NYC Round Table Interview
Woody Allen
The difference between a star and a legend.
Intro/Interview/Written by Tony Jenkins
Woody Allen is not particularly attractive, most people want to be friends with him, and I would rather not think of his mouth doing anything but delivering his nervous ramblings. But Woody Allen is not a star, he is a legend. And to be a legend, you have to have talent. You don’t last 35 years in Hollywood by being a hack. Since 1978, Allen has been nominated for 15 Academy Awards for his acting, writing and directing, winning for both screenplay and director in 1978 for Annie Hall, and in 1987 when he took home the Best Screenplay Oscar for Hannah and her Sisters.
While his film, Small Time Crooks, may not be one of his greatest works, there are no signs that the 65-year-old Allen will ever stop. He adopted a child with his wife Soon-Yi, is still in good shape, and more importantly, has inked a long-term deal with DreamWorks SKG, the studio founded by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen, to distribute his upcoming films. The legend continues to grow.
The issue in Small Time Crooks is that money doesn't buy you happiness, is that something you've found to be true?
WA: It buys you a lot. There's one or two barriers it can't get past. But everything else, it's very good. Obviously, you can have all the money in the world, and as my father said, if you don't have your health, you've got nothing. And there's one or two other things that it can't buy, but 80 percent of what you need, you can get with money.
Can you remember the first big thing you bought yourself when you finally got a good chunk of money?
WA: The only thing I ever got – I don't have a country home, or a boat, anything of significance – the only thing I ever wanted was a car and driver, which I got years ago. Because for many years growing up in Manhattan I would find myself in the streets at two o'clock in the morning coming home from an evening out or something, freezing and unable to get a lift and unable to get a taxi, so the one thing I wanted was that. It's an enormous luxury for a New Yorker. Enormous. If I had to give up everything in the world, that would be the last thing. But I've never cared about anything else.
What about the Knicks' tickets?
WA: Yeah, but the Knicks' tickets didn't start as a luxury. What they do is suck you in and up the price slowly every year. Because when I got my Knicks' tickets they were not a lot of money. They were like $75 for a courtside seat, $65 maybe, and that was fine. Mine are now $250 apiece. What happens is they incrementally raise them. Like next year, even though the Knicks may not be better, it will be five dollars more to go. Poor Spike Lee. I believe his tickets are at least a thousand a seat, if not fifteen hundred, and more for the playoffs. So every game that he goes to, he's spending at least two thousand dollars a game if not three thousand. And there are forty-two home games.
Did you ever steal something as a kid?A lot of kids have those stories, where their parents made them put it back.
WA: I have that story. Just once in my life I took a little paper moustache, the kind that you stick on your nose. And I mentioned to my father that I had stolen it and he grabbed me and dragged me back to the store, which was a block-and-a-half away, and made me put it back. That was the only time.
You learned your lesson?
WA Yeah, I never stole anything again. I only stole it because all my peers stole for fun. I didn't need it and I didn't want it.
How old were you?
WA I must have been ten-years-old. What it was, you bought a penny piece of gum and you got the moustache. But I just took the moustache. It was a challenge.
You once said that if you could come back as anything you would come back as Warren Beatty’s fingertips, it seems ironic now that his fingertips are in diapers, so are yours aren’t they?
WA I don’t do diapers. I’m very hands on as a father, you know, I read to the baby and I play with the baby, but I draw the line at diapers. I don’t mind if she throws up on me. Soon-Yi doesn’t like that - it’s a rough one for her. I don’t mind that. But diapers, probably because of my upbringing or something, I just can’t do it. Soon-Yi can do it effortlessly.
How old is the baby now?
WA About 14 months.
How is it to be a father at this age? Is it harder, is it better?
WA It’s exactly the same. It’s not as if I was a father at twenty and now I’m going to be sixty-five, also, I don’t notice a physical difference in my ability to do things. I still get up in the morning and exercise and lift weights, I don’t feel like I’m ninety. It’s effortless. I don’t have any problems from that point of view. And I feel lucky, because I wouldn’t have been able to really support a child at that age and it would have been a factor. I would have had to go on the road as a comedian. Now I don’t have to. Now I can afford to have the child without the pressures.
It’s a trend in Hollywood that all these guys that are older are having babies. Beatty, Nicholson.
