I made Woody Allen laugh. Now how many people in this world can make that claim? No one I know goddamn it. It was so cool having him sit only a few feet away from me plus the new movie, Melinda and Melinda, is my favorite of his since Bullets Over Broadway. The film is split up into two parts the comedy and the tragedy. It stars Radha Mitchell as Melinda, a woman who unrepentantly bursts into dinner parties and sends everyone into a tizzy.
Check out the official site for Melinda and Melinda
Daniel Robert Epstein: You always work with great cinematographers. I could hardly believe that this was your first time working with Vilmos Zsigmond. Why him and why now?
Woody Allen: What made me choose him, I just worked with Darius Khondji and I was going to work with him again but he was stuck on this tennis movie [Wimbledon]. Anyhow he was not available. So they gave me a list of cinematographers who were available and Vilmos was a guy I had loved through the years but had never even met so I had no idea what to think. He was available so I called him, it turned out he was anxious to do it and I had a very good time with him.
DRE: What was it about this idea that appealed to you?
WA: There are many times where I've had ideas that I felt could be written amusingly or as a serious story then I would always chose one and go in that direction. Here I had an idea that I thought could make a serious story but could also make a funny, romantic story. Then it occurred to me, why don't I alternate the two and see if I can do the picture and maybe learn something from it. Of course I learned nothing from doing it but it was fun to do.
DRE: Do you prefer to write the dramas or the comedies?
WA: It's always fun to write the heavy stuff for me because over the years I've done a lot of movies and almost all of them have been comedies. So it's occasionally fun to do something heavy just for the change. But then when I realized I was going to be working with Will [Ferrell] I went back over the script and started to customize it for him and that became fun.
DRE: How did you customize it for him?
WA: First of all, he's so physically different. He's a big silly person and everyone including me has laughed at him in these broad ridiculous comedies. The question was, could he act and be believable. It turned out; I guess because of his size, his face or whatever talent he has, he's vulnerable. There's something sweet about him so your heart goes out to him. There were things in the script, the actual dialogue, that he couldn't do. Since I'm writing the dialogue, my tendency is to write it for myself even though I knew I'd never be playing it. But I write it instinctively for myself and I had to cut some lines and dialogue out of the thing because he couldn't do it. It never sounded funny when he did it. But there were things he did do that I could never imagine when I was writing it. Before I met him, I never could have imagined it for the script or the contributions he would make sort of built in to his ridiculous persona. The way he moved, there's something in the look of his face, it's intangible, but it's silly and sweet.
DRE: Is there a good example of something you cut?
WA: I can't give you an example of exact lines I cut, but they were one-liner jokes that I do that are easy for me but they dont sound like a joke when he does it. Rather it sounds like dialogue rather than a joke. It comes naturally to me, but it's not so natural to him. I've had that problem before with Diane Keaton. She's someone I used to write these sharp remarks for and she could never do them. She's the funniest person I ever met and always used to steal the picture from me. I always wrote the movie for me and wrote her a secondary role and when the movie came out she was always the funny star and I was always the secondary part. But she couldn't do those kinds of one-liners either for some reason. There are some people who just can do them and Will is not one of them. Will has a different comic gift and its hard to quantify it but its working great for him, not just on my picture but in general.
DRE: How do you cast your actors?
WA: Well it's always a question of who is best for the role. Then you find out that your choices are not available sometimes or they won't work for no money which is what we have. Sometimes you get very expensive actors who couldn't care less about money and they're available so they rush to do it. On this picture, the hard casting was Radha because it was very tough to find somebody who could be very dramatic and handle the light romantic as well. Sometimes when we were filming, she'd have to do it in the same day. She'd come in the morning and have to cry or commit suicide or something and then in the afternoon she had to be light and frothy. I had no idea she existed and then I saw a scene from Phone Booth and she was very good, very attractive and a very convincing actress. Then they sent me some indie films she did and she was very good. I called her and she wanted to do it so I just felt, why not? I've been very lucky in the past with women that I've worked with whether they were known or unknown.
Actors only work with me if they are between desirable jobs. If I call an actor and then Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorsese are calling them, who are fine directors, and offer them very substantial money, they have no interest in me at all. But if they just finished the picture and earned their $10 million salary and have nothing to do until August then I call them in June they say, why not?
