This is an English blog about the shooting of a film by Woody Allen in Barcelona.
It is thought for everybody who wants to improve their level of English. People
who only speak English are also welcome!
(Javier Bardem, Penélope Cruz, Scarlett Johansson, No idea, Rebecca Hill)
(Patricia Clarkson, Chris Messina, Lloll Bertran, Abel Folk, Joel Joan, Jaume Montané)
(the Basque photographer, Javier Aguirresarobe)
(Joan Pera, the Spanish and Catalan dubber will play dumb ...)
Comentarios
Dear Visitor
In February 2007 I opened a new site called WOODYALLEN.TK.
There I open a geocities blog where I began to write about any thing I knew about the new film that Woody Allen will shoot in Barcelona.
In that blog I wrote in English, Catalan and Spanish.
Soon I open other blogs, one in Spanish and another in Catalan.
The truth is that I have ended exhausted with so many blogs.
At the same time there were more visits so I found that although WOODYALLEN.TK was a very easy to remember domain it was too quite slow.
So I took one domain I had, ELJU.EU, and redirected it to the same content.
For Catalan people ELJU.EU is quite easy to remember because EL JUEU means THE JEW so it is a
nice name for the most famous living jew I can imagine!
I like to watch movies in the original version and I like English and everybody knows that the level of English in my country is quite poor so finally I have decided to create this new blog
that I called the INTERNATIONAL BLOG of ELJU.EU
because it is meant for the people from Barcelona and abroad.
I find quite good to improve our English thanks to the visit of Woody Allen to our city.
So from now on I will write mostly here.
On the right you will see some links to pages from ELJU.EU.
These last months I wrote a bibliography and now I have created a little page with some photos of the actors and actresses.
As you will see, the pages are quite amateur and in fact I create them for myself.
But I also like to share them.
So I encourage people from around the world to improve their English through this forum.
And for those who do not need to improve their English they always will have content related to the new film by Woody Allen in Barcelona.
to be continued ...
Cultivating Catalonia could be a good way to improve our English ...
It is the title of an article in variety.com
I have found a website, www.rolsl.com, where you can send a photo and your data in order to join the new project of Woody Allen this summer 2007.
I have already done. Be aware you need NUMERO AFILIACION SEGURIDAD SOCIAL. Let's wait and see ...
Two musicians, Eddy Davis and Conal Fowkes, will play in Casa Fuster while Woody Allen shoots in Barcelona. They will be in Casa Fuster from June 19th to August 18th. They will play in the Café Vienés of Casa Fuster. Both belong to the New Orleans Jazz Band, the band of Woody Allen. Casa Fuster was built by Domènech i Montaner in the Modernist style at the end of Passeig de Gràcia.
June 11th 2007 has been the date chosen by Woody Allen and his family (Soon Yi and his two daughters) to land in Barcelona. Once in Barcelona Woody Allen went to the spectacular Torre Agbar ( www.agbartower.com is an unofficial site) where the producers, Mediapro, have an office. In fact her sister, Letty Konigsberg, as a producer, arrived some weeks earlier in Barcelona.
His chosen hotel has been this time the beautiful Hotel Arts situated in one edge of la Barceloneta so next to the sea.
He said that today he would visit places of Barcelona to know better where to shoot.
His arrival to Barcelona made him the front page of El Periódico, Diario ADN, etc.
About the script we know that Scarlett Johansson will be a tourist who comes to Barcelona as a tourist and falls in love with Javier Bardem who lives in barcelona. It will be a comedy it seems.
In local newspapers websites you can see photos of Woody Allen next to Abgar Tower. He does not dress as a typical tourist because he does not wear short jeans. Only the baseball hut makes him look as a tourist. For my taste a baseball hut does not match well with classical clothes but I know this is not a universal idea.
THANKS, MR. WOODY ALLEN FOR HAVING CHOSEN BARCELONA! CHEERS!
As nobody else writes here I do not know if someone is reading what I write here in English.
Besides improving my English I think this blog in English is a good idea as most information about the stay of Woody Allen in Barcelona is not written in English.
So as I said before Woody Allen arrived on Tuesday. On Wednesday he moved through Barcelona.
He went to Sagrada Familia, He went to Colombus monument. He went to Barceloneta, to the beaches. He also was in Montcada street. It seems that basque photographer, Javier Aguirresarobe joined the director.
I went to flickr.com and I put as keywords WOODY ALLEN BARCELONA and I saw photos of the arrival of Woody Allen's family to Barcelona.
It also seems that in Saló de Cent, in Townhall, there will be a talk about the film but I do not know the day. In some hours he will revceive Doctor Honoris Causa as I mentioned some days ago ...
I also have read about some of the shops that may appear: CHANNEL and ADOLFO DOMINGUEZ in Passeig de Gràcia. These shops have been preselected!
If I had to choose I would have chosen maybe MOSELLA, a
shop in La Pedrera of Gaudí. After all, I know them ...
I forgot to tell that Woody Allen also went to Maremagnum and Club Nàutic. In www.bcn.cat , the website of our townhall, you can see photos of Woody Allen in Caixaforum too with an sculpure of Mitoraj at the background.
Woody Allen is much more than a great film director: he is a monster of our times. You just have to go to google news and put the words WOODY ALLEN and you will see a lot of news where WOODY ALLEN is mentioned again and again in any writing! People around the world use quotations or films by Woody Allen at any time!
Now in the US there is a new publication by Woody Allen called MERE ANARCHY. Mere Anarchy is a collection of essays as well as literary parodies.
By the way, on June 18, the Asturian village of Aviles will host the world preview of Cassandra's Dream.
As I said before this may be one of the first websites where you can get fresh content in English of what is going on with the new film of Woody Allen in this part of Europe. Each day I try to get as much information as I can and I write here in English. Unfortunately it seems that almost nobody is reading this international blog.
Anyway, as you may know Woody Allen went to Asturias this Monday and there was there the première of Cassandra's Dream. In Spain the media knew that for some days. International media talk about it as a secret première. I think they refer to the fact that people who
saw the film have to keep the content for themselves. But some may understand that the
playing of the film was a secret and this was not the case!
Unfortunately I have discovred that news change a lot according to the language and I find that quite bad! Spanish Google Noticias and English Google News are very different!
Let me continue. Woody Allen has been in Asturias looking for places to shoot. Unfortunately I have never been in Asturias even if it is not so far from Barcelona: both places are in the Iberian peninsula, one in the Mediterranean and the other in the Cantabrico in the Atlantic ocean.
So here I will tell you places he visited. Maybe the best would be to go to flickr.com to see these places. I may do that and put then links to the photos. I would do in a page of elju.eu
The places visited are or were the following:
Real Balneario de Salinas,
Around faro (lighthouse) de San Juan,
Hotel Palacio de Ferrera ,
around iglesia de San Nicolás,
jardín francés del parque de Ferrera
(French garden of Ferrera Park)
calle San Francisco
plaza de Domingo Álvarez Acebal,
Casa de Cultura (where Cassandra's dream was screened) in Avilés
calle de Galiana
Casa Tataguyo (he had supper)
And in Oviedo:
Hotel de la Reconquista
plaza de la catedral and around
iglesia de San Isidoro
El Fontán
Corrada del Obispo
Santa Maria del Naranco (spanish prerromanic)
top of mountain Naranco.
