by David Geffner
Photos by John Clifford/DreamWorks LLC
It will come as no surprise to anyone that Woody Allen's 33rd feature film is funny. Or that its affectionate skewering of the movie industry's disdain for artistry echoes the director's own career.
What may startle fans of America's most prolific writer-director ("We have a union issue, Boss. Can a hyphenate marry a below-the-line?" asks studio head Treat Williams in Hollywood Ending.) is just how darn romantic the movie is.
The guy (Allen as an older director in need of a job) gets the girl (Téa Leoni as his former wife and the studio executive who champions his talents). The brutish studio boss (Williams) loses the girl (Leoni as Williams' fiancée) and gets stuck with a lousy movie (except in France where they love it). The audience (anyone between Canal and 96th Streets) departs the theater with a real Hollywood ending — warm smiles all around.
Woody Allen may have cemented his fame in this movie with the words — "Only New Yorkers talk so much about their problems, and only in Woody Allen films!" But it's his meticulous attention to the entire frame that ranks him with the screen's great romantics. We're talking Chaplin, Rohmer, Capra, Murnau here.
"I'm a big believer in clarity," Allen said during an interview from his New York City office, where he is preparing for the May release of Hollywood Ending. "It's very important to me to let the audience know what's going on and keep them informed of what's happening in the story at all times.
I think that's a very middle-class feeling — not wanting to be bewildering. It's also out of a partial sense of survival if you make comedy for a living — don't ever ruin the joke with obscure or overly stylized filmmaking. I don't consider my audience when I make a movie because I feel, to some degree, I represent the average guy. If I like the joke, then my audience will too. I'm a very middle-class person who trusts his own instincts when it comes to telling a story."
Few American filmmakers, of course, can tell a story like Woody Allen. Hollywood Ending, which Allen will introduce in his first-ever visit to the Cannes Film Festival, provides a textbook example of a lifetime's accumulation of directing comedy.
Classically framed in medium two-shots with warm, naturalistic lighting, Allen's long, flowing takes not only "get out of the way of the jokes," but they let the actors dominate the action. Aside from the occasional split-screen or extended tracking shot, Hollywood Ending is filmmaking that is just clear and funny.
"There are two things that are fairly consistent in my films," Allen said. "I don't do a lot of close-ups and I use many long masters. I like the perspective of the master shot back to the camera, and I like to give the actors the chance to move freely and experiment within the scene. Obviously, as the writer of all my films, I have specific ideas as to style and tone. But mostly I let the content dictate the form. The most successful comedic filmmakers — Chaplin, Keaton and Billy Wilder — tended to keep things simple, if for no other reason than to clutter the comedy can be fatal.
"Of course, over the years, if you want to stretch out as a director and have more fun with the medium, there might be some conflict in your approach to style and technique. That's come through with some of my past movies where I have been more aggressive with the camera, or the lighting, or editing, etcetera. What I've found through experience is that you can only make your presence felt as a director on the more serious films, or, in my case, the more serious comedies. My first concern on truly comic films, ranging from Bananas to Hollywood Ending, is always to protect the laughs in the picture."
Allen also is legendary for protecting his actors.
"I always frame up the shot myself and show that to the DP," Allen said. "The DP gives his feedback and once we've got the shot established, and he's lit it, I'll bring in the actors. I don't like to rehearse — this is purely personal taste, mind you. I'll show the actors where to stand, since I've already essentially blocked out the scene for myself, without storyboards, when I wrote it. More than 90 percent of the time, the actors are fine with my blocking. But sometimes they'll say they want to change it and, of course, we try that. I'm certainly not going to force an actor into something he doesn't feel good about doing."
In fact, Allen's technique revolves entirely around his faith in, and respect for, an actor's abilities. While he is a scrupulous refiner of mise-en-scene and camera movement, improvisation does play a part in all of Woody Allen's films.