DRE: I felt the dramatic portion of the movie felt like it was populated by WASPS and the comedy portion was populated by Jews. Did you feel that way?
WA: [laughs] That's very funny. I don't think of it that way, but I guess people think of comedy with Jews all the time. I'm forever being asked, why are all the comedians Jewish? I always feel that they are not. It's a misconception based on the fact that there were many Jewish comedians that came out of the Catskills. But Bob Hope, Buster Keaton or WC Fields werent Jewish and they were great comedians. Charlie Chaplin was half Jewish, so which half? Peter Sellers was half. So there are some fabulous Jewish comedians, but there are many that are not. I don't think it's a particularly Jewish thing. There was that rush of borscht circuit comedians that came out of that specific milieus. I was raised in a Jewish neighborhood and household so naturally my idiom is where I grew up. I've had this conversation with Spike Lee several times, I could never convincingly write about a black family and I doubt, I don't know but I doubt, if he could write convincingly about a Jewish family.
DRE: How did you decide to cast Chiwetel Ejiofor?
WA: I saw him in that one picture Dirty Pretty Things. I thought he was gorgeous, charismatic, a great actor. I made a phone call, he was available, and I sent the script to him. Then he wanted to do it so it was just my good luck. Daniel Sunjata, the black actor that played in the comic section, was from [the Broadway show] Take Me Out. He was great. I could have used either one for either role really. I saw Chiwetel first and wanted him for that but they were both two wonderful charismatic guys which is what I wanted. I wanted a guy who in one sense would sweep up both women and the other I wanted someone who is really a threat to Will.
DRE: Do you think in terms of color for roles?
WA: No I wasn't. I was thinking there's this party, there's a piano player at the party and he's an American piano player and she doesn't fall for the stiff they try to fix her up with but there's this great, gifted attractive guy at the piano. Once I decided on him then the other story I wanted a black actor as well.
DRE: How was the switch from DreamWorks to Fox Searchlight?
WA: The switch was easy. Dreamworks was great to work with and they only distributed my films. Fox is great and I had a wonderful time with them. To me it was no different because I always work the same way. No one reads the script, they either want to go with me or they don't. My pictures don't cost a lot of money so they're really not risking a tremendous amount. They don't get to say anything about casting or anything at all really.
DRE: You do a movie a year, is that difficult at all?
WA: I finish a movie and then I sit around. I heard Neil Simon say the same thing once, you sit around for a week and what do you do? You go to the Bahamas and go fishing? So I start writing something else and when I finish it, I put it on. It's not rocket science. You write for a few months, you finish a script. You cast it; you shoot it, editing goes very fast with an Avid. So the whole thing is not that big a deal. I finished another picture and I'm preparing to shoot another picture this summer.
DRE: Do you ever miss doing standup?
WA: I miss doing standup but I'm too lazy to do it again. To write an act and be funny for 45 minutes on stage is a huge amount of work. Much more work than a movie. In order to get an hours worth of really funny, potent material, it's a huge amount of work that I don't have the energy or patience to do it. But I do miss it because it's a wonderful medium to work in. I also love watching it so the fact that you can turn on your television set at any time of the day or night and see two or three comics working in perpetuity around the clock is wonderful.
DRE: Would you ever direct something someone else has written?
WA: I've never done that. I've really only directed because I'm a writer and I like to write but I wouldn't rule it out now that I'm getting older. It would be an interesting experience to see what it's like to direct someone else's script. But I've only directed in the past because I wrote the script.
DRE: What is your writing process?
WA: I still lay down on the bed with a yellow pad and write. Invariably I have to type it myself and that takes three days. I was taught to write on a typewriter and I think it would be healthier for me to do it because if you write on your typewriter, you act out the scene and you type it down and you sort of know it works. When you write on a pad, you're hearing it in your head and you don't know that it works when it becomes audible, but it goes so much faster that I've gotten into the bad habit and I've been doing it for years.
DRE: Ive heard so many stories about actors getting fired from your movie sets. What is a fireable offense on your set?