About the title of the film he said that MIDNIGHT IN BARCELONA was the title at first but that it may not be the final title.
Now MidnightinBarcelona.Com redirects to ELJU.EU
I have realised that www.matchpoint.com and www.cassandrasdream.com have no connection with Woody Allen.
In any case, Woody Allen has the last word. If he wishes Midnightin Barcelona.com can be for him, only for him, for free ... It would be such a pleasure!
As you may know this is the international blog of ELJU.EU, WOODYALLEN.TK, MIDNIGHTINBARCELONA.COM, WOODY.TK, FILMO.TK, ETC
I have been watching domains with names of Woody Allen's last films and they have no connection at all with the films by Woody Allen. I think that Woody Allen does not care about this things.
Nevertheless, if one day he cares, I would be the first to redirect www.midnightinbarcelona to whereever he wishes ...
Meanwhile I just have read in The Guardian that MIDNIGHT IN BARCELONA may be or may not be the title of the new film. ( film.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,2106536,00.html )
You can read there that Midnight in Barcelona will be the first of two films shot in Spain. TWO FILMS ...???????
On the other hand I also have read that Woody Allen in going to enter the Opera world
with the hand of Plácido Domingo in the Opera of Los Angeles ...
These last days I have been watching images from Asturias. I had never been there.
So let me summarize what I know:
Asturias is located in the north of Spain.
If you go to Wikipedia you will see that the Asturiano language also exists although I do not know if a lot of people speak it.
The cities of Oviedo, Gijón and Avilés are quite close.
On the coast Avilés and Gijón and inside Oviedo.
A friend of mine told me that the landscape is very beautiful. From the sea you can see enormous high mountains nearby (Picos de Europa ? )
Above I told you some places that Woody Allen had visited in Oviedo, the capital of Asturias, and Avilés.
In Avilés the church of San Nicolás looked to me gourgeous!
In Oviedo I saw some images of Hotel La Reconquista and I found it so impressive. I will try to put photos in ELJU.EU.
I also was very impressed by Santa Maria del Naranco. This prerromanic building seems to me a perfect place for a romantic shooting.
In the photos it has a kind of surrealism.
(Now I realise that Woody Allen loves Gaudi but I do not know what he thinks about Salvador Dali, Port Lligat, Cadaques, ...)
I feel quite sad about the international media. With Internet you may think that anyone anywhere can know anything.
But this is not the case ...
Let me explain ...
Some days ago Avilés was lucky enough to watch a première of Cassandra's Dream.
This was known by Spanish press before the
day of the première. No problem until now ...
Then you go to the press in English and I feel astonished!:
FIRST: They write about what happened in Avilés after it happened! (International newspapers do not have people who can read Spanish press, it seems ...)
SECOND: They write about what happened in Avilés as a SECRET screening?
Why secret? Because they did not know about it? I prefer to think they use the word SECRET in the sense that people who watched the film should not disclose the content.
THIRD: Newspapers as THE INDEPENDENT and othe newspapers do not know why Woody Allen
screened the film in Avilés!!!!!
I feel ashamed! Woody Allen is one of the most important film directors of all times and the media in English do not know why
Woody Allen screens in Avilés!
If you read their articles it seems as if
Woody Allen was a foul and screened in Avilés
because he is a madman!
Come on!
I doubt the English media reads this but let me tell them what they do not know (and they get paid to be journalists ...)
In Avilés there is the Niemeyer Foundation!!!
Woody Allen is connected with this foundation!!!
He is very interested in this foundation.
So by screening the film there he wants to promote Avilés because in this way he promotes the foundation in honour of Niemeyer
(the architect who built some of the masterpieces in Brasilia, Brazil)
On the other hand Avilés is a nice village.
And it is very close to Oviedo.
In Oviedo Woody Allen received an award, the Principe de Asturias.
From that time it seems that he fell in love with the city.
And I may imagine he is very happy that Oviedo has an statue of him!!! (how many statues of Woody Allen can you find in New York, London or Venice ...?
I hope that now the international press understand better why Woody Allen screened Cassandra's dream in Avilés ...
(Besides he is going to shoot also in Oviedo and Avilés besides Barcelona for his new film ...
The article in The Independent where it is unknwon why Woody Allen chose Avilés
(They do not mention the Foundation Niemeyer!):
news.independent.co.uk/europe/article2692511.ece
The Independent is not alone ...:
www.pr-inside.com/allen-sneak-previews-new-film-r161160.htm
Here somebody complains in Spanish about the organisation of the screening in Avilés:
www.asturiasopinion.com/article.php?id=1144
So, maybe, the international press did not know about the Niemeyer Foundation because
the organisation of the event was quite bad?
It seems that Josep Maria Domènech could also act in the new film. Maybe you know him from Balseros.
-----------------------------------------
James Conlon, conductor of the Cincinnati May Festival, will conduct Woody Allen's first foray into opera, when the three-time Oscar-winner makes his opera directing debut in Puccini's "Gianni Schicchi" in Los Angeles in September 2008.
SOURCE:news.enquirer.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070626/LIFE/306260009/1079
Some weeks ago Woody Allen published PURE ANARCHY. This September, thanks to TUSQUETS, there is an edition in Spanish: PURA ANARQUÍA
Yesterday Woody Allen played with his jazz band in Casa Fuster, Barcelona. I just have read this in El Periódico. So now we must wait some days so that this news is translated into English and you can get this information in English in the main press. It is crazy that things go like that.
Fortunately some people can know things faster in this blog ....
Strange as it may seem this blog doesn't seem to receive much attention even if it is one of the first places where you can find fresh information translated into English about the new Woody Allen film in Barcelona.
In fact now I prefer to write in the Spanish blog because at least there there are other visitors ...
But I write now to criticise again the international press.
Last Monday there was a new conference in Barcelona. I even took some pictures
(you can see them in flickr.com: i put elju.eu in the picture of the pretty cypress ...)
The New York Times says
"Mr. Allen said he wanted to show the city “as I see it with my own eyes, as I did for ‘Manhattan,’ ” referring to his 1979 film as he spoke in Madrid to the news media."
THIS IS NOT TRUE! THE CONFERENCE WAS NOT IN MADRID. IT WAS IN BARCELONA. EACH DAY I FOLLOW THE NEWS ABOUT WOODY ALLEN AND HE WAS NOT IN MADRID. SHAME ON THE NEW YORK TIMES ...
On July 9th 2007, a Monday, Woody Allen began to shoot in Barceloneta.
The first place he chose was Restaurant Barceloneta and in ELJU EU you can see the photos I took. I imagine I could go evryday to take some picture of the shooting but you need time for that.
Now in FLICKR COM you can see a lot of photos of the film. You just put the keywords Barcelona Woody Allen. Some of the photos have the words WOODYALLEN TK or ELJU EU.
The situation in Barcelona is crazy.
A lot is written in Spanish and Catalan. For example in the blog in Castilian of ELJU EU.
I will put here what is going on this week in Barcelona so that the wide world knows about the events in Barcelona:
MONDAY JULY 9TH
-- RESTAURANT BARCELONETA (the place where
I saw again Woody Allen and I took some
photos of him, the crew and the very
beautiful and lovely and magnificent and
like a dream, Scarlett Johansson)
-- MUSEU PICASSO
-- PASSEIG MARITIM
-- SANT MIQUEL BEACH
TUESDAY JULY 10TH
-- 7-12h:morning: RAMBLA DE LES FLORS
between
Carme and Hospitat street
--afternoon: PASSEIG COLOM AND COLOM AREA
WEDNESDAY JULY 11TH
-- MOLL DE LA MARINA
THURSDAY JULY 12TH
--ending of shooting in MOLL DE LA MARINA
-- 11-17h: RAMBLA CATALUNYA between Aragó
and Consell de Cent street.
