JUST ROLL THE CAMERAS: and everyone can be done in time for cucumber sandwiches. |
NEW YORK — Woody Allen has said that Scarlett Johansson, like Diane Keaton, was “just hit with a talent stick and has it all.” How does the 21-year-old, who’s coming off her second starring role for Allen in Scoop, feel about such praise? “It’s amazing,” she said at Scoop’s recent New York press junket. “It’s quite unbelievable. I’ve been paying him on the sly. His demands are getting kind of insane. I’m all dried up. But the compliments keep coming, which is nice.”In fact, Allen wrote the role of Sondra Pransky, a bumbling aspiring journalist, with Johansson in mind. “When we were shooting Match Point, Woody and I had this nice banter between us, and since I’d always admired him as an actor as well as a director and a writer and a comedian, I said I thought it would be great if we could work together because we have such a nice relationship. And he was like, ‘All right, I’ll think of something.’ So he thought of Scoop.”
The role marked a rare opportunity for Johansson to play someone awkward and uncool. “I don’t think Sondra wants to be cool. She just wants to be this idea of something fabulous. She’s kind of a loser. Woody always said she’s kind of like Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday. She’s kind of a lovable idiot. It was a lot of fun to play all those weird mannerisms.”
Although the insecure, fast-talking, Brooklyn-born Sondra resembles the persona Allen created for himself in his own performances, Johansson said she wasn’t imitating him. “I’ve never ‘done’ Woody before. That’s how we talk to each other. I’m from New York, he’s from New York, we have some similarity in our background. I could never attempt to try to imitate him. I would never want to. He’s a 70-year-old man, for Christ’s sake. This is the way Woody and I banter in our own lives. It was very easy going from bantering off screen to bantering on screen. Just start the cameras rolling.”
Allen’s unobtrusive, just-roll-the-cameras style of directing was a novelty to much of the British cast, said Deadwood star Ian McShane, who plays Sondra’s ghostly mentor. “On the set, he’s very low-key. The way he directs, half the time you don’t know he’s there. He plans the scenes ahead of time with the cameraman and the stand-ins. Then he expects you to know your lines and do what you do. After that, there’s very little directing.
“There were a lot of English character actors there because obviously the idea of working with Woody Allen appeals to most actors because of his body of work. They were doing one line for Woody because everyone wants to be in a Woody Allen movie. It looks great on your CV at the end of the day. And they asked me, ‘What’s he like?’ They were expecting a Director who was going to do some magical directing when in fact it’s a very simple process. And they were finished by lunchtime. We were finished by midafternoon most days, so we could go back and have cucumber sandwiches and tea. Very civilized.”