"I give my actors a lot of freedom to improvise. I never want an actor to feel stuck with my dialogue, or that if he has ideas he can't bring them up during the scene. If he makes some egregious mistake, I'll correct him after the take and say, 'You can't really say that because later in the movie your changes will be contradicted.' Or, 'Don't do that — it's too filthy or incoherent.' But that practically never happens because I cast very good actors who know what they're getting into with me. They understand the script and know they're free to make that role their own. If that means forgetting what I wrote and using their own dialogue, that's fine as long as they make it believable. The believability of the situation is everything to me."
Hollywood Ending, like many of Allen's films, is set in crowded Manhattan bars and restaurants. Here is where Allen shines. Characters flow in and out of the frame as the camera tracks invisibly around the swirling conflict of love and war in the big city. It all looks ridiculously smooth and effortless on-screen, with most of the audience's attention riveted to the conversation at hand. But the hours Allen spends in setting up such shots typically occupy most of the day.
"While other directors might set up quickly and shoot a lot of coverage, I spend most of the time setting up, perhaps until three in the afternoon. When everything is choreographed just right — actors crossing through the frame to various places, lighting just so — when it's finally ready, I shoot it, and that's it. I don't do any coverage.
"As soon as I get a take I really like, I do one more after it just to see if they can top it, and [the actors] very rarely do. Ninety percent of the time, when I'm watching my dailies, the take just before the last take that I'm looking at is the one we use. Some directors gain the time by shooting a lot of coverage. That's not me. I gain the time in really perfecting the setup. Then I shoot it and it's done."
Examine any interview in which Hollywood's most prominent actors are asked what directors they'd really like to work with and, invariably, Woody Allen's name comes up. Allen is considered the consummate "actor's director" with actors from theater, film and television clamoring for an opportunity to work with him. But don't book your flight to New York just yet, even if you are Hollywood's most bankable commodity. As the director explained, his casting process is methodical and tailored to personal methods tested over decades of filmmaking.
"I generally inquire about the actors before I cast them to find out if they are loose and easy and flexible," Allen said. "I've avoided working with actors that are really intense and don't get up to speed until the 18th take. I don't have the patience, or the money, for it. To me the great majority of making a film is simply common sense. This is the joke, this is what you have to do, and we all come out and do it. Anybody can screw up a few takes. But if the actor constantly needs 18 takes to get up to speed, it's irrational."
Like many master filmmakers, Allen has worked with one casting director, Juliet Taylor, on all his films dating back to Love and Death in 1975. He trusts her implicitly to supply the best creative ammunition for his script.
"Sometimes I write roles specifically for actors. Diane Keaton would be perfect for this role, or Dianne Wiest might be right for this role. But, mostly, I just give the script to Juliet, and she'll give me a list of 15 people that she thinks might be possible for that role, some of whom may be actors I've never even heard of."
The director cited an example from Bullets Over Broadway where Taylor asked him to meet actor Chazz Palminteri. "He had never been in a movie and I had no idea who he was," Allen recalled. 'The second he walked through the door I thought to myself, "This is what I had in mind when I wrote this part. He's absolutely perfect.' So I cast him. The pitfall of writing parts for specific actors is that they may not be available and then you're disappointed. This has happened to me in the past and it's not a great experience."
From the moment those familiar white titles on a black screen come up, and the first rollicking notes of an American jazz standard echo forth, you know you've bought a ticket to a Woody Allen movie. Hollywood Ending is no exception. Allen has never hired a composer to score his movies although Dick Hyman has been credited as "music arranger" on several Allen films. He simply roots through his prodigious musical knowledge to find the right piece of music to match his visuals. If Thelonious Monk doesn't work, then Charlie Parker will. If Cannonball Adderly doesn't hit the right note, then surely Gershwin can. It's almost always jazz or classical music, and more often than not, highlights a wind instrument, because that's what Allen himself plays. Where did this unusual, and stylistically defining approach come from?
