Theater News

Woody Allen’s Midnight Rendezvous

The Oscar-winning writer and director discusses his charming new film, Midnight in Paris.

Woody Allen
(© Tristan Fuge)
Woody Allen
(© Tristan Fuge)

Woody Allen’s charming new film, Midnight in Paris, is set in a Paris that Allen visually captures in the same way as he has Manhattan, London, and Barcelona. The film focuses on Gil, a successful but unfulfilled Hollywood writer (Owen Wilson), who takes a Parisian holiday with his fiancée Inez (Rachel MacAdams). Gil wishes he could have a different life in what he thinks is the perfect time and place: Paris in the 1920s, with all the glitterati including Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Salvador Dali. And then, at the witching hour of midnight, his wish comes true.

Allen admits that the movie’s genesis was unusual. “I was going to make a film in Paris because we had the financing and I wanted it to be a romance, because we all grew up with the idea of Paris from the movies as a romantic place,” he notes. “And after I came up with the title, I thought, ‘Gee, that’s a very romantic title, a great title for a movie.’ But for a long time, several weeks or so, I didn’t know what happened at midnight in Paris. Do two people meet, are they having an affair?”


Fortunately, inspiration finally came to Allen. “One day it occurred to me that the protagonist [Gil] would be walking along and a car would pull up and there would be some exciting people inside and they would say ‘Get in’ and take him on an adventure. It was very capricious. I wasn’t even thinking of doing a period piece.”

As for the time travel aspect of the film, Allen admits he would choose to go to Belle Epoque Paris — but just for a few hours. “I would have lunch and come home, because I wouldn’t want to be trapped there,” he says. “Seriously, that period in Paris must have been astonishingly beautiful, because it’s drop dead beautiful now!”

Among the film’s star-studded cast, which includes Marion Cotillard, Kathy Bates, Adrien Brody, and Alison Pill, is 2011 Tony Award nominee Nina Arianda in the role of Carol, the wife of a know-it-all professor (played by Michael Sheen). “She’s a tremendously gifted actress and I wanted her very badly,” he says. “She turned a truly nothing appearance into a little bit of a something — which was all her contribution. If she were older, I was younger, she would be great to play my wife because she’s really got it."

Allen’s latest film, which is shooting this summer in Rome, is tentatively titled Bop Decameron, and stars Allen along with Alec Baldwin, Penelope Cruz, Roberto Benigni, Jesse Eisenberg, and Ellen Page. “It’s a broad comedy and there happened to be a part in it for me. I come to Rome with my wife because our daughter has met an Italian boy and we’re going to meet him and his family,” he says.

“You know, I can’t play the love interest anymore and of course this is tremendously frustrating because that’s really what I want to play,” he continues. “I wanted to play Owen’s part in Midnight in Paris, but it just isn’t believable any more.”