Brian Hamill

A laughing matter: (Left to right) On the set of "Melinda and Melinda," actors Will Ferrell and Steve Carell with director Woody Allen.

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Years after emigrating to Manhattan, filmmaker Woody Allen still credits his Jewish upbringing in Brooklyn for much of his inspiration and comic sensibility.

"I was raised in a Jewish neighborhood, in a Jewish household, so naturally my idiom is where I grew up," the Flatbush-born Oscar winner told reporters earlier this week. "I’ve had this conversation with [fellow Brooklyn-native filmmaker] Spike Lee, at 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 - certainly not as convincingly as I could - about a Jewish family. Because you live it every moment, so it gets into your nuances."

Co-starring "Saturday Night Live" alum Will Ferrell ("Anchorman"), Chloe Sevigny ("Shattered Glass") and Chiwetel Ejiofor ("Dirty Pretty Things"), Allen’s latest film, "Melinda and Melinda," uses dueling comic and tragic points of view to tell two versions of the same story about a woman ("Man on Fire" starlet Radha Mitchell) trying to make sense of her complicated life.

Told by a journalist that the comic take on the tale seems to him distinctively Jewish, while the tragic version appears to have more WASPish qualities, Allen offered a rare laugh and said, "That’s very funny."

"I don’t think of it that way," he said. "But I guess people think of comedy for Jews all the time. I’m forever being asked why all the comedians are Jewish, and I always feel that they’re not; that this is a misconception based on the fact that there were many Jewish comedians that came out of the Catskills."

Taking a moment to list a number of great non-Jewish comics - among them Bob Hope, Buster Keaton and WC Fields - Allen argued, "I don’t think [comedy] is a particularly Jewish thing."

Acknowledging that his concept for the two-tone tale, "Melinda and Melinda," has been percolating for some time now, Allen said it first occurred to him while he was trying to decide if some of his other stories should fall into the realm of comedy or tragedy.

"There have been many times when I’ve had ideas that would have, I felt, worked either way," confided the former stand-up comedian who has cranked out a film a year for the past few decades and amassed a staggering 20 Oscar nominations.

"The idea could have been written amusingly or as a serious story and, in the past, I’d always chosen one and gone in that direction and here I had an idea and I thought, ’Gee, this could be a serious story, but it could also make a funny and romantic story.’ And then it occurred to me, why don’t I alternate the two and see if I can do the picture and maybe learn something by juxtaposing the two?

"Of course, I learned nothing," the 69-year-old filmmaker deadpanned. "It was fun to do, but not enlightening."

Best-known for writing and directing low-budget, New York-centric comedies like "Annie Hall," "Hannah and Her Sisters" and "Bullets Over Broadway," the Midwood High School and Brooklyn College graduate surprised journalists at the roundtable when he said he savored writing sad stories even more so than funny ones.

"I think it’s fun to write the heavy stuff for me," Allen noted. "Because over the years, I’ve done a lot of movies and almost all of them have been comic, so it’s fun to occasionally do something that is very, very heavy - just for the change. But then when I realized I was going to work with Will, I went back over the script and tried to customize it more for him and that became fun."

Describing Ferrell as "a big, silly person," who can also be quite vulnerable and sweet, Allen explained how he tailored the script to accentuate the "Elf" actor’s gift for broad comedy, while changing some lines because they simply didn’t suit him.

"There were things in the actual dialogue of the script that he couldn’t do," Allen said. "Since I’m writing the dialogue, the tendency is to write it for myself, even though I knew I would never be playing it. But I write it instinctively for myself, and I had to cut some lines and dialogue because he just couldn’t do it. It just never sounded funny when he did it, but there were things that he did do, that I could never imagine when I was writing it."

Clearly happy with Ferrell’s performance, Allen extolled his virtues and emphasized that he didn’t hold the actor’s inability to deliver rapid-fire zingers against him.

"The kind of one-liner jokes that I do and that’s easy for me to do and doesn’t sound like a joke when I do it - it sounds like dialogue, but it’s really a joke - comes naturally for me. It was not so natural for him," Allen related. "I had that problem with, believe it or not, [my frequent leading lady] Diane Keaton. She’s someone who I used to write these sharp remarks for, these one-liners, and she could never do them. She’s the funniest person I’ve ever met and always used to steal the picture from me. I always wrote the movie for me and write her a secondary role and when the movie came out, she was always the funny star and I was always the secondary part and she couldn’t do those one-liners either."

Although Allen was known for working with a stock company of players in the 1970s and ’80s, his more recent films have featured a variety of Hollywood A-listers, mixed in with fresh, new faces. Asked to describe his casting process, the filmmaker shrugged and said he really just considers who’s best for the role, then who is available and then who will work for no money, "which is what we have." The hardest part about casting "Melinda and Melinda," Allen revealed, was finding someone to play the title character.

"The hard casting was Radha. It was very tough to find somebody who could be very dramatic and convincing and handle the light, romantic stuff, as well," Allen said. "Sometimes when we were filming, she had to do it in the same day. She’d come in in the morning and she’d cry and threaten to commit suicide and then in the afternoon, she’d have to be light and frothy, and so it was very hard and I had never heard of her. I didn’t know she existed even, and then I saw a scene from ’Phone Booth,’ the Joel Schumacher film, and I thought she was very good. Very attractive and a very convincing actress."

Further viewing of the Australian actress’ work and a single meeting with the blonde beauty, and Allen knew he had found his Melinda.

Asked if he is amazed by how many Hollywood actors still clamor to be in his movies after all these years, the filmmaker replied with his trademark humility, "I’m not surprised, because they only work with me if they are between desirable jobs.

"If I call an actor or an actress and Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorsese is calling them - they’re fine directors and offering them substantial amounts of money - they have no interest in me at all," he said. "But if they’ve just finished a picture and they’ve earned their $10 million salary and they have nothing to do until August and I call them in June and they like the part, they say, ’Why not?’"

"Melinda and Melinda" opens in some New York City theaters on March 18. The film will play at Cobble Hill Cinemas (265 Court St. at Douglass Street in Cobble Hill) starting March 23. For ticket prices and screening times, call (718) 596-9113 or go visit the Web site www.moviephone.com. Also on March 23, the film opens at BAM Rose Cinemas (30 Lafayette Ave. at Ashland Place in Fort Greene). For tickets and screening times, call (718) 636-4100 or visit www.bam.org.

©2005 The Brooklyn Paper