WA There’s no reason why not. I mean, I don’t see any reason not to have a child. It has nothing to do with one’s age it has to do with ones physical ability and financial ability to raise the child. I’m more fit to have a child now then when I was twenty. Physically I’m fine. My father will be a hundred this year, my mother’s ninety-four. I’m in good health. Why shouldn’t I have a child? I can roll around on the floor with her and match her in stamina effortlessly, so why not?
One day when she starts dating, are you going to be tough on these young guys that come in?
WA I’m liberal that way. I remember my experiences going before fathers, and they had real moustaches. They would look at me and say, ‘young man, would you like a cigarette?’ testing me to see if I smoked at fourteen or something. But you hope that you get lucky. You raise a child and you hope that she’s not going to come back and say, ‘I did a thing in my journalism class on Charles Manson and we’ve fallen in love, I’m going to marry him.’
You went a long time between marriages. Was it good that you didn’t do it sooner again?
WA It’s just a question of the right person. I got married the first time when I was very young. I was nineteen, my wife was seventeen, and we both wanted to get into the world. And we did and she was a wonderful women. Very talented. A pianist, a philosopher, and she was terrific and we had a very good marriage, but we mutually went in different directions. Then I married Louise, who I was crazy about and am to this day, we’re still very good friends. I had no real interest in getting married, particularly, and then Soon-Yi and I started going out and it seemed liked the right thing to do, and it was the right thing to do. We’ve been very, very happy. We have a child and a house and it was very pleasant.
And you moved from your apartment.
WA Yeah, that I feel a little bit bad about. I moved into a house. Let me put it to you this way, I was petrified of moving into a house. I felt that in a co-op I was protected by the doorman and the building, and I thought in a house anyone could get in and bludgeon me to death in my bed at night. After a month in the house I wish someone would come in and bludgeon me to death. It would be a relief. It’s so difficult to do a house.
Looking back on your career, it’s so amazing, everyone is clamoring to work with you, you have total creative control. Have you ever just sat back and thought to yourself, I am just incredibly lucky?
WA I say that all the time. I always say that I’ve been incredibly lucky and that people have a tendency to underplay the roll of luck in life and I feel that people underplay that because they’re so scared to lose control. I don’t feel that. I feel that I’ve been completely lucky. That if I didn’t have a talent to amuse people, I would have scuffled to have some kind of job, I don’t know what. I would have done the best I could. Instead, do to some quirk of nature, I was able to make jokes and be amusing. I’ve led a very, very privileged life and out of pure luck. I’m the first one to say it. I feel personally that, in a number of ways, I really haven’t lived up to the luck that I’ve had. I’ve tried my best to, but I wish I had achieved better things then I’ve done. But I’m totally cognizant of the fact that I’ve just been completely lucky.
What amuses you these days?
WA I liked Wonder Boys. I liked Magnolia. I’m not saying these are perfect films, every film has it's audience or not. But personally, those are films that I enjoyed. I thought that they were not factory-made films. They were not aimed to pander to any special market. East West is wonderful.
Edward Norton has said one of the things he admires about you is that you embrace your influences rather that try to depart from them. Do you feel that?
WA I do. To this day, I still have my idols in photographs on the wall. Martha Graham used to say, ‘if you’re going to steal, steal from the best,’ and I have always embraced the people that I have idolized and tried to incorporate what I’ve enjoyed in their films and in their styles in mine.
Think about how many walls your picture must be on.
WA I don’t know. I was in conversation with Martin Scorcese some time ago and I was pointing out that, in my opinion, I-- and I’m not saying this pejoratively-- I have influenced nobody, whereas Marty, every time I go to a movie, I see his influence. Correctly so, because he’s a brilliant director. I’ve seen Altman’s influence; Coppola’s influence. But mine, I don’t really see. There are certain people in every field that do not influence. They can do perfectly good work, I’m not denigrating my work. Like in jazz, for example, Charlie Parker was a monstrous influence everywhere, but Thelonious Monk, who is a definite genius, has no real heritage. Practically nobody was influenced by him. I feel that I’ve influenced nobody. I would be very surprised if my picture was up on someone’s wall. It may be, but I just would be surprised.
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New York Entertainment
Interview
As he told us in his recent New York cover story, Woody Allen wrote the script for Whatever Works in the seventies, with Zero Mostel in mind for the lead, and shelved it after Mostel's death in 1977; last year, he dusted it off in order to finish a movie before the threatened actors' strike. Allen updated its references, but not its main character, Boris Yellnikoff, a bitter, suicidal, genius physicist (played by Larry David) who houses, and eventually begins a romantic relationship with, a dimwitted Southern runaway (Evan Rachel Wood). Last week, Allen and Davis answered reporters' questions at the Regency Hotel. A few highlights, after the jump.
