Woody Allen releases his French-language film Coup de Chance
With murder-comedy-thriller Coup de Chance – his 50th film, and his first in French – the director returns to form.
Woody Allen isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. At 88 he is in good health, even if he is a little hard of hearing, and he remains a prodigious filmmaker, presenting his latest film, Coup de Chance – his 50th as a director – at the Venice film festival in September.
He also has a happy family life and took to the red carpet with his wife of 25 years, Soon-Yi, 53, and their two daughters, Bechet, 25 and Manzie Tio, 23 – perhaps in a show of solidarity given the director’s past legal issues with other family members. Allen and Soon-Yi – the adopted daughter of Allen’s former partner Mia Farrow – had married in Venice, and he says returning to the city is a special occasion for both of them.
“The mayor married us and everybody at the time was saying, ‘Oh, this is a strange marriage, he’s so much older than her’ and, you know, ‘This will never be a good marriage’,” he says.
“There was of all kinds of criticism that she will take advantage of me or I will take advantage of her, whatever reasons they gave. But it’s been very, very good. We’ve had a great time, we have two wonderful daughters and I love her. And she loves me. I do everything she says and then there’s no conflict.”
Audiences in France flock to Allen’s films, and I have been interviewing him there for more than 30 years. One of his most recent successes was Midnight in Paris (2011), and he returned to the city to make Coup de Chance, his first film in French.
Allen, who has been Oscar-nominated a record 16 times for best original screenplay, knows how to write a good story. Coup de Chance represents a return to form, in line with some of his best comedy thrillers such as Crimes and Misdemeanours and Match Point.
It follows a beautiful young woman, Fanny (Lou de Laage) who is married to the possessive, rich, older Parisian, Jean (Melvil Poupaud). When Jean discovers she is having an affair with the young and handsome Alain (Niels Schneider), he is intent on putting a stop to it. He is not above committing the odd crime and, given the film’s title, luck also plays a role. Even though it’s a film about a murder, it leaves the audience in raptures after its final scene.
“I’m glad because I didn’t set out to do that,” Allen says. “But if the film does that by accident, that’s a lucky bonus.”
At first he’d asked two American actors to star in the film, but they weren’t available. “All of a sudden it hit me to make the film in French,” he recalls. “When I was younger, I’d idolised European filmmakers like Truffaut, Bergman and Godard, and I thought I could be a French filmmaker here.”
Never mind that Allen didn’t speak the language; he enlisted actors who could. “Once I found the right actors it was not hard,” he says. He often works with actors, including famous ones, whom he does not necessarily know. This gives him a sense of freedom. The important thing for the filmmaker is to find the right actor for a given character.
“I’d never heard of any of the actors in Coup de Chance,” he says. “I was in New York, they were in Paris, and the casting director sent me many videos and I’d ask about them. We got all those we wanted.”
De Laage is beautiful, talented and smart. She won a 2022 Emmy for Melanie Laurent’s The Mad Women’s Ball, available on Amazon Prime. Although de Laage hasn’t yet hit the big time in France, Allen’s film could boost her profile. She has the look he was after for the role of Fanny.
“In Fanny’s first year of marriage I wanted her to be more elegant, with her hair back, and more rich, more cold-looking, more high-end,” he says. “But I wanted her to be able to go back to being more schoolgirl with a sweater and skirt and her hair down. Lou was able to do it. When I saw her at the premiere I couldn’t believe how elegant she looked. She could have been at Monaco or something.
“Then I noticed that the older lady, Valerie (Lemercier, as Camille) was a very, very gifted comedian. I didn’t know her but she was great as Fanny’s mum. For Jean (Poupaud), I needed a man who could be not like a criminal, who could be charming and nice, a sweet man who could love Fanny and be charming with people in conversation. And there he was.”
The only minor problem of shooting in French was when Allen encouraged his cast to improvise, as he usually does. That was also his method in the Spanish-language scenes of Vicky Cristina Barcelona, where he couldn’t understand what Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem were saying.
“I would check with someone and say, ‘Did they say anything terrible? Did they get my idea across?’ They were all wonderful actors, and there were no big things that I had to reshoot.”
We can imagine that Cate Blanchett went to town in Allen’s Blue Jasmine, for which she won her second Oscar, her only one for best actress. Allen is not a stickler for rules.
“I make mistakes over and over,” he says. “I’m careless, I’m not a perfectionist. Filmmakers like Scorsese and Spielberg, they’re the perfectionists. I never felt that way. And I’m lazy. If to make a film they have to live in some terrible place, they go and live there for six months. I make my films in New York or Paris or Rome, Spain, you know, nice places. I don’t like to work too hard. At five or six o’clock at night, I go home. They will say, ‘No, we’re going to stay because I want to get this perfect. I want to shoot it one more time.’ I never do that. I say good enough. Over the years I’ve had tickets to basketball games and I never miss those.”
He insists filmmaking isn’t hard work and he earns a lot of money.
“What’s hard is the guy who gets up in the morning and drives a taxi all day, a guy who works construction, or a schoolteacher who works with a small salary,” he says. “I can tell you that I’ve never worked a day in my life. My father worked, my mother worked in a flower shop and she had to go in every day.”
Longevity, he says, is mostly down to luck and good genes: “My father lived to slightly over 100 and my mother to almost 100. I eat well and exercise.”
Allen compares Coup de Chance to his 2005 film Match Point starring Scarlett Johansson.
“Both films revolve around the capriciousness of luck, and chance having a much more dominant impact on our lives than we care to admit,” he says. “So those films are saying the same thing in different stories.”
Allen has enjoyed success as a filmmaker from the very beginning of his career with What’s Up, Tiger Lily? in 1966. He has a process of making a film each year and insists on complete control. He writes his screenplays on his bed, with a ballpoint pen and a yellow pad, then types them up. He writes mostly about women because women are more interesting than men, he says.
His biggest box-office films have been Midnight in Paris, Annie Hall and Manhattan – where he co-starred with his one-time lover and still good friend and supporter Diane Keaton. He won screenplay Oscars for Midnight in Paris and Hannah and Her Sisters and won for both writer and director on Annie Hall which, like Manhattan, many critics consider a masterpiece. While his recent films aren’t up to that standard, they’re hugely enjoyable.
He has a New York film he would love to make, but nothing has been announced. The financing possibly would have to come from his European supporters.
In the meantime, he plays clarinet with his jazz band and for 30 years has had a weekly gig at New York’s Carlyle Hotel. The band also tours Europe.
“You walk in, you sit down for an hour and a half and you play,” he says. “I would do this even if no one was paying me. You know, it’s like a weekly card game. I play for pleasure. I didn’t think people would come but they came and they enjoy the music.”
In our interview Allen does not discuss his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow’s allegations of sexual abuse, though in Venice he discussed it with Variety: “The situation has been investigated by two people, two major bodies, not people, but two major investigative bodies. And both, after long detailed investigations, concluded there was no merit to these charges, that, you know, is exactly as I wrote in my book, Apropos of Nothing.”
The forthright Lemercier, a huge star in France, sprang to her director’s defence in our interview. “The American justice system made a big, big decision that he is not guilty and I think they looked everywhere,” she says. “I don’t understand why people don’t believe what they have decided. Woody is able to continue working and expressing himself and at his age getting up at five in the morning to shoot a film in French – I find that super courageous.”
Despite the whirl of conjecture around him, particularly in the US where Coup de Chance is unlikely to be released, Allen sticks to his New York routine. Above all he remains devoted to his family.
He speaks lovingly about his daughters, who are named after famous jazz musicians; they worked in the crew for Coup de Chance and his 2020 film, Rifkin’s Festival. Bechet works in the costume department and soon will join her sister on the upcoming season of Emily in Paris, on which Manzie has been a production assistant for 18 episodes.
“They like being in Paris, although I think they love New York, and they will probably settle there ultimately,” Allen says. “They have had the advantage of living in Paris for long periods of time and we raised them so that they can both speak French fluently. So it’s been an easy job for them.”
Coup de Chance opens in cinemas on December 26.
