank you for this interview. As a screenwriter, I enjoyed the insights into how this film was made and Mr. Allen's thoughts. My daughter and I look forward to and always go to see his pictures. Truly there is only one flaw in Vicky Barcelona that there is one actor who uses Mr. Allen's inflections when they speak. He should not lose confidence - only make sure the actors are free to find their own way to the characters they are portraying. Look forward to his next picture.

  Author: Mary | Permalink

• Good Interview Wed Aug 06 at 16:43 EST

  Enjoyed the interview, Woody Allen is the man though.

  Author: jason | Permalink

• Hey Guap2DaMax Wed Aug 06 at 16:05 EST

  You still rock!

  Author: Larry | Permalink

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