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.