-- 17-19h: Argenteria street and Montcada
(this is El Born: very beautiful old
streets. I love the streets of El Born)
-- 19h (afternoon-evening): big correfoc
(typical tradition with people running
with fire!: very very beautiful!)
around Santa Maria del Mar in El Born.
I think this may be one of the most
beautiful moments of the film ...)
FRIDAY JULY 13TH
-- 14-18h Passeig de Gràcia between Aragó
and València street
-- at times Provença Street (the street of
La Pedrera, a masterpiece by Antoni
Gaudí i Cornet)
-- afternoon: MASIA CAN TRAVI in HORTA
( gruptravi.com/catala/principal.asp?rest=travi )
This old house from the 17th century
is not in center of town and I did not
know about its existence. It looks
gorgoeous
That's all I know. I must admit that Woody Allen has chosen very beautiful places.
Maybe Barcelona is not so beautiful as it may be watched on a film but the truth is that if you have money Barcelona can be a very nice place to enjoy ...
Today you could read in ELPERIDICO.COM about the film by Woody Allen.
I must say that I find the whole article a bit critical with Woody Allen.
It seems that Woody Allen wanted Javier Bardem to play as a torero who seduces or tries to seduce Scarlett.
Catalan producers convinced him that Catalaonia is different.
I must admit I find quite disappointing this of the bullfighter because it shows a great ignorance about Barcelona.
Finally it was decided that Javier bardem will be a painter ...
It seems that there are problems because there are too many people watching the shootings.
I have read in
elcomerciodigital.com/prensa/20070715/portada/patron-asturiano-para-woody_20070715.html
an article about the Asturian ship and its owner, Bill Basagoiti.
It seems that last wednesday, July 11th 2007, Woody Allen shooted in this ship with Scarlett Johansson. She had a drink on the ship.
I imagine the ship was in El Moll de la Marina in Port Olímpic and went into the sea.
By the way, I do not know anything about the following shootings in Barcelona.
Maybe they want to keep them secret so that they have no many visitors nearby.
As you can see, I am the only one to write in this blog. If you understand a bit of Spanish you can visit the Spanish blog of ELJU EU
where you will find fresh news from Barcelona.
And Scarlett did not jump into the stage in the Summercase with The Jesus & Mary Chain.
I have my reasons to believe that the title of the new film will just be BARCELONA.
Mr Roure said that the word BARCELONA would be included in the title.
Let's remember that the initial title was MIDNIGHT IN BARCELONA.
Quiero saber si Woody Allen ya terminó el rodaje en Barcelona y si va a seguir rodando, dónde lo hará?
Me añado a la peticion! Se sabe algo de donde va a rodar durante los proximos dias? Aun esta en Barcelona???
Segun me dijeron, Woody iba a estar 7 semanas rodando, por lo que todavia quedan unas 5... Pero si me parece extraño como desaparecio de repente, en ningun lado estan dando informacion. Yo lo pude ver 2 dias solamente... POR FAVOR SI ALGUIEN SABE ALGO COMPARTALO!!!
Acuerdo entre Warner Bros. Entertainment Espana y Mediapro.
Este acuerdo incluye la película de Woody Allen-
Texto original:
Warner Bros. Entertainment Espana and Spanish production giant Mediapro have signed a distribution deal for Spain.
The agreement allows Warners to handle theatrical and DVD rights on Mediapro productions, including Woody Allen’s Barcelona summer 2007 shoot, among other future high-profile pics.
SOURCE: VARIETY.COM
Last week the shooting took place in a private house in Musitu street neat Putget Park.
This week the shooting took place on Monday at El Prat airport.
The blackout in Barcelona happened as Woody Allen was in MNAC in Montjuic (one of the landmarks shown in postcards ...)
On Tueday the shooting took place in Fundació Tàpies.
Later they shooted in beautiful Plaça Felip Neri were Woody Allen even had a MIGDIADA (SIESTA in Spanish) That happened on the terrace of Felip Neri. The entrance of this hotel has been for a long time the front page of ELJU.EU.
You can see this siesta of Woody Allen and
also at the actor Javier Bardem in one video in 20minutos website.
As can see in the video Javier Bardem is a man with a lot of personality and he seems not to like much to be watched so much in contrast with Woody Allen.
Today it was said that Woody Allen would shoot in Avinguda Pearson in Pedralbes.
In the film it seems that a Catalan family would lodge Scarlett in a house there.
The shooting would consist in a party at the sunset but right now no fresh news about this ...
Quite soon Penelope Cruz will join the shooting.
The shooting will move to Oviedo quite soon too to shoot there for one week. They will return to Barcelona in August again.
This Friday the shooting will take place in Tibidabo with Javier Bardem (Juan) and Rebecca Hall (Vicky) off alone.
There will be two city shots montages sightseeing ParK Güell, Sagrada Familia and Hotel Palace.
The characters for this Friday are Vicky, Cristina, Juan, Doug and Judy, ie, Rebecca Hall, Bojangles Schmidt, Javier Bardem, Chris Messina and Patricia Clarkson.
Star treatment for Woody Allen sets Barcelona grumbling
Giles Tremlett in Madrid
Tuesday July 31, 2007
The Guardian
Woody Allen, whose latest film stars Penelope Cruz and Scarlett Johansson. Photograph: AP
As actors and film crews working for Woody Allen clog up the already bustling streets of Barcelona this summer, the residents of this eastern Spanish city have begun to ask why their city hall is helping fund the director's next film.
With a section of the city's famously busy Las Ramblas boulevard among the streets to have been blocked off for Allen and stars such as Scarlett Johansson and Penélope Cruz, the grumbling has turned into a political row.
Article continues
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Some 10% of the budget for the film, known as The Barcelona Project and featuring Spanish actor Javier Bardem, comes from city and Catalan regional taxpayers.
Barcelona city hall has set aside almost €1m (£680,000) to help fund the film, as well as providing police escorts for Johansson and others. A further €500,000 comes from the regional government of Catalonia.
"It's a huge advertisement for the city that will be seen all over the world," says the socialist mayor, Jordi Hereu.
But the people of Barcelona are worried that Allen has been showered with public cash and told he can do whatever he likes, including cutting traffic in parts of the city. "He must think we're pretty stupid," said Catalonia's El Periodico newspaper.
Opposition politicians have accused the city's socialist administration of being so obsessed with the New York director that its members had queued to get their photograph taken with him.
"They spend money on this film, but seem to find it difficult to give money to Spanish or Catalan films," said Alberto Fernández of the opposition People's party.
The film's Spanish producers say it has received the same public grants as Spanish films. But the city's contribution has taken the form of direct investment from the city hall, which it says it hopes to recoup from the film's profits.
One extra cost that was certainly not in the budget, however, is for the repairs to the motorbike of one of Johansson's police outriders, who crashed into a taxi.
Allen rarely shoots films outside the United States and his home city of New York. His 2005 film Match Point was shot in Britain.
