Interview: Woody Allen and Samantha Morton

Sweet and Lowdown writer-director Woody Allen and Samantha Morton, a 22-year-old British actress who plays mute laundress Hattie in the bittersweet Depression-era comedy, met the press at the Hotel Bristol in Paris on December 17. On visits to France, Woody has been speaking his own bent-but-unbowed version of French since he made “Everyone Says I Love You,” so the excerpts below were translated INTO English by yours truly.

Q: Your films are appreciated worldwide but in France you’re more successful than back home. How do you explain this?

Allen: For some reason, here I’m a hero and in the U.S. I’m nothing. My American audience is very small. I don’t understand why. I’m VERY American. I love jazz and baseball. I was born in Brooklyn. I make comedies — which are supposed to be untranslatable. But for some reason, in France, in South America, in Asia, in Israel, they like me more. Maybe the subtitles are extraordinary.

Q: Is it possible to portray musical genius in a film?

Allen: Not really. A genius makes a quantum leap from a merely talented musician. There are a lot of talented musicians in New York, but no geniuses.

Q: This is the most Chaplinesque of your films.

Allen: My favorite comic film is Chaplin’s City Lights. My friends prefer Buster Keaton, but City Lights is my favorite because of the deep feelings. The girl in that film is just like Samantha.

Q: Wasn’t it frustrating playing a mute in a Woody Allen film, insofar as Woody’s dialogue is so clever and important?

Morton: No, not at all. Even though Hattie doesn’t speak verbally, she’s constantly speaking in her mind. For me it was refreshing to have that tool taken away from me. Characters can lie with their words — say one thing and mean another. I found it absolutely impossible to “lie,” which lends Hattie much of her purity. Concentration WAS hard because I found other people so funny.

Q: When Woody offered you the part, you’d never seen any of his films. And when he told you to play the part like Harpo Marx, you’d never seen any Marx Brothers movies.

Morton: I’m a completely different generation. I’m not a film connoisseur. I grew up in Nottingham, where we only had the Odeon, so you could only see Ghost Busters or Raiders of the Lost Ark. I didn’t grow up going to the movies or renting videos. I watched telly. My mentors are Alan Clarke and Ken Loach. [Loach’s] Kes changed my life and made me want to make movies. When Woody said “Watch Harpo,” it’s like when someone gives you a great book. It was an education. Hattie’s just a laundress so I didn’t want to complicate things by doing too much research.

Q: Woody, weren’t you shocked to learn that Samantha hadn’t seen any of your films?

Allen: My own wife hasn’t seen most of my films. But I’m used to that because most Americans haven’t seen my films.

Q: How did you make it look like Sean Penn is really playing those incredible solos?

Allen: We hired an excellent guitar teacher and Sean studied and practiced daily for six or seven months. The teacher went to San Francisco where Sean lives and even followed Sean to Europe when he was making another film on location. He can play. Not well enough to really play in the film, but he’s fingering every note — I can pan from his face to his hands and it’s all him.

Q: As we enter the next century, how do you view the future of filmmaking?

Allen: I think the next century will be a golden age. I think directors will use the new technologies for storytelling and not just for special effects.

FilmFestivals.com reporter
Lisa Nesselson