"When I made my very first film, Take the Money and Run, I was working with Ralph Rosenblum, the editor, and he said, 'Let's just put this record behind this scene so it doesn't seem so long and naked when we see it in the editing room.' I think he put on a Eubie Blake record. I thought to myself at that time how ridiculous it was for me to have someone score my movies. I've got a million recordings. I can choose from Mozart or Louis Armstrong or Bach or Charlie Parker, or anyone I want, and all of a sudden the scoring of a picture became my job. That was really fun for me because when the picture was over, I could cut it together and take my record collection and pick out just the right Erroll Garner record and put it behind the scene. If that wasn't perfect, I could take it away and maybe use Thelonious Monk. If I didn't like that, maybe Art Tatum. It gave me this huge new creative tool without having to hire someone to write a score that may or may not work out."
Allen expanded upon his reluctance to share his creative process in the area of music, going on to note, "You sit there with a composer and he plays his stuff, and he may have missed what you were going after. I don't want to hurt his feelings. I don't want to step on his creative ideas that aren't what I had in mind. Selecting the music myself gives me control over a key creative facet of the film. I love it. To me, the most fun of the entire process of filmmaking is dropping the recordings in. I probably should have been a disc jockey."
Thankfully, Allen chose directing. And what of his newest film? The one that features Allen as a director who goes temporarily blind due to psychosomatic stress smack in the middle of shooting the film that will resurrect his career. Well, suffice it to say that while Galaxie Pictures (Hollywood Ending's fictional movie studio) is appalled by the incoherent mess inflicted by a blind director, the French absolutely love it. And here's the joke imitating life, or at least part of it: Woody Allen will kick off this year at Cannes by introducing Hollywood Ending to screen out of competition. Previous Allen films that have screened in that bastion of European art culture include some of his most commercially sturdy and critically acclaimed films: Manhattan, The Purple Rose of Cairo and Hannah and Her Sisters.
"They've invited me so many times that I now want to offer them something in return," Allen said in press statements on why he had rejected so many past Cannes invitations. Festival organizer Gilles Jacob was a tad more effusive, noting that seeing the director in the flesh would be "almost unimaginable, a quasi-supernatural experience."
Alien sightings aside, why do the French love Woody's work so much, while his home country relegates each new effort to a quickie release on the indie–art house circuit? Allen himself suspects the adoration may stem from the French concept of auteurism, which, taken at face value, simply recognizes a film's director as its one true author.
"I suppose you can call me a writer/director, but honestly, I feel like I'm writing with film," Allen said. "There are certain kinds of filmmakers who make works that are their own, very personal-type films, and even though they are film directors, they are basically writers who are writing with film. I write with film to tell stories that I've conceived in my head. The French call it being an auteur. But that appellation got to be very pretentious and I don't necessarily think of it that way. I think of it as simply trying to get up on the screen what I've created in my bedroom when I was just lying there dreaming up ideas."
Ideas have always been Allen's stock in trade. He described his talent for creating fresh new stories and situations as "innate" and "extremely fortunate." Combined with his self-described middle-class work ethic, Allen's "writing with film" has sustained an amazingly long-lived and prolific career in a business that is renowned for neither. Like his musical heroes used to score his movies, Allen cast two of his directing peers (at opposite ends of the age spectrum), as actors in Hollywood Ending. Mark Rydell plays Allen's longtime trusted agent, who is convinced Val Waxman (Allen) can pull off the charade of his life by directing a film without his sight. Greg Mottola, who also appeared in Allen's 1998 film, Celebrity, plays Val's AD who, like everyone except for the DP's Chinese translator, has no clue the director has gone temporarily blind.
If you're like me, you're probably chuckling right now. And therein lies Allen's genius — simplicity in his storytelling, clarity and undying respect for the comedy in his directing. It all amounts to just another Hollywood ending for a middle-class guy from Brooklyn who wrote and directed his way into the psyche of film romantics the world over. Just go ask the French. They'll tell you.
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The DGA Directing Team
Hollywood Ending
Directed by: Woody Allen
- Unit Production Manager: Helen Robin
- First Assistant Director: Richard Patrick
- Second Assistant Director: Danielle Rigby
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