Allen, who has not given away the plot, says the film will reflect his passion for the city. It is a "love letter to Barcelona, and from Barcelona to the world", he says.
There is no guarantee, however, that foreign locations make for successful Allen films. While Match Point was hailed by critics and won an Oscar nomination, the follow-up called Scoop, filmed in London, was widely deemed a flop. A third London film, Cassandra's Dream, will be released this year .
The 71-year-old film-maker has won three Oscars, two of them for the original screenplay and direction of his 1977 classic Annie Hall. The third was for the screenplay of Hannah and Her Sisters in 1986.
The Barcelona film is reportedly about two American tourists who become involved with a Spanish painter played by Bardem and a jealous ex-girlfriend played by Cruz. The other tourist, alongside Johansson, is reported to be Rebecca Hall.
Allen's Spanish producers are reported to have persuaded him to change the Bardem character from that of a matador, partly because Barcelona is not famed for its enjoyment of bullfighting.
It was recently reported that the film is to be titled Midnight in Barcelona, though this has not been confirmed. Filming is also taking place in the northern Spanish region of Asturias.
SOURCE: GUARDIAN CO UK
It is not true that Catalan people are angry with the funding of the new film by Woody Allen. Barcelona¡s city Hall and Catalan government is a very good inversion.
I fell very sorry to read that we are angry.
The reason why I am angry is because I read them in English.
This means that Woody Allen can read that.
And it is not true!
Catalan people are angry that our train system, our airports and power system are quite poor.
But Woody Allen is a gift to us!
At least me! And I am not alone!
Woody Allen will be always be welcome!
These days I have been following the shooting in Barcelona and most of the crew come from here. The photographer is a Basque man.
The driver of the director's car is Catalan.
What I mean is that the shooting is a very good way of mixing between different people.
I say that because I find that with the funding of the film the Catalan government is funding a film made here by people from here and with a wonderful director called Woody Allen.
So please do not think that people in Barcelona are angry with the shooting ... I do not know of anyone angry.
And in the shootings the people are crazy for Woody Allen!
If we were angry we would say bad words!
It is just the opposite
Yesterday there were problems in Asturias. people are all over the shooting trying to take photos and videos.
This must be disgusting for the producers.
Woody Allen likes secrecy and in this way it is not possible.
I am afaid that when he returns back to Manhattan he may not have a very positive view of a part of the crowds round here ...
So I feel crazy because I opened a site about the shooting but now I have my doubts this is right!
I have realised too that it is easy to get attention in one's site. It is enough not to
think much if what you do is right or wrong.
You just have to think about your visitors.
But which is the limit?
I have decided to put a text in elju eu saying it is time to let the shooting to continue without disturbances from the crowd.
In some days Woody Allen will be back in Barcelona.
Will I be able to keep to promise not to want to see them again ...?
Woody Allen on Ingmar Bergman
Wednesday, Aug. 01, 2007 By RICHARD CORLISS Woody Allen in Love and Death.
Everett
Article ToolsPrintEmailReprintsSphereAddThisRSS He created indelible allegories of postwar man adrift without God. He was the movies' great dramatist of strong, tortured women, and the finest director of actresses. More than any filmmaker, he raised the status of movies to an art form equal to novels and plays. Yet when Ingmar Bergman died on Monday, the popular description of him was: Woody Allen's favorite director.
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What did the domineering Swedish tragedian and the self-depreciating American comedian have in common? Plenty. Both created original scripts from their experiences and obsessions. Both worked fast — at least a movie a year for most of their long careers — and relatively cheap. Both forged long relationships with their sponsoring studios. And Bergman was a strong influence on Allen's work: from his New Yorker parody of The Seventh Seal, "Death Knocks" (in which the hero plays not chess with Death but gin rummy) to a cameo by a Grim Reaper in Love and Death and, more deeply, the inspiration for the theme and tone of Interiors and Another Woman.
Shooting his new film in Spain, Allen took time out to talk with me about Bergman. We began by remarking on the death, the same day as Bergman's, of Michelangelo Antonioni — the Italian director of L'Avventura, Eclipse, Blowup and The Passenger, and another prime depicter of modern alienation. — R.C.
RICHARD CORLISS: The insular Swede and the cosmopolitan Italian, dead on the same day.
WOODY ALLEN: Dreadful and astonishing. Two titanic film directors! Everyone here was shocked. Their work lives on, which just means their films are showing in a few places and sold on DVD. But the men are no longer with us, and that is tragic.
R.C.: But Bergman was 89, Antonioni 94. They had a great run, and you have to think they got to say what they had to say.
W.A.: Yes, they were not prematurely taken from our midst. Still, to me, the fact that it happens at all is sad, just terrible, tragic.
R.C.: Your connection with Bergman is well known. Did you know Antonioni at all?
W.A.: I knew him slightly and spent some time with him. He was thin as a wire and athletic and energetic and mentally alert. And he was a wonderful ping-pong player. I played with him; he always won because he had a great reach. That was his game.
R.C.: But it's fair to say you're first and foremost a Bergman guy, and that you have been for 50 years. There were a lot of young people in the 50s who saw Bergman's films — usually it was The Seventh Seal — and were overwhelmed with an almost religious conversion. And the doctrine of this religion was that film was an art.
W.A.: I agree. For me it was Wild Strawberries. Then The Seventh Seal and The Magician. That whole group of films that came out then told us that Bergman was a magical filmmaker. There had never been anything like it, this combination of intellectual artist and film technician. His technique was sensational.
R.C.: After long admiring Bergman, you finally met him, through Liv Ullmann, who had starred in many of his films and lived with him for a few years.
W.A.: He and I had dinner in his New York hotel suite; it was a great treat for me. I was nervous, I really didn't want to go. But he was not at all what you might expect: the formidable, dark, brooding genius. He was a regular guy. He commiserated with me about low box-office grosses and women and having to put up with studios.
Later, he'd speak to me by phone from his oddball little island [Faro, where Bergman lived his last 40 years]. He confided about his irrational dreams: for instance, that he would show up on the set and not know where to put the camera and be completely panic-stricken. He'd have to wake up and tell himself that he is an experienced, respected director and he certainly does know where to put the camera. But that anxiety was with him long after he had created 15, 20 masterpieces.
R.C.: You knew he was Ingmar Bergman, but maybe he didn't. He didn't get to view his reputation from the outside.
W.A.: Exactly. The world saw him as a genius, and he was worrying about the weekend grosses. Yet he was plain and colloquial in speech, not full of profound pronunicamentos about life. Sven Nykvist [his cinematographer] told me that when they were doing all those scenes about death and dying, they'd be cracking jokes and gossiping about the actors' sex lives.
R.C.: You worked with Nykvist on four films. And you seem to share Bergman's work ethic.
W.A.: I copied some of that from him. I liked his attitude that a film is not an event you make a big deal out of. He felt filmmaking was just a group of people working. At times he made two and three films in a year. He worked very fast; he'd shoot seven or eight pages of script at a time. They didn't have the money to do anything else.
R.C.: One reason that boys of a certain age were enthralled by Bergman's films was that he had some of the world's most beautiful and powerful actresses in his repertory company: Eva Dahlbeck, Harriet and Bibi Andersson, Ingrid Thulin, Gunnel Lindblom, Liv Ullmann, Lena Olin. These were major mesmerizers, and they all worked for him.