WA: Fireable is only when it turns out to be my casting mistake because the person does no wrong. I hire them and I'm convinced they can do it and then they come in and they don't do it. I try every conceivable way to get them to do it. I talk to them, I explain it, I try and be as lucid as I can and then if that doesn't work sometimes I try and trick them transparently. Sometimes they do it and sometimes they don't. I'm not a skilled director like Elia Kazan or Mike Nichols who can get a performance out of someone who can't act. So after three days of trying to get the person to do the scene, I fire them because I don't know what else to do. I feel we're doomed if we use them and I can't think of what else to do. It's possible that someone will come in and read and they'll be very good at the reading and then for some inexplicable reason they can't do it when the time comes. It doesn't happen a lot but it does happen occasionally. It's a terrible thing.
DRE: Do you like doing these smaller budgeted films or would you like to try and do a $100 million movie?
WA: I wish I had the $100 million. $50, $60 million and $100 million are common now and I'm making films where everything is a maximum of $15 million. Its tough because there's a lot of things I want to do that I can't. When I did this next film that hasn't come out yet, Match Point, they said to me you're not going to be able to afford music. I figured out that by using all opera I was able to connive an opera company to do the music. But there's a lot of things you can't do like any kind of special effects or reshooting things so if I had more money, I'd use it.
DRE: What do you want to do that you havent been able to?
WA: I would like to make some films that are bolder than I've made. I've made romantic films and comic films but I would like to see if I could come up with something that was bolder, more aggressive. I've always been a passive comedian. I've always been a comedian in the mold of Bob Hope. Someone that's victimized, a coward, a failure with women and a loser. I'd love to try a picture where I was a winner just for the fun of it.
DRE: Could you tell me about Match Point?
WA: It's a film shot in England with Scarlett Johansson who is brilliant and Jonathan Rhys-Myers who is also brilliant. I worked in the summer, it was cool in London and the skies are all grey which is great for photography and there are no unions! Thats a wonderful thing, not only financially but because everyone could help out and do the other person's job without infringing. So it's like making a student film in the best sense of the word. The guy who makes lunch can also stop traffic. It'll be at Cannes and probably out later this year.
DRE: If you got a tattoo, what would it say?
WA: Just a simple thing that said "Mother."
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
Check out the official site for Melinda and Melinda
Daniel Robert Epstein: You always work with great cinematographers. I could hardly believe that this was your first time working with Vilmos Zsigmond. Why him and why now?
Woody Allen: What made me choose him, I just worked with Darius Khondji and I was going to work with him again but he was stuck on this tennis movie [Wimbledon]. Anyhow he was not available. So they gave me a list of cinematographers who were available and Vilmos was a guy I had loved through the years but had never even met so I had no idea what to think. He was available so I called him, it turned out he was anxious to do it and I had a very good time with him.
DRE: What was it about this idea that appealed to you?
WA: There are many times where I've had ideas that I felt could be written amusingly or as a serious story then I would always chose one and go in that direction. Here I had an idea that I thought could make a serious story but could also make a funny, romantic story. Then it occurred to me, why don't I alternate the two and see if I can do the picture and maybe learn something from it. Of course I learned nothing from doing it but it was fun to do.
DRE: Do you prefer to write the dramas or the comedies?
WA: It's always fun to write the heavy stuff for me because over the years I've done a lot of movies and almost all of them have been comedies. So it's occasionally fun to do something heavy just for the change. But then when I realized I was going to be working with Will [Ferrell] I went back over the script and started to customize it for him and that became fun.
DRE: How did you customize it for him?
WA: First of all, he's so physically different. He's a big silly person and everyone including me has laughed at him in these broad ridiculous comedies. The question was, could he act and be believable. It turned out; I guess because of his size, his face or whatever talent he has, he's vulnerable. There's something sweet about him so your heart goes out to him. There were things in the script, the actual dialogue, that he couldn't do. Since I'm writing the dialogue, my tendency is to write it for myself even though I knew I'd never be playing it. But I write it instinctively for myself and I had to cut some lines and dialogue out of the thing because he couldn't do it. It never sounded funny when he did it. But there were things he did do that I could never imagine when I was writing it. Before I met him, I never could have imagined it for the script or the contributions he would make sort of built in to his ridiculous persona. The way he moved, there's something in the look of his face, it's intangible, but it's silly and sweet.
