Allen (Woody)

Film director

Offers a role to Carla Bruni-Sarkozy (July 2009)

Woody Allen started his career as a gagman: 50 gags a week for 100 dollars. He very soon became a script writer and rewriter. But the image most people have of Allen Stewart Konigsberg, born in 1935 in New York, is the jack-of-all trades – actor, script writer and film director combined. Since his first film in 1969 (Take the money and run), Woody Allen has produced a film a year, from loony comedy (Bananas, 1971) to adult love story (Annie Hall, 1977) and sessions on the couch (Manhattan, 1979). Blending comedy and melancholy, skillfully mining his past and his future, the most psychoanalytical of filmmakers has continued in the last few years to move from one genre to another, even tackling the thriller (Match Point, 2005). What’s new is that the man so intimately associated with New York is coming back to Europe. After London and Barcelona, next summer he will be setting up his cameras in Paris – the scene of one of his first films, Love and Death, in 1975. When he was asked after the release of Whatever Works what famous person he would see as an actor if he had the choice between the Dalai Lama and the Queen of England, he answered: “Carla Bruni”, adding “She has charisma and she’s used to appearing on stage. I could give her any role at all.” True, Carla Bruni has already appeared on film in Prêt à porter (Robert Altman 1994) and Paparazzi (Alain Berberian, 1998), but playing herself. She hasn’t yet played a fictional character. On 23 November 2009, she declared on the set of Grand Journal: “I’m not an actress but I can’t pass up such a geat opportunity. If ever it goes ahead, it will be a wonderful adventure for me.”