W.A.: He was obsessed with faces and had a wonderful way with women. He had an affinity for women that Tennessee Williams did. Some kind of closeness he felt. Their problems obsessed him.
R.C.: One difference there is that Tennessee Williams didn't sleep with his leading ladies. Bergman was a famously imperious charmer, and had long liaisons with Harriet Andersson, then Bibi Andersson, then Liv Ullmann. There was a rumor that all seven actresses in his film All These Women were former Bergman mistresses.
W.A.: That would not surprise me because, as I heard it from Sven, that's the way it was there. There was an enormous amount of socializing, and sexual and romantic escapades. It was a lighter situation than you would think. There's so much feeling on the screen that you think he had to have a serious life. But he was a ladies' man. He loved relationships with women.
R.C.: Many film critics assign Bergman to a lower rank because, they say, he makes filmed plays. I don't see this as a limitation, but wouldn't you agree that he was essentially a film writer who directed his own work?
W.A.: That could be said of me too. But you must also take a Bergman film like Cries and Whispers where there's almost no dialogue at all. This could only be done on film. He invented a film vocabulary that suited what he wanted to say, that had never really been done before. He'd put the camera on one person's face close and leave it there, and just leave it there and leave it there. It was the opposite of what you learned to do in film school, but it was enormously effective and entertaining.
R.C.: OK. So you think he's great, and I think he's great. But to many young people — I mean bright, film-savvy kids — he's Ingmar Who? What relevance do his films have today?
W.A.: I think his films have eternal relevance, because they deal with the difficulty of personal relationships and lack of communication between people and religious aspirations and mortality, existential themes that will be relevant a thousand years from now. When many of the things that are successful and trendy today will have been long relegated to musty-looking antiques, his stuff will still be great.
R.C.: But not many artists worry about God's silence these days. In the media the current battle is between militant believers and devout atheists. You get very few tortured agnostics.
W.A.: You're right. That was his obsession. He was brought up religiously [his father was a Lutheran minister] and it wasn't simply a question of atheism or not. He longed for the possibility of religious phenomenon. That longing tortured him his whole life. But in the end he was a great entertainer. The Seventh Seal, all those films, they grip you. It's not like doing homework.
R.C.: If someone who hadn't seen any of his films asked you to recommend just five, what would be your Bergman starter set?
W.A.: The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Magician, Cries and Whispers and Persona.
R.C.: Many directors would be happy to have made just those five films.
W.A.: Or one of them.
SOURCE: TIME COM
The new film by Woody Allen in Barcelona maybe won¡t show some aspects of Barcelona.
I do not know. But I can assure you that Barcelona and Catalonia during these days have given to the directors unique events.
So a part of Barcelona went into a blackout during some days. A perfect excuse for a romantic supper among candles for Javier Bardem and Scarlett. Maybe in La Dama.
Maybe Javier and Scarlett could have decided to have a litle trip to Sitges in train. Two hours inside the train and then walk through the railway inside a dark tunnel back into Barcelona. A romantic way to know each other.
Or maybe Scarlett and Javier could have decided to go to Tarragona with a nice car.
They could have began to know each other better while they waited and waited in a 70 km histirical queue in the highway.
But I do not think we see these things in the Woody Allen's film.
I have the feeling we won't see the real Barcelona (the title of which is without doubt: CHAOS IN BARCELONA) but a touristic view of Barcelona.
I wonder if in the future the decline of Barcelona will coincide with the shooting of Woody Allen in Barcelona.
What a strange feeling. To live in a city that is pure anarchy and chaos surrounded by
Woody Allen's eyes ...
Below you have an article from the Guardian.
It is three years old. Woody Allen was shooting in London. With Johansson already.
The project was called too WASP and it meant
WOODY ALLEN SUMMER PROJECT.
Si I wonder if WASP 2007 means WOODY ALLEN SUMMER PROJECT 2007 or WOODY ALLEN SPANISH PROJECT as some say ...
Why I love London
He's famous for being an angst-ridden workaholic who never steps outside his beloved New York. But in this exclusive interview, Woody Allen talks about spending this summer filming in London - and how he's never been so happy
Simon Garfield
Sunday August 8, 2004
The Observer
In search of grey skies ... Allen filming in London last year. Photograph: AP
'You have such beautiful skies,' Woody Allen said last week at the completion of another scene in another film, 'when they're overcast.' Allen and his crew had been looking up at the skies above West Kensington all morning, hoping for cloud. They were at Queen's Club, surrounded by the lush tennis courts and white-cottoned members trying not to appear too interested as a small 68-year-old man in a frayed green baseball cap moved among them. 'I never shoot in the sun if I can help it because everything looks much better without it,' the director continued. 'The sun has been the bane of my existence.'
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Allen's crew wear laminated passes bearing the letters WASP 04 - the Woody Allen Summer Project, the 36th such project in his career. They have filmed in Belgravia and the Fulham Road, in St James's Park and Tate Modern, and everywhere they've been people are thrilled to see them. Passers-by ring up friends on their mobiles: Woody Allen filming in our street! Scarlett Johansson looking beautiful! Woody much smaller in real life! 'Occasionally people ask me for autographs and I give them,' the recipient of this adulation says. 'People are so nice to me. If only everyone who is so keen to see me would go to see my movies!'
WASP 04 is still a mystery, even to those on set. Allen will only say who's in it (Johansson, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Emily Mortimer, Matthew Goode) and what it's vaguely about, which turns out to be the same as almost all his other movies - human relationships and their consequences. In his famous style, the actors only get to see their own scenes, and the producers even less. As the only person who knows quite what film he is trying to make, Allen says he is happy with progress, 'but I hope it's not just that the English voices are so beautiful to my ear that they cover a multitude of my sins.'
He fears that the same speeches read by an American cast would be pedestrian. 'To hear Jonathan Rhys-Meyers do them or Brian Cox or Penelope Wilton - they sound like what we've grown up in America to consider as acting and theatre at its highest. And Scarlett is of course just a natural great actress. She can do no wrong, incapable of a bad moment. Very sexy, very pretty. She was just touched by God.'
We talk while the sun is out - 10 minutes here, 15 there - on a sequence of benches, director's chairs and catering buses. Allen walks slowly between each spot, and speaks gently and with great conviction. When he is filming, he occasionally crouches down to peer through a lens, but otherwise watches over the cameraman's shoulder with the day's script tightly rolled in his hand, as if he is about to swat flies. He does not bellow 'And... action !' at any point; the working day progresses organically, merging from set-up to camera-roll in smooth order, with hushed conversations among his technicians between scenes. On this day in West London, precisely halfway through a seven-week schedule, it is as if nothing is riding on the film at all.
If only this were so. The paying public and large parts of the film business have fallen out of love with Woody Allen's art, if not his person. With each new film they see a diminishing of talents. Allen peps up his work with the leading young actors of the day, and he injects the usual one-liners and angsty philosophies, but he is regularly regarded as a lost cause, a man who has spent the last decade grimly failing to reproduce the great achievements of his career - Annie Hall, Manhattan, Zelig, Broadway Danny Rose, Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanours, Husbands and Wives - some of which defined an era, some of which just defined the best imaginable way to spend a Saturday night.