DRE: Is there a good example of something you cut?
WA: I can't give you an example of exact lines I cut, but they were one-liner jokes that I do that are easy for me but they dont sound like a joke when he does it. Rather it sounds like dialogue rather than a joke. It comes naturally to me, but it's not so natural to him. I've had that problem before with Diane Keaton. She's someone I used to write these sharp remarks for and she could never do them. She's the funniest person I ever met and always used to steal the picture from me. I always wrote the movie for me and wrote her a secondary role and when the movie came out she was always the funny star and I was always the secondary part. But she couldn't do those kinds of one-liners either for some reason. There are some people who just can do them and Will is not one of them. Will has a different comic gift and its hard to quantify it but its working great for him, not just on my picture but in general.
DRE: How do you cast your actors?
WA: Well it's always a question of who is best for the role. Then you find out that your choices are not available sometimes or they won't work for no money which is what we have. Sometimes you get very expensive actors who couldn't care less about money and they're available so they rush to do it. On this picture, the hard casting was Radha because it was very tough to find somebody who could be very dramatic and handle the light romantic as well. Sometimes when we were filming, she'd have to do it in the same day. She'd come in the morning and have to cry or commit suicide or something and then in the afternoon she had to be light and frothy. I had no idea she existed and then I saw a scene from Phone Booth and she was very good, very attractive and a very convincing actress. Then they sent me some indie films she did and she was very good. I called her and she wanted to do it so I just felt, why not? I've been very lucky in the past with women that I've worked with whether they were known or unknown.
Actors only work with me if they are between desirable jobs. If I call an actor and then Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorsese are calling them, who are fine directors, and offer them very substantial money, they have no interest in me at all. But if they just finished the picture and earned their $10 million salary and have nothing to do until August then I call them in June they say, why not?
DRE: I felt the dramatic portion of the movie felt like it was populated by WASPS and the comedy portion was populated by Jews. Did you feel that way?
WA: [laughs] That's very funny. I don't think of it that way, but I guess people think of comedy with Jews all the time. I'm forever being asked, why are all the comedians Jewish? I always feel that they are not. It's a misconception based on the fact that there were many Jewish comedians that came out of the Catskills. But Bob Hope, Buster Keaton or WC Fields werent Jewish and they were great comedians. Charlie Chaplin was half Jewish, so which half? Peter Sellers was half. So there are some fabulous Jewish comedians, but there are many that are not. I don't think it's a particularly Jewish thing. There was that rush of borscht circuit comedians that came out of that specific milieus. I was raised in a Jewish neighborhood and household so naturally my idiom is where I grew up. I've had this conversation with Spike Lee several times, I could never convincingly write about a black family and I doubt, I don't know but I doubt, if he could write convincingly about a Jewish family.
DRE: How did you decide to cast Chiwetel Ejiofor?
WA: I saw him in that one picture Dirty Pretty Things. I thought he was gorgeous, charismatic, a great actor. I made a phone call, he was available, and I sent the script to him. Then he wanted to do it so it was just my good luck. Daniel Sunjata, the black actor that played in the comic section, was from [the Broadway show] Take Me Out. He was great. I could have used either one for either role really. I saw Chiwetel first and wanted him for that but they were both two wonderful charismatic guys which is what I wanted. I wanted a guy who in one sense would sweep up both women and the other I wanted someone who is really a threat to Will.
DRE: Do you think in terms of color for roles?
WA: No I wasn't. I was thinking there's this party, there's a piano player at the party and he's an American piano player and she doesn't fall for the stiff they try to fix her up with but there's this great, gifted attractive guy at the piano. Once I decided on him then the other story I wanted a black actor as well.
DRE: How was the switch from DreamWorks to Fox Searchlight?
WA: The switch was easy. Dreamworks was great to work with and they only distributed my films. Fox is great and I had a wonderful time with them. To me it was no different because I always work the same way. No one reads the script, they either want to go with me or they don't. My pictures don't cost a lot of money so they're really not risking a tremendous amount. They don't get to say anything about casting or anything at all really.
DRE: You do a movie a year, is that difficult at all?
WA: I finish a movie and then I sit around. I heard Neil Simon say the same thing once, you sit around for a week and what do you do? You go to the Bahamas and go fishing? So I start writing something else and when I finish it, I put it on. It's not rocket science. You write for a few months, you finish a script. You cast it; you shoot it, editing goes very fast with an Avid. So the whole thing is not that big a deal. I finished another picture and I'm preparing to shoot another picture this summer.
DRE: Do you ever miss doing standup?
WA: I miss doing standup but I'm too lazy to do it again. To write an act and be funny for 45 minutes on stage is a huge amount of work. Much more work than a movie. In order to get an hours worth of really funny, potent material, it's a huge amount of work that I don't have the energy or patience to do it. But I do miss it because it's a wonderful medium to work in. I also love watching it so the fact that you can turn on your television set at any time of the day or night and see two or three comics working in perpetuity around the clock is wonderful.
DRE: Would you ever direct something someone else has written?
WA: I've never done that. I've really only directed because I'm a writer and I like to write but I wouldn't rule it out now that I'm getting older. It would be an interesting experience to see what it's like to direct someone else's script. But I've only directed in the past because I wrote the script.
DRE: What is your writing process?
WA: I still lay down on the bed with a yellow pad and write. Invariably I have to type it myself and that takes three days. I was taught to write on a typewriter and I think it would be healthier for me to do it because if you write on your typewriter, you act out the scene and you type it down and you sort of know it works. When you write on a pad, you're hearing it in your head and you don't know that it works when it becomes audible, but it goes so much faster that I've gotten into the bad habit and I've been doing it for years.
DRE: Ive heard so many stories about actors getting fired from your movie sets. What is a fireable offense on your set?
WA: Fireable is only when it turns out to be my casting mistake because the person does no wrong. I hire them and I'm convinced they can do it and then they come in and they don't do it. I try every conceivable way to get them to do it. I talk to them, I explain it, I try and be as lucid as I can and then if that doesn't work sometimes I try and trick them transparently. Sometimes they do it and sometimes they don't. I'm not a skilled director like Elia Kazan or Mike Nichols who can get a performance out of someone who can't act. So after three days of trying to get the person to do the scene, I fire them because I don't know what else to do. I feel we're doomed if we use them and I can't think of what else to do. It's possible that someone will come in and read and they'll be very good at the reading and then for some inexplicable reason they can't do it when the time comes. It doesn't happen a lot but it does happen occasionally. It's a terrible thing.
DRE: Do you like doing these smaller budgeted films or would you like to try and do a $100 million movie?
WA: I wish I had the $100 million. $50, $60 million and $100 million are common now and I'm making films where everything is a maximum of $15 million. Its tough because there's a lot of things I want to do that I can't. When I did this next film that hasn't come out yet, Match Point, they said to me you're not going to be able to afford music. I figured out that by using all opera I was able to connive an opera company to do the music. But there's a lot of things you can't do like any kind of special effects or reshooting things so if I had more money, I'd use it.
DRE: What do you want to do that you havent been able to?
WA: I would like to make some films that are bolder than I've made. I've made romantic films and comic films but I would like to see if I could come up with something that was bolder, more aggressive. I've always been a passive comedian. I've always been a comedian in the mold of Bob Hope. Someone that's victimized, a coward, a failure with women and a loser. I'd love to try a picture where I was a winner just for the fun of it.
DRE: Could you tell me about Match Point?
WA: It's a film shot in England with Scarlett Johansson who is brilliant and Jonathan Rhys-Myers who is also brilliant. I worked in the summer, it was cool in London and the skies are all grey which is great for photography and there are no unions! Thats a wonderful thing, not only financially but because everyone could help out and do the other person's job without infringing. So it's like making a student film in the best sense of the word. The guy who makes lunch can also stop traffic. It'll be at Cannes and probably out later this year.
DRE: If you got a tattoo, what would it say?
WA: Just a simple thing that said "Mother."
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
VIEW 25 of 40 COMMENTS
lit:
amazing.. love him..
totem:
I know this is an almighty thread bump but I have just realised that this is here and I bloody love it.