On playing the "Woody Allen role":
David: I know it’s the part that people normally would see him play, but I never considered that I would play him. And nor would he want me to play him. There was only one moment in the movie, I remember I was having trouble with a line, and I said, come on, how do you want me to do it? Just do it, and I’ll do it like you. And so he went, you know, “the Western world … ” And so I did that, the next take, but he didn’t use that one.
Allen: I have to interject. This is not a part that I could have played even if I was younger. Larry is able to do this kind of sardonic, you know, sarcastic, vitriolic, humor, and get away with it. Cause there’s something obviously built into him that audiences like. You know, Groucho Marx had this. They were never offended by Groucho, they were offended if he didn’t insult them, he told me once.
On awards:
Allen: People have always asked me over the years about performances in my movies, and they think I’m being facetious when I say this, but I’m not: I hire great people and I get out of their way. I try not to talk to them as much as possible. They’re not getting that Oscar because I sat them in a room and drilled their character into them and tricked them. Penélope Cruz was great in the Almodóvar film before my film, and Michael Caine was sensational — actually Michael Caine deserved the Academy Award for Educating Rita, the film he did before my film. He didn’t deserve it necessarily for [Hannah and Her Sisters]. And I think they were paying him off.
On accents:
Allen: I didn’t know [Evan Rachel Wood] could do a Southern accent. She said yes, I can do one, but she didn’t want to show me. I heard the accent she was doing [for the first time] when we shot her. There was no rehearsal, I never heard it in conversation. And Ed Begley Jr. didn’t even know that he was supposed to be doing a Southern accent. We were on the set, and I told him, and he was surprised. I got panicky for a moment. Then he said, "Oh okay," and he made some kind of little mental adjustment, and then he was just great.
On dealing with panic attacks:
Allen: You turn on something on television, with me it would probably be a ball game, something that’s calming, there’s no sense of conflict. If I was to turn on a movie, I would be full of self-loathing: I make these movies, and there are so many great ones, and I couldn’t do that.
David: I generally stay with the panic. I embrace the panic. I know there’s no getting out of it, even if I turned on a ballgame. It wouldn’t make any difference to me – I would still hear that sick, psychotic voice going crazy in my head. And there’s nothing I could do.
Allen: It's perfect casting.
On screenplay input:
David: I tried to convince [Woody] at some point before we started shooting that he should change the character’s occupation to a former grandmaster. I didn’t want to be a physicist because I thought I wouldn’t be able to improvise because the character is so much smarter than I. I thought I would be able to improvise a chess champion, yes.
On life in general:
Allen: Life is quite terrible — this is fiction, it can be read as misanthropic, it can be interpreted that way. I think it’s simply realistic. The real world is as horrible, or actually, much more horrible, than the world that Boris envisions. He has compassion, he feels bad about this. But you can’t pick up the paper in the morning without a carload of atrocities — young women are thrown in prison in Korea, some guy enters the Holocaust museum and kills the guard. This is the average stuff we live on every morning. In a sense, the movie is almost mild compared to the ugly brutality that’s just a part of your morning Cornflakes.
On real funny:
Allen: The ones that aren’t authentically funny, you know. Your body knows. You may not be able to articulate it. You may laugh at them and get a certain amount of enjoyment, but when you go to sleep at night, and you wake up at three in the morning, and you’re alone in your bed, you know who’s really funny.
On adapting his movies for Broadway:
Allen: I myself would have no interest in that whatsoever. None. Producers call all the time. They wanted to make Bullets Over Broadway into a musical, and Purple Rose of Cairo into a musical. And they do propose these things. And I don’t care. If they want to, and they made some deal, they can. I have no interest in writing it, seeing it, knowing about it. What would probably happen is they take the rights, and they make it into a musical, and it would be a terrible musical, and everyone would be angry at me.
On New York memories:
David: Well, I grew up in Brooklyn, and then I lived in Hell’s Kitchen from the time that I got out of college until I moved to L.A. in my early forties. I remember very distinctly the smell of urine as I left my front door. I remember having to take my shoe off before I came into my apartment to kill the thousands of roaches that were in my bathtub. I have very fond memories of this. Shall I go on?