It's not that Small Time Crooks or Sweet and Lowdown or Mighty Aphrodite are bad films - how much more entertaining they are than most teen and disaster movies - it's just that they don't fill us with the joy that they used to, and we don't tend to quote from them. Every year a hopeful critic jumps out from the page to proclaim The Curse of the Jade Scorpion or Hollywood Ending 'a magnificent return to form', but theirs is a minority voice. It may be his age, it may be exhaustion, it may be the lack of someone around him to say, 'Whoa, one movie every two years is enough for anyone!' Or it may be that he no longer has the power to grasp and ridicule the concerns of our times. But what if most people are wrong? What if his best work is still to come?
I have met Allen twice before, but have never seen him with such an assured outlook on life. He says he loves being in London, his wife and two children are either out at the sights or in the pool of his rented house, and he is serious when he says that he finds the on-set catering to be better than in New York. His own opinion of his current standing in the film world is instructive.
'In the United States things have changed a lot, and it's hard to make good small films now,' he says. 'There was a time in the 1950s when I wanted to be a playwright, because until that time movies, which mostly came out of Hollywood, were stupid and not interesting. Then we started to get wonderful European films, and American films started to grow up a little bit, and the industry became more fun to work in than the theatre. I loved it. But now it's taken a turn in the other direction and studios are back in command and are not that interested in pictures that make only a little bit of money. When I was younger, every week we'd get a Fellini or a Bergman or a Godard or Truffaut, but now you almost never get any of that. Filmmakers like myself have a hard time. The avaricious studios couldn't care less about good films - if they get a good film they're twice as happy, but money-making films are their goal. They only want these $100 million pictures that make $500m.
'That's why I'm happy to work in London, because I'm right back in the same kind of liberal creative attitude that I'm used to.'
I wonder if there was a time recently when he found the situation he describes too painful to endure? 'Yes. In the last couple of years I've thought about if I do really want to function in the film business the way I did when I started. When I started, there was a great joy in wanting to make a film and knowing there was a huge audience out there - not huge, but a special audience, and I would try to appeal to that audience if I could.
'You felt part of something. Now, you know, I don't really care that much. There's no real prestigious film industry, there's no real cultivated film industry. All new young directors are smitten by what they see, and they are smitten by special effects and blockbusters and they all want to make those kind of pictures. OK, not all - 98 per cent. Maybe if I can get a situation in the United States where someone will work the way I want to work I'll do it. If not, I'll make another film in Europe... or I'll work in the theatre.'
In October he will direct his own play, Second-Hand Memory in New York. 'It doesn't have to be films,' he says of his future career. 'There's no film community I really care to be a part of.'
For the time being he perseveres, often to the consternation of his greatest fans. Why does he work so hard? 'Why not?' he replies with some bewilderment. 'What does one do in the world? I read books, listen to music, I watch sports, and there's plenty of time to work. What else would I do? When my grandmother was old she used to just sit by the window all day and look out at people. That seems to me boring. Life is a meaningless grind, so... you know... One film a year really isn't a big deal. There's plenty of time to do all this stuff, and plenty of time for my family and to go to the basketball game and take walks and go to dinner every night. Tonight I'll go see the dailies, yesterday's work, and hopefully it will be good. I'll go home, play with the kids, my wife and I will go out to a nice restaurant for dinner, go to sleep...'
Allen says he has all but given up on his ambitions to make a masterpiece, something that may be ranked against Kurosawa and his dead European idols. 'I've resigned myself,' he says. 'I'm functioning within the parameters of my mediocrity.' He maintains that he never sees any of his films after they leave the editing room, and that he remains vaguely unhappy with all of them; they never turn out the way he had hoped when he first sketched out his ideas in his bedroom. Surely not Manhattan or Hannah and Her Sisters ?
'You know, I tried to buy Manhattan back, because I was disappointed with it and I wished I could get them not to release it and I'd do a free film for them, which is what I offered them. But other people loved it, so I can't really tell myself.'
We walk towards some lunch. I tell him there is lamb today, and swordfish steaks. He says he may go for something more spartan. As he constructs a tiny mixed salad in a polystyrene bowl I wonder if he is glad that Manhattan appeared after all. 'Yes, because it was such a big success. I always think with films like that that I got away with something. I think, "It's interesting, they really don't see what the problem is..."'
Allen says he feels the same when people pay to hear him play New Orleans jazz on his clarinet. Last weekend he travelled with his band to perform three concerts in Germany, and this weekend he's in Spain and Monaco for a Red Cross gala in the presence of Prince Albert. 'I have improved, but I've improved within the parameters of no talent. I don't say this with false modesty. I'm a strict amateur, with no ear, but people come to see me because I'm a celebrity from the movies. I would starve to death in a week if I had to do it without being a celebrity. I go into these 2,000- or 3,000-seat venues and I sell them out. Jazz musicians who are truly miraculous go in and don't have anything near that kind of thing, so obviously it's got nothing to do with the quality of my playing.'
He fears that his fame may also work against him. 'I tried to write a novel,' he says. 'And I finished it. But I didn't want to have a novel out there that would be regarded as the work of a celebrity. I didn't want it looked down upon or embraced because it had a celebrity name. I wanted to write a novel that could hold its own with professional novels, and I didn't think that this could, so I have it in my drawer. I just didn't think it was good enough.'
His assistant joins us at the back of the catering bus, asking whether it's OK if a driver can bring someone to the set. 'That is OK,' Allen says, 'but I need something more to eat.' He holds up his bowl. 'These turned out to be cucumbers but I thought they were something else. Can I get a piece of bread, a nice dry piece of brown bread, a few more tomatoes?'
'A candy bar?' his assistant asks.
'No, I don't want a candy bar. If there's anything else in the vegetable family...'
I wondered about the title for his London film. He said that when he writes in his bedroom he too refers to his new movie as the Woody Allen Spring / Summer / Fall Project. 'It's never that I'm hiding the titles. When I have them, I always give them out. But when a film is over then I want to see what title feels best, and what title best leads the audience to that material. I've had all the people working for me trying to think of titles. Sometimes it comes right to the wire and we panic.' On one film he came up with the title Anhedonia. 'They thought it was too obscure a word; it means the inability to experience pleasure. People said, it's a lovely movie, but if they see the title Anhedonia they won't be interested at all. So finally, not even two weeks before we were ready to make the ads we thought, OK: Annie Hall.'
The appearance of one Woody Allen title each year has remained the only constant in a decade of flux. The last 10 years have been one of dramatic personal and professional upheaval for Allen: he split from his partner Mia Farrow and married her adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn. They adopted two children. Both his parents died. He endured a painful legal battle with his long-time producer Jean Doumanian. He even changed his jazz musicians.
He talks of these events with protective nonchalance, but once there was a period when his career, or at least his reputation, seemed over, those months when Mia Farrow accused him of child neglect and people assumed he was sleeping with his daughter. One thing was clear even before the courts ruled on custody: Woody could never really play Woody again.
'I never give it any thought,' he claims. 'It never meant anything to me. I just function, and the tabloids do their work, and it never had any direct bearing on my life. It didn't make my pictures do better or worse. It didn't make me happy or unhappy. As a newspaper reader you could read about it every day, but there was nothing really happening. If you were in it, it was kind of boring.
'I consider myself incredibly lucky,' he continues. 'I have an ideal marriage and great kids. My parents both died peacefully. I was disappointed that I had a falling-out with my former producer because she was a friend, but it's not a brain tumour - that's the worst thing that could happen to either one of us.'
