American director Woody Allen would like to make one more film in New York if he can get the money for it. The four-time Oscar winner and the author of films such as Annie Hall and Vicky Cristina Barcelona said this on Monday at the Venice Film Festival, where he presented his fiftieth project, a romantic thriller called Lucky Strike.
The film Zásah štětsem will be released in Czech cinemas on January 4 next year. | Video: Gravier Productions
Allen he filmed it as his first in French, he worked directly in France with the actors there. In his native US, the artist is in a difficult position because of his adopted daughter Dylan, who first accused him in the 1990s and again a few years ago of sexually harassing her.
The director repeatedly refused and was never even charged, but he lost his contracts with the publishing house and the Amazon studio. He has not been to a major festival since 2016, when he last appeared in Cannes, France, and now he has visited Venice for the first time since 2007. At home, he is currently having trouble getting money for other projects, writes the AFP agency.
For example, some actors distanced themselves from Allen. Scarlett Johansson, Diane Keaton or Emma Stone stand behind him and continue to act in his films, while Colin Firth, Timothée Chalamet or Rebecca Hall renounced him, complements Guardian newspaper.
By a stroke of luck, he therefore produced it in France and cast European actors in the main roles. “I always wished to be born in France or to be a French director. I greatly admired Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, whom I had the honor of meeting and even working with Godard.” mentions Allen in a recent interview for Variety magazine.
According to him, he loves Paris, where the novel takes place. The fact that he was filming in French, which he does not understand, was said to be no problem for him. He does not consider it essential to understand the language for evaluating an actor’s performance. All you have to do is watch the movements of the actors, their expressions and overall their body language, says the director.
Actresses Valérie Lemercier (left) and Lou de Laâge (right) with Woody Allen at the Venice Film Festival. | Photo: Reuters
A stroke of luck is about the collapse of a seemingly perfect marriage. “It’s about the significant role that luck and chance play in our lives,” Allen sums up.
He adds that he has been lucky in his life and that now that he has finished his fiftieth film, he has to think carefully about whether he wants to start another one. Nevertheless, he would probably not resist and would like to artistically return to New York, to which he dedicated several films from Manhattan from 1979 to Rainy Day in New York from 2019. He should have an idea for another one. But he needs to find someone to pay for it. “If there’s some crazy person out there who’ll give me money to do it, even though they can’t read the script and don’t know who I’m going to cast, I’ll shoot the movie in New York,” Allen said at the festival.
He admits that the Paris in his novel is more of a romantic version of the French capital, just as he has depicted the dreamy form of New York many times in the past. “This is how I feel about cities. I fall in love with them the way other directors fell in love with actresses. All these years I’ve been idealizing New York. And mine is very different from the way Martin Scorsese or Spike Lee make it,” he says important fellow directors.
Filming in Paris was difficult for him mainly because of the coronavirus pandemic, he admits. Nevertheless, he considers the biggest change in recent times to be how distribution models have changed with the advent of streaming services.
“There used to be a time when I went to the cinema and there were always three or four films I wanted to see. Every week there was a new Truffaut, Fellini, Bergman or Kurosawa opening. All the great directors were European, you had top French cinema, Italian, Swedish. All of us in America wanted to shoot like Europeans. But today only a minimum of European films are shown in America. I think that culturally, certainly in terms of cinematography, the USA is not quite at the top right now,” says Allen.
At a press conference in Venice, the 87-year-old director also spoke about one of the main themes of his films, death. “There’s nothing we can do against her, she’s really useless. All we can do is not think about her, find a distraction,” he replied.
The film Hit by Luck, in which the actresses Valérie Lemercier and Lou de Laâge act, premiered out of competition at the Venice Film Festival. Bioscop will release it in Czech cinemas on January 4 next year.
