A Tale Of Two Cities

On her first day of shooting her first film, Paris-Manhattan, Sophie Lellouche found herself directing not just her hero, but the story's spiritual subject. At the last minute, Woody Allen – who was coincidentally in Paris at the time shooting was commencing – had agreed to make a cameo for Lellouche. And he had a three-hour window in which he could make it happen.

“I don't know if I could really say that I 'directed' Woody Allen,” Lellouche smiles, in recollection, in a Sydney hotel, talking about her first feature in a heavy French accent. “I just talked to him briefly about the film, and what I need from him, and he just knew it exactly and we did it. We only had a few hours. It was a very special first day for me. It was like something unreal.”

As Allen's Midnight In Paris celebrated the filmmaker's love of Paris, Paris-Manhattan returns the amour, the film a celebration of the French fondness for Allen. “He is so loved here, very deeply,” Lellouche says. “I think Woody Allen movies are European. They're existential, intellectual movies. The humour is very subtle. And I think they speak specifically to French people. Because we are very nervous, neurotic people too.”

And, that nervousness and those neuroses spoke specifically to Lellouche when she was a 15-year-old watching her first-ever Woody movie, Hannah And Her Sisters. “I remember that I [felt] very close to him about his questions, his fears, his anxiety,” she recounts. “I thought, 'Wow, there are people on this Earth who feel the same that I do'. I was only 15 years old and I was French, and this guy was middle-aged, and American, but I still felt so close to him.”

Ten years later, Lellouche was a budding film student when she watched Play It Again, Sam, and inspiration struck. “I was very jealous of Humphrey Bogart because he was the advisor of Woody Allen,” she laughs. “After watching this movie, I thought, 'Oh, it'd be great if I could get Woody Allen to be my friend'. That was the initial idea, that my life would be better if it had Woody Allen in it. But I didn't come to write the screenplay until ten years later.”

Lellouche made her first short film in 1999, but then her fears and anxieties led her to give up on her dream. “The reality was too difficult,” she says. “I was so scared not to do well. I couldn't bear the thought of it; my fear was too overwhelming… There were whole years where I didn't go outside. Even now, I don't really like to go outside. My best friends are the library and the movie theatre.”

After establishing a career working in the lingerie industry and starting a family, Lellouche returned to her old idea, wrote a script in which a rom-com heroine lives her life strictly under the advice of things Woody Allen's said in his movies, and, in a dream-come-true scenario, found a producer, Philippe Rousselet, who was willing to let her direct it. “He felt that it was my story, it was a personal story, that it was my movie to make,” Lellouche says. “He could tell how important it was for me to make it. Because to make a film you have to overcome all your fears. And I have a lot of fears.”

WHAT: Paris-Manhattan
WHEN & WHERE: In cinemas Thursday 13 December