Rome inspires Woody Allen's new romantic comedy

As his latest comedy, ?To Rome with Love,? arrives, Woody Allen seems mystified by just how, exactly, he does his magic in the movies.

Last year?s time-traveling comedy ?Midnight in Paris? become the prolific filmmaker?s highest grossing picture ever with $57 million here in the United States and $94 million abroad.

Allen calls it ?a happy accident.?

?I had no idea why everybody embraced the picture so enthusiastically,? he said at New York?s Regency Hotel. ?You make a movie, some they like a little bit, some they don?t like at all.?

But ?Midnight,? which transported Owen Wilson to 1920s Paris, ?wherever it was, whether it was Sweden or Japan, it was the best attendance I?ve had on a picture. It?s completely a mystery to me.?

Allen wrote and directed ?To Rome,? and also stars in one of its four non-connecting stories.

?I?ve always liked to act. When I write a script I look at it and if there?s a part I can play, I play it,? said Allen, 76.

?The last half-dozen scripts I?ve written, there hasn?t been anything I can do. This last script I saw a part I could play.?

Allen and Judy Davis are parents visiting their just-engaged daughter who discover the groom?s father has a voice equal to any opera star ? but only when he sings in the shower.

Another tale has Roberto Benigni as a man who finds himself suddenly famous, besieged by paparazzi.

As he romantically navigates between Ellen Page and Greta Gerwig, Jesse Eisenberg, as a student living in Rome, is given advice by a visible but otherworldly Alec Baldwin.

Penelope Cruz plays a high-class hooker mistaken for a country bumpkin?s new bride by his disapproving relatives when the real one disappears.

?There are things in the Italian sensibility,? Allen said, ?that make you want to tell different stories and stories that were suggested by the fact that I was in Rome: Something with opera, with the paparazzi and newlyweds who come and get split up. These are things to me very Roman.?

(?To Rome With Love? opens tomorrow.)

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/bostonherald/entertainment/movies/~3/K_5e48_iHfQ/view.bg

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