Allen: My memories of New York are unrealistic. The New York that I grew up loving was, ironically enough, the New York of Hollywood parties, where people lived in penthouses with white telephones and came home at five in the morning … people popping champagne corks and making witty banter and elevators that open into your apartment directly. I never knew New York as it really existed. For that, you have to speak to Spike Lee or Martin Scorsese.
On improving as a director:
Allen: Well, marginally, I’ve gotten better. Every time you make a movie — I’ve now made about 40 movies — every time you make it is a new and different experience. You learn very little from the past. I’m better than when I made Take the Money and Run, but not much better than when I made Annie Hall. I’ve learned very little after that.
On the temperature of the room:
Allen: It’s freezing.
David: Woody’s chilled. Somebody get Woody a jacket.
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The Village Voice
New York Blog
Interview: Woody Allen on Whatever Works, The Meaning of Life (or Lack Thereof), and the Allure of Younger Women
The new Woody Allen film, Whatever Works -- his 40th for those keeping count -- signals a return for the filmmaker in more ways than one. For starters, it is his first film to shoot on location in New York since Melinda and Melinda in 2004, interrupting a half-decade European vacation during which the 73-year-old Allen has directed three films in London and one in Spain. It also marks the realization of a project he first conceived in the 1970s as a vehicle for Zero Mostel, then set aside following the actor's untimely death. The result is a light comic burlesque -- a minor key but eminently pleasurable Allen confection -- starring Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm mastermind Larry David as Boris Yellnikoff, an atheistic, egotistical, misanthropic physics professor whose contempt for the entire human race is lessened by his chance meeting with the ditzy Southern belle (Evan Rachel Wood) he finds squatting underneath his backstairs. Allen is running late on the sunny May afternoon, when I show up at his Upper East Side editing room, tucked away inconspicuously behind a door labeled "Manhattan Film Center" on the ground floor of an otherwise residential building. It's here that Allen cuts all his films, screens them (and others) in a soundproof, green velour screening room, auditions actors for his upcoming projects (and there is always an upcoming project), and otherwise holds court. On the two previous occasions I have come here to interview him, the results have never been less than surprising, Allen holding forth with unexpected candor and ease about his films and about the cosmic matters that weigh heavy on his soul. And today is no exception, as Allen enters in his signature attire of pastel button-down, khaki trousers and well-worn brown lace-ups, apologizes for his lateness, and proceeds to talk at length about the meaning of life (or lack thereof), the trouble with actors, and the allure of younger women.
The title Whatever Works suggests a philosophy of life but also a work ethic. In other words, if you make a film a year, as you do, you can't afford to sit around waiting for the muses to descend.
WA I've never been someone who's waited for the muses, because my background is in television. When I came up, we used to write shows, and if you were writing for Gary Moore or Sid Caesar -- whoever it was -- you had to have a show. It was live. When you came in on a Monday morning, you had to think of something. You couldn't wait for inspiration; you just had to do it. So I got used to that, and I can do it to this day. I can go into a room and -- it doesn't always come out good -- but I can produce something. I do think it's an ethic. It keeps you out of mischief. If you work, it keeps you distracted. It keeps you from thinking about yourself too much, about how terrible you are, about how great you are. It's certainly humbling. I've often used this comparison: With mental patients in an institution, they give them basket weaving, finger painting and things like that to do, because the very act of working with your hands is healthful and therapeutic. It's the same thing with making a film, which is a handmade product. You have to write it, you have to go out and shoot it, then we come here and we put the film together and put the music in. For a period of time, you get two rewards: You get the reward of distraction -- you don't think about the outside world, and you're faced with solvable problems, and if they're not solvable, you don't die because of it. And then, if it's the right film, you get to live in a fake reality for a number of months. So if I'm making a picture like The Purple Rose of Cairo or Bullets Over Broadway or Everyone Says I Love You, for several months, I get to live with very beautiful women and very witty men and they have costumes, and the sets are beautiful. It's a very pleasant way to waste your life.
It's funny that you mention those three films in particular because, like them, Whatever Works seems like a fantasy. The characters and the story all have a heightened, exaggerated feel.
WA Right, it's a cartoon tale. The mother, the father -- everyone in the movie is cartoon like.
I was also reminded of two of your more recent films, Match Point and Cassandra's Dream, both of which also concern luck, chance and the randomness of life, even though Whatever Works is actually a script you wrote more than 30 years ago. When we spoke at the time of the release of Match Point, you said, "You're always searching for control, and in the end, you're at the mercy of the hoisted piano not falling on your head." And here there is a scene in which a person falls from a window onto another person's head!