Several times during our meeting Allen mentioned how grateful he was to have his health, and he did look for wood to touch. His father lived beyond 100, his mother to her mid-nineties, so the great screen hypochondriac has genes on his side. 'My hearing is a little worse,' he says, 'and my eyesight is a little worse, but I'm in reasonably decent physical shape. But growing older you never like, because it's sadder, because you're getting closer to dying, and who wants that?'
Last week Anything Else opened to the usual mixed reviews. It's an intriguing film, in which Jason Biggs and Christina Ricci take the roles Allen would once have written for himself. Allen plays a paranoid crank who may also be a visionary, a gag-writer who advises everyone to carry a rifle and water-purifying tablets and a torch that floats in water. It is a part that for once no one can mistake for autobiography: he drives a red Porsche and wants to move to LA. But it may be autobiographical in other ways. Anything Else is rather an optimistic picture, despite the apocalyptic jokes: the Jason Biggs character cleanses his life of pretence and disastrous relationships and moves on to some sort of contentment. I went to see it on the first Sunday evening following its release - and there were only about 30 others in the cinema.
The real buzz is for his next film, completed not long before he arrived in London and already being lined up for the autumn film festivals. He describes Melinda and Melinda as both a dramatic and comic film, telling the same story from two perspectives. It features Will Ferrell, Chloë Sevigny, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Radha Mitchell, the latter replacing Winona Ryder at the eleventh hour and tipped by Allen for great things. In WASP 04, Scarlett Johansson replaced Kate Winslet shortly before shooting began, a switch that required the character to change nationality. 'It was not a problem,' Allen says. 'It took about an hour.'
As we relocate for the fourth time I ask Allen what he enjoys most about filmmaking, and he says 'not the filming. I like the writing and the editing. When I get bored with writing, I can stop and finish the next day, and when I'm editing I have my own private room in New York, I have all my music, and it could be 95 degrees outside or zero, and I'm functioning.'
What he likes most about filming is the improvement actors bring to his scripts. 'There is a lot of improvisation. I make up things all the time, and I encourage the actors to do the same. The first thing I tell the actors is "Disregard the script - if you want to drop lines, change lines, improvise, lengthen or shorten something just do it and if you're getting anything wrong I'll tell you."' Brian Cox said recently that he found Allen a very fast director but the freedom Allen gave him was rather intimidating. 'Woody will say, "You know, it would be nice if I could recognise some of my own words, but that's OK..."'
Ten years ago, when I first met him, I reminded Allen of something he'd once written: he'd said that if he could live his whole life again he'd do it just the same but he wouldn't read Beowulf. I wondered what he'd change in reality. He said he would have liked to have entered a more physical profession, perhaps ballet dancing.
Ten years on, he says: 'It would be like having a re-shoot. Whenever I do a re-shoot for a scene the new scene is always better, and this would be the same with my life. I only wish I could do a re-shoot. I would rather that my talent had been a musical one. I would rather have been a great instrumentalist. Or when I did What's New Pussycat? in 1965, my first movie, in retrospect I regret not staying and living in Paris. Living in Paris was a very happy experience. I thought, "What if I never go home? What if I stay in Paris, I love this city." I wonder in retrospect if I would have enjoyed that more... making films in France.'
The sun was disappearing for him again; there was another career move to make. I asked him what he'd still like to achieve in his life. 'Besides death in sleep? I'd like to keep happy and play with the kids and be with my wife. I've never known great family life since I was an adult, but now I do and it's meaningful to me. I would like to keep healthy and make a great movie. I would love to be able to do that, but I don't think that's going to happen any more. If I keep working, I think it's possible that I could do a great movie some day by accident.'
SOURCE: film.guardian.co.uk/interview/interviewpages/0,,1278451,00.html
Scarlett Johansson is a passionate and commited advocate and fundraiser and has been involved with Oxfam for since 2005.
In 2007 she traveled to Sri Lanka and India to meet young girls who have a chance to go to school against great prejudice and poverty, and she also met families affected by the Tsunami on the coastline of southern Sri Lanka.
Scarlett has been involved in great fundraising projects with us including an exclusive Louis Vuitton event in NY and donating money through photoshoots. She is also a powerful advocate – writing to Chancellor Merkel before the G8 and putting her voice alongside Mr Nelson Mandela and His Grace Emeritus Archbishop Desmond Tutu for the launch of the GCAP Campaign (also known as Make Poverty History/ONE Campaign).
Scarlett continues to be one of our inspiring and creative supporters.
SOURCE: OXFAM.ORG
I GOT the news in Oviedo, a lovely little town in the north of Spain where I am shooting a movie, that Bergman had died. A phone message from a mutual friend was relayed to me on the set. Bergman once told me he didn’t want to die on a sunny day, and not having been there, I can only hope he got the flat weather all directors thrive on.
I’ve said it before to people who have a romanticized view of the artist and hold creation sacred: In the end, your art doesn’t save you. No matter what sublime works you fabricate (and Bergman gave us a menu of amazing movie masterpieces) they don’t shield you from the fateful knocking at the door that interrupted the knight and his friends at the end of “The Seventh Seal.” And so, on a summer’s day in July, Bergman, the great cinematic poet of mortality, couldn’t prolong his own inevitable checkmate, and the finest filmmaker of my lifetime was gone.
I have joked about art being the intellectual’s Catholicism, that is, a wishful belief in an afterlife. Better than to live on in the hearts and minds of the public is to live on in one’s apartment, is how I put it. And certainly Bergman’s movies will live on and will be viewed at museums and on TV and sold on DVDs, but knowing him, this was meager compensation, and I am sure he would have been only too glad to barter each one of his films for an additional year of life. This would have given him roughly 60 more birthdays to go on making movies; a remarkable creative output. And there’s no doubt in my mind that’s how he would have used the extra time, doing the one thing he loved above all else, turning out films.
Bergman enjoyed the process. He cared little about the responses to his films. It pleased him when he was appreciated, but as he told me once, “If they don’t like a movie I made, it bothers me — for about 30 seconds.” He wasn’t interested in box office results, even though producers and distributors called him with the opening weekend figures, which went in one ear and out the other. He said, “By mid-week their wildly optimistic prognosticating would come down to nothing.” He enjoyed critical acclaim but didn’t for a second need it, and while he wanted the audience to enjoy his work, he didn’t always make his films easy on them.
Still, those that took some figuring out were well worth the effort. For example, when you grasp that both women in “The Silence” are really only two warring aspects of one woman, the otherwise enigmatic film opens up spellbindingly. Or if you are up on your Danish philosophy before you see “The Seventh Seal” or “The Magician,” it certainly helps, but so amazing were his gifts as a storyteller that he could hold an audience riveted and enthralled with difficult material. I’ve heard people walk out after certain films of his saying, “I didn’t get exactly what I just saw but I was gripped on the edge of my seat every frame.”
Bergman’s allegiance was to theatricality, and he was also a great stage director, but his movie work wasn’t just informed by theater; it drew on painting, music, literature and philosophy. His work probed the deepest concerns of humanity, often rendering these celluloid poems profound. Mortality, love, art, the silence of God, the difficulty of human relationships, the agony of religious doubt, failed marriage, the inability for people to communicate with one another.
