A passionate man

Woody Allen has made his first musical. It's about love.

Outside a bitter winter storm batters New York but at a table covered with white linen Woody Allen is calm. Unlike the neurotic bungler he often plays, the real Allen is assertive, coherent and bold, with barely a trace of modesty. He walks in and shakes hands like a tiny prize-fighter. There seems to be a cocky glint in his eye, just visible behind the trade-mark spectacles with their black frames and thick glass.

The 60-year-old director may be entitled to a swagger. He has just begun to direct his 26th movie, while his 25th, Everyone Says I Love You, opens in New York on 1 November.

This product of Allen's recent period in media purgatory is a light, effervescent musical - his first. Against a backdrop of stunning locations in Paris, Venice and New York, Allen's character miraculously scores with Julia Roberts. What does the movie tell us about the whereabouts of Woody's emotional life?

"Nowhere," he says, relaxing in a crisp blue shirt with brown corduroy trousers. "There is no correlation between the film you make at the time and how you feel. I could be feeling depressed and anxious and make a very amusing film. I've made depressing pictures when I've felt very up. It's all completely accidental."

Everyone Says I Love You is an escapist film, a romantic comedy featuring 24 songs from another era; perhaps one that Allen can deal with more effectively than the one in which he lives?

"The choice of songs could be as psychological. It was the period I grew up in, the Thirties and the Forties," he says. "I'm very focused on certain things and I like what I like. I like New York City, I like the Marx Brothers, I like jazz. There are a certain number of things for which I have a genuine passion and they appear in a lot of my movies.

"Objectively, the Thirties and Forties was the period of our greatest songwriters - Gershwin, Berlin, Porter. It may be that, musically, that period was just a more beautiful time. There's nobody today who can challenge Rodgers and Hart or Rodgers and Hammerstein."

Everyone Says I Love You has a first-rate cast. Drew Barrymore, Julia Roberts, Alan Alda, Goldie Hawn, Itzhak Perlman, Edward Norton, Tim Roth and Natalie Portman lead an ensemble that had no idea, initially at least, that they'd be in a musical. Allen let this slip once the actors had been sent their parts of the script.

"I didn't think that was too risky," says Allen, smiling happily. "It was just a movie, and you can ask the actors to do anything. You can ask them to do sex scenes or drive fast cars. There was nothing dangerous about singing."

Many actors might disagree. Drew Barrymore did. Hollywood's current favourite bad girl said her voice was "outside the limits of human tolerance". She was allowed to use a "voice double", the only member of the cast who did so.

"Years ago it occurred to me to make a musical with people who couldn't sing," says the director. "I wanted a story musical in which people sang when they felt like it and danced when they felt like it. So long as they did it with some feeling, their talent, as singers, was unimportant. I don't like to rehearse much; none of my scenes include much rehearsal so people kind of began their songs when it felt natural."

Although it wasn't quite like that. Goldie Hawn has a terrific voice and her performance of her songs was too refined for Allen. He asked her to rough it up. But then Allen is a man who most often finds beauty in imperfection.

"I'd agree with that," he says. "I do get a kick out of crude things. I like crude art and crude music. The music I like the best, New Orleans jazz, is very crude. I don't like slick, glitzy well-fashioned stuff. That's why I love places like New York and Venice. The city can be run down and the canals polluted, but I find it wonderful."

If Allen has demons, and his movies plus his emotional entanglements suggest he must have them, they're probably held in check by hard work. The man born Allen Konigsberg in Brooklyn, almost 61 years ago, rarely has a day off. His next film, which he describes as a "much nastier comedy", is in production with demanding stars like Robin Williams, Billy Crystal, Demi Moore, Mariel Hemingway and Judy Davis. Yet he's already writing the script for his 27th picture.

"You have to think ahead or the time comes up very fast," he says, pushing his glasses up his nose and running a hand distractedly through his salt- and-pepper hair. "Once you have written the picture and cast it and start shooting it, your mind is free to work on another project because it's routine; actually making the movie is routine. That's what I've been doing for 25 years. Through thick and thin, I've worked."

Everyone Says I Love You is not quite a return to vintage form but it's good enough. It features an extended family living on New York's Upper East Side, familiar territory for the director who says it's the only place in the world where he feels truly comfortable. It makes fun of republicans and liberals alike, while giving all its protagonists an opportunity to fall in love and wax philosophical. The lasting memory, however, is Drew Barrymore. Allen has taken an acerbic, gum-chewing, tab-smoking wildcat and made her a sweet, waspy girl.

The transformation is puzzling. Allen himself seems surprised that it came off. At first he thought she was quite wrong for the role but by putting her in a preppy-style dress, complete with an East Side hair cut, he says it worked. On screen the result seems less satisfying. There is an almost total loss of Barrymore's idiosyncratic vitality, stirring memories of past movies where critics observed that Allen's female characters are often merely either dithering, adorable or both.

That may explain the most curious decision Allen made with his musical. He shot several scenes with hot property Liv Tyler (of Stealing Beauty fame) as a character he described as a "sexy, sensuous, hot right wing Republican". In the end, all her material was cut from the film, a decision Allen defended on the grounds of length. There may have been another, more subconscious motive. Tyler's performance was apparently vital without being shrill, and there's never been much room in Allen's movies for that kind of woman.

Looking back, it may be excusable if Allen is confused about women and love. His movies often see him connecting with women who, in real life, would probably not look twice at the kind of characters he plays. Yet he lives in a universe where beautiful women fawn over him, not least because a part in one of his films always results in a considerable career boost. If Allen is bothered by these conflicts, he's keeping stumm. He prefers to be thought of as an emotional enigma. The claim that his movies and his life are not connected is a sensible one - it means that we can't use his films as evidence when we try to unravel the apparent contradictions in his character.

Maybe the best clue as to where he really stands comes from the song he would choose to sing to somebody he loves. "It would be `I'm Through With Love', " he says, caught off guard by the question. The song is the bitter sweet refrain that appears throughout Allen's first musical as it's unofficial theme tune. Of course the title is ironic, the song is the cri de coeur of a hopeless romantic.