WA The same obsessions I had when I first started, I have now. I've been in psychoanalysis, I've been successful, I've had ups, I've had downs. I've had some hit movies, movies that failed. But with everything that's happened to me, all of my experiences, I've never been able to solve the real problems of life that have plagued every playwright since Euripides and Aristophanes. No progress has been made on the existential themes and the subject of interpersonal relations, which are still brutal and painful and fragile and very hard to make work, and which cause everybody an enormous amount of suffering and grief. Why are we here? What is the point of it all? Take Camus' question [in The Myth of Sisyphus] of whether or not to commit suicide. Now, even the most grim people come to rationalizations where, in Camus' case, he feels that pushing the rock up the hill, the doing of it, is worth it and you don't have to succeed. But I feel -- in answer to the question of why should we not kill ourselves given a meaningless, godless existence -- that it's a pre-intellectual question, and that your body answers it for you. Your mind will never be able to give you a convincing justification for living your life, because from a logical point of view, if your life is indeed meaningless -- which it is -- and there's nothing out there, what is the point of it? Well, the point of it is only that you're too scared to terminate it because you're hard-wired, it's in your blood, to live and to want to live and to want to protect yourself. So, while I'm home babbling about how meaningless life is and how cruel and brutal and without any purpose, if there's a fire in my house, I'll go to extreme measures to save my life. And then when I've saved my life, I'll say to myself, "Why did you bother to do that?"
Even by the standards of some of the antisocial, unlikable characters you've written in the past, including the ones you yourself played in Anything Else and Deconstructing Harry, Boris seems a step beyond.
WA You know, at one point I was going to call this film, when I first wrote it for Zero, The Worst Man in the World. I thought it would be a funny character -- a guy who is the quintessence of misanthropy and who can't fit in, doesn't want to fit in, rejects everything, just isn't someone who can deal with life or wants to deal with it. He doesn't accept it: He finds the fact that he's mortal to be unacceptable. He cannot agree to the rules of life. The characters I've played in those other movies were certainly in that direction but not as extreme as I wanted to make the character of Boris.
Did you, at any point in the past three decades, consider playing the role yourself?
WA No, because when I thought of it for Zero, I thought of it as a part for a fat man. I thought of him as a big, aggressive physicist, a Russian chess genius who had no time for "microbes" and "earthworms." And I can't do that. My source of comedy is more victim -- I find myself frightened when I hear the noise in the other room, that sort of thing. This guy was grandiose. It was hard to think of people who could play him now, and then [casting director] Juliet Taylor mentioned Larry, whom I had worked with very briefly before and whom I knew from Curb Your Enthusiasm. But it seemed to me that he could do it, because on his television show he's very authentic. He's not an overacter or a fake posturer. Of course, he told me up and down the line how he couldn't do it, how he's not an actor and this and that, and then I knew he'd be great. Because it's the ones like Diane Keaton, who tell you how bad they are, who always come through. It's the ones who tell you how great they are who never come through. People who can act are naturals. Over the years, I've met and worked with people who studied all over the place, and if they had natural talent, it was great. If they didn't, the fact that they had studied didn't mean anything. I've gotten guys off the street -- literally off the street -- who come in here and, when they speak, they're un-self-conscious and authentic. Whereas, with a lot of professional actors, they come in to meet for a part and we'll be chatting like we're chatting now, and they're just fine. Then, they read the part and they go into their acting mode, and everything about them suddenly becomes inauthentic. They feel they have to do something to the material or they're not justifying their paycheck. So they start acting it, and you don't want them to act it; you want them to just say it. If they're supposed to be a salesman, you want them to be a salesman like you'd experience a salesman. But they don't. They start playing a salesman.
The real revelation in the film, I think, is Evan Rachel Wood, who has been very strong in a number of movies but who hasn't had an opportunity to play this sort of 1930s screwball ingenue.
WA I had never heard of her, and my wife said you should look at this girl Evan Rachel Wood, because I saw her in one or two movies and she's just great. Then a few days after that, [production designer] Santo Loquasto was talking to me and he said the exact same thing. So I checked her out and saw that she was a remarkable actress -- complicated and dark, really exceptional. I didn't know if she could do comedy or not. I thought she could, and she agreed to do it, so I assumed she wouldn't agree to do it if she didn't think she could. And so she did it and she was incredibly good. I said to her, "It's a Southern girl, you're going to have to do a Southern accent," and she wouldn't do it for me, wouldn't show me her Southern accent until we shot. Now, I can empathize with that. It's risky, because if she couldn't do it, I would have been in very serious trouble. But she did it, and she just did it great. On the other hand, Ed Begley Jr. [who plays Wood's father] had no idea he was going to be required to do a Southern accent. He came to New York, got into costume, came to the set. The first shot we shot in the movie was with him, and he had no idea. I said, "You know you're going to have to play this with a Southern accent. You do do a Southern accent, right?" He said, "Well, I think I can." I said, "Okay, because I assumed you knew that when you read it." But he didn't, and he just simply did it. So much for all this meticulous preparing.
So much for The Method.
WA I was with a Japanese lady yesterday, who was in town doing interviews because Vicky Cristina Barcelona is opening in Japan. She asked me what pictures I've liked [recently] and I mentioned Rachel Getting Married, which was a picture I liked very much. She said she had interviewed Jonathan Demme and he had said it was the first time he shot a picture without rehearsals, and of course everyone in it was great and it was a wonderful picture. I, on the other hand, have never done rehearsals. I just don't think they're necessary. And yet, there are directors -- great directors, like Ingmar Bergman -- who would rehearse and rehearse. I wouldn't know what to do at a rehearsal. When I was in Paul Mazursky's Scenes From a Mall, he did extensive rehearsing, and he's a wonderful guy and a wonderful director, but I thought it was nuts at the time. I thought, "How do you have the patience for this?" But that's how he works. I just never put a minute's thought into it beforehand, to the point where an actor will come to the set not even knowing he's got to do a Southern accent. And yes, I could have been very traumatized if he had said, "Oh, I can't do a Southern accent. I just can't do one. If you need British, fine, but I can't do Southern." So I've been lucky that way, that I haven't run into a catastrophe. It's the same thing if there's a scene with a lot of physical action. I work it out with the cameraman and bring in the actor with no rehearsal and say, "Start over here and go over there and pick up a cigarette and then come over here," and 99 percent of the time that's exactly what they do and it looks fine. Once in a great while, someone will say, "I don't know what I'm doing over there. I'd feel better walking over to the window." And I always say, "So, walk to the window."
The film suggests that Boris is redeemed, humanized in a way by his encounter with this much younger woman, and you yourself have said that you've found a happiness with your wife, Soon-Yi, that you never imagined you would find with a younger Korean woman who has no connection to the film industry.
WA In fiction, that was even a theme as far back as Manhattan, that in this presumably more innocent, younger person -- before they get spoiled by the world -- that one can find a certain happiness. Mine was very good luck, personally, that way, but that has always been an idea of mine going back quite far. Even Annie Hall, when you think of it, was kind of a naive girl from Chippewa Falls, who was young and came to New York and knew nothing and was a real hick, a rube, with all her colloquial expressions but with the thought that she would become a mature woman. At that time, she represented for me the same kind of freshness.
When we spoke last year, you were just about to come to Los Angeles to direct your first opera, Puccini's Gianni Schicchi, and you joked that you were going to skip town quickly before anyone had the chance to tar and feather you for it.
WA It turned out in the end to be quite a pleasant experience, because I was surrounded by gifted people. The cast was wonderful; I didn't cast them, they gave me the cast. The conductor was wonderful. It was just a pleasure. And, of course, I was working with a piece of material that's great. It was the first time I directed anything that wasn't mine, and so I could devote myself strictly to directing. I didn't have to write and constantly patch up bad writing. This is what I'm doing all the time in my own films. They're always an original script, and they're all full of mistakes. It's not like it's a Broadway show, where I take it out of town and iron the kinks out. With a movie, this is it, so I'm rewriting all the time and fixing and helping and adjusting. Here, Puccini has a little masterpiece both musically and in terms of the story, so all I had to do was mount it. Now, it's a short opera, and I don't think I could do Aida with the elephants.
Is there anything you can say about the film you are preparing to shoot this summer, other than that it takes place in London again and stars Naomi Watts?
WA You know the full cast, right? Anthony Hopkins, Freida Pinto, Josh Brolin, Antonio Banderas. The cast is great. It's a comedy-drama, I can tell you that. It's a comic film but comic in the way that either Vicky Cristina or Hannah and Her Sisters was. It's not comic like Bananas. This is real, with a serious side to it but hopefully a reasonable amount of laughs. Hopefully.
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