And yet the man was a warm, amusing, joking character, insecure about his immense gifts, beguiled by the ladies. To meet him was not to suddenly enter the creative temple of a formidable, intimidating, dark and brooding genius who intoned complex insights with a Swedish accent about man’s dreadful fate in a bleak universe. It was more like this: “Woody, I have this silly dream where I show up on the set to make a film and I can’t figure out where to put the camera; the point is, I know I am pretty good at it and I have been doing it for years. You ever have those nervous dreams?” or “You think it will be interesting to make a movie where the camera never moves an inch and the actors just enter and exit frame? Or would people just laugh at me?”
What does one say on the phone to a genius? I didn’t think it was a good idea, but in his hands I guess it would have turned out to be something special. After all, the vocabulary he invented to probe the psychological depths of actors also would have sounded preposterous to those who learn filmmaking in the orthodox manner. In film school (I was thrown out of New York University quite rapidly when I was a film major there in the 1950s) the emphasis was always on movement. These are moving pictures, students were taught, and the camera should move. And the teachers were right. But Bergman would put the camera on Liv Ullmann’s face or Bibi Andersson’s face and leave it there and it wouldn’t budge and time passed and more time and an odd and wonderful thing unique to his brilliance would happen. One would get sucked into the character and one was not bored but thrilled.
Bergman, for all his quirks and philosophic and religious obsessions, was a born spinner of tales who couldn’t help being entertaining even when all on his mind was dramatizing the ideas of Nietzsche or Kierkegaard. I used to have long phone conversations with him. He would arrange them from the island he lived on. I never accepted his invitations to visit because the plane travel bothered me, and I didn’t relish flying on a small aircraft to some speck near Russia for what I envisioned as a lunch of yogurt. We always discussed movies, and of course I let him do most of the talking because I felt privileged hearing his thoughts and ideas. He screened movies for himself every day and never tired of watching them. All kinds, silents and talkies. To go to sleep he’d watch a tape of the kind of movie that didn’t make him think and would relax his anxiety, sometimes a James Bond film.
Like all great film stylists, such as Fellini, Antonioni and Buñuel, for example, Bergman has had his critics. But allowing for occasional lapses all these artists’ movies have resonated deeply with millions all over the world. Indeed, the people who know film best, the ones who make them — directors, writers, actors, cinematographers, editors — hold Berman’s work in perhaps the greatest awe.
Because I sang his praises so enthusiastically over the decades, when he died many newspapers and magazines called me for comments or interviews. As if I had anything of real value to add to the grim news besides once again simply extolling his greatness. How had he influenced me, they asked? He couldn’t have influenced me, I said, he was a genius and I am not a genius and genius cannot be learned or its magic passed on.
When Bergman emerged in the New York art houses as a great filmmaker, I was a young comedy writer and nightclub comic. Can one’s work be influenced by Groucho Marx and Ingmar Bergman? But I did manage to absorb one thing from him, a thing not dependent on genius or even talent but something that can actually be learned and developed. I am talking about what is often very loosely called a work ethic but is really plain discipline.
I learned from his example to try to turn out the best work I’m capable of at that given moment, never giving in to the foolish world of hits and flops or succumbing to playing the glitzy role of the film director, but making a movie and moving on to the next one. Bergman made about 60 films in his lifetime, I have made 38. At least if I can’t rise to his quality maybe I can approach his quantity.
source: NEW YORK TIMES
Woody Allen in Spain filming 'Midnight in Barcelona.'
"WOODY ALLEN is all over Barcelona," we learned last week at dinner in Mallorca with friends who had just arrived from the Spanish city.
They had seen him at the Arts Hotel, an architecturally striking waterfront hostelry so posh and heavily staffed that beautifully groomed young ladies circulate through the lobby offering you drinks even if you're just pausing before heading out.
The Woodman had finally started shooting his long-planned Spanish-set feature -- a romantic comedy purportedly titled "Midnight in Barcelona" -- in July after a considerable postponement and recent local controversy over the financial contribution by the city and Catalonia of $1.3 million, considered an exorbitant sum by those who feel such amounts should go to native filmmakers rather than established foreign helmers.
FOR HIS SELF-ADVERTISED love letter to the city, Woody evidently surveyed many of its most decorous neighborhoods and artistic sights as potential locations. But early on, shooting had created considerable inconvenience on the celebrated La Rambla promenade and the producers had trouble securing permission to film at the street's legendary produce market La Boqueria, as the demands of a film production promised to be too disruptive to the frenzied sale of every manner of edible produce known to humankind that is always taking place there.
"You're bound to run into him," our friends concluded. "He's everywhere."
Still, Woody Allen, as well as his film's stars, Scarlett Johansson and Penelope Cruz, never even entered my mind once we arrived in the massively photogenic city last weekend. So I scarcely anticipated the sight that awaited us as, accompanied by the tolling of the sonorous bells of the city's central Gothic cathedral, we opened the shutters of our room at the Hotel Colon on Monday morning to behold beneath us eight large trucks in the middle of the cathedral square that were unmistakably of the sort used in film production.
It didn't take a moment to deduce that our friends' confident prediction of a Woody sighting was about to come true. There was no resisting it. My wife, who shares the filmmaker's Dec. 1 birthday, and daughter headed out first and returned to report that Woody and the crew were working down a little side street along the edge of the cathedral.
My son and I soon followed suit, easily locating the director, sporting his trademark frumpy fisherman's hat, rumpled clothes and chest-caving slump, confering with a man bearing a pronounced resemblance to Harvey Weinstein. The small group of gawkers, my son and I included, was restrained from getting too close by tough Spanish guards and portable metal fences, and was quickly pressed back up against a wall when Johansson suddenly appeared and bounded purposefully past us to report for work. At this point the barrier, and the growing throng of tourists, was pushed much further down the street, making continued voyeuristic surveillance of the scene impossible; when I approached a young and obviously American production factotum and politely asked if he would pass a note to someone I knew inside, I was greeted with the sort of dismissive I'm-so-busy-and-important-why-do-you-dare-even-speak-to-me attitude that has unfortunately always afflicted certain levels of the film business.
WHILE WE HUNG AROUND, my nine-year-old son, whose taste in comics includes the greats and near-greats -- Chaplin, Keaton, the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges -- began asking me who Woody Allen is and why he hadn't seen any of his films. Well, you have, I said, remembering our one dismal attempt a couple of years back to introduce the kids to Allen with "Sleeper," only to discover in it such unremembered highlights as the Orgasmatron and other sexual interludes that provoked more questions than we felt like answering during a movie screening, and that taught us all that what was PG in 1973 is now more like PG-13 or R.
While we couldn't get anywhere near enough to Woody, Harvey or anyone else to catch their attention, we did strike up a conversation with a nice older Spanish woman whose companion was a strikingly unidentifiable type of black-and-white terrier. She told us that Woody Allen had noticed the dog and decided he wanted to use it in the film, and would she wait until 2:30 so it could make its movie debut? With nothing special to do, she agreed.
When we prepared to leave the next morning, the trucks were still in the plaza, and extra effort had clearly been expended to protect from view the central makeup and wardrobe vans where Johansson, Cruz and the other stars spent much of their time. From our fourth-floor window, however, we had an unobstructed view of all of them in their various states of readiness.
I'll look forward to seeing them all -- and to how Allen depicts this seldom-seen city onscreen -- when the film comes out in a year. But I'll be paying particular attention to whether or not the dog makes the cut.
SOURCE: VARIETY.COM
The new name of the film is